American animals
Fact is stranger than fiction in The Imposter director Bart Layton’s meta crime caper AMERICAN ANIMALS, as bored college-kids-turned-crooks commit larceny in the library. Total Film meets the team behind the unbelievable true story.
The shocking true tale that’s unlike any heist movie you’ve ever seen before.
described it as “one part Ocean’s Eleven, one part Harold & Kumar”. The idea, masterminded by college student Warren Lipka, a sports scholar at Transylvania University, Kentucky, was to pull off a heist at the campus library, where they would steal millions of dollars’ worth of rare books, including a first edition of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species.
In theory, it was brilliant. And yet none of the four men involved had ever been involved in a crime before, which led Layton to wonder what possessed them. “That part of it,” he says, “was intriguing – the ‘why’ of it. And that led me to get in touch with them. We began to exchange letters, and the letters showed the kind of honesty you only get from people who are probably alone a lot of the time and don’t really have a confidante, then suddenly have a stranger to pour their hearts out to. More than anything else, it was those letters that took it from being a fun yarn into a more deeply resonant and relevant story.”
Surprisingly, none of the four were especially keen to make a movie, and a falling-out between them had held things up even further – plus they’d promised the rights to a Hollywood production company anyway. “Originally, I think they just wanted to get it out of their systems and explain some of the motivation,” says Layton. “But because we’d traded these letters – they sent me clippings from books and poems and movies, and I sent them stuff back
– we got to a place where we understood each other. So when it came time for them to renew the option they had with these big Hollywood producers, they came to me and said, ‘We’re not gonna do it, are you interested?’ I said, ‘Well, yes, but we’re not going to pay that kind of money.’ But they wanted to do it, and off we went.”
Perhaps what persuaded Lipka and co to take part in Layton’s production was the fact that they would literally be taking part. Going further with the fusion of dramatisation and documentary that Layton used in The Imposter, American Animals sees the four men as they are today – using talkinghead interviews – and also as they saw themselves 14 years ago. Hilariously, their biggest fear, and showing how movie-literate they actually were, was that their story would be turned into this year’s equivalent of 21, the slick, soulless 2008 crime drama about six MIT students who tried to fleece Vegas with their mathematical card-counting skills.
Thankfully, American Animals is no 21, playing with documentary and fictional storytelling devices to put the audience in the protagonists’ shoes. Layton says, “I thought there was a way of telling the story and structuring the film that would mirror the descent into fantasy for these young guys – they allowed it to go too far. I thought it would be fun if, somehow, the audience were to become complicit in that as well.” As a result, the film starts in a place of relative naturalism, and as the four get more involved, and more invested, in the plotting and the planning, so the grammar of the film starts to change: the music, the colours, and the camera movements…
“All of it edges a little closer towards movie world,” explains Layton. “And critical to me wanting to tell the story was the third act after they cross the line. The fantasy is allowed to go way past the point where it should have stopped, and they are so detached from reality that when they cross that line they are thrust headlong back into it. That felt to me the most important part – crashing back into a world that is now uncomfortably real.”
Real-life fantasy
TF first meets Layton at the Grey Goose lounge on Park City’s Main Street, the afternoon after American Animals makes its world premiere at Sundance. He is surrounded by his cast: Evan Peters, who plays Lipka; Barry Keoghan, who plays Lipka’s best friend Spencer Reinhard; plus Jared Abrahamson and Blake Jenner, who play fellow conspirators Eric Borsuk
and Chas Allen respectively. Spookily, all eight – the cast and their real-life counterparts – had been at the screening and after-party, further blurring the fantasy and reality.
Was there any trepidation about portraying these people? “No,” says Abrahamson. “Bart was so clear with us right from the beginning that we were going to be capturing the entire essence of the story – the glory they had going into it, thinking it was going to be this remarkable thing and they were going to have this adventure. It was important to us, after, to show the remorse – how much it haunted them, and the weight of their crime – because they didn’t expect it to go down the way it did. So, for all of us, I think it was
‘WE’VE ALL HAD THAT PERSON IN OUR LIFE, WHO WOULD ALWAYS DO CRAZY STUFF’ EVAN PETERS
responsible to show the entire aspect, not make them into heroes but make them into people.”
For X-Men/American Horror Story star Peters, it was also a no-brainer. “I never had second thoughts about it,” he says. “I loved the story so much and, like Bart always says, it’s always been a cautionary tale. So it’s interesting to go that full arc – showing where their minds were at, dealing with all those different emotions as the story unfolds.”
Gesturing at his cast, Layton says, from the outset, he forbade his actors to make contact. “They were all keen to have access to the real guys, as you would be, because that’s the thing you’re trying to capture,” he says. “But, first, I didn’t want the real guys to try and charm them into representing them in a favourable light. But I also felt that they were now
10 years older and were different human beings, so I wasn’t convinced that that was going to be useful – I wanted these guys to be free to find their own Warren, Spencer, Chas and Eric without being beholden to any of that. And then Evan, channelling Warren’s rebelliousness, completely ignored me…”
No wonder. Lipka is the film’s big enigma, the largerthan-life ringleader whose story and motivations may or may not have been quite what he said they were. “I just think Warren is such an interesting character,” enthuses Peters. “He has so much energy, and it’s also the kind of energy that lures people in. He wants friends. We’ve all had that person in our life. I know I had one growing up – he would always do crazy stuff. He would always get into trouble, and I would just follow him anywhere, because he was so much fun to be with and he made life such an interesting time. He made it worthwhile. So I wanted to talk to Warren a bit and figure out what made him tick.”
above and beyond
The person that’s most taken in by Lipka’s essence is Spencer Reinhard, the main conduit for Lipka’s crazy idea. In real life, Reinhard was, and still is, a talented artist, but he craved more. “In the movie,” notes Layton, “he says, ‘Art has to be about something more than my life is great and I’m good at drawing.’ He felt that he was looking down a future of predictable outcomes, and he needed to take a risk. But where was that risk going to come from – that risk that was going to turn him into someone with something to say?” Taciturn Dunkirk actor Keoghan agrees: “Spencer didn’t really want in, but yet he did want in. He needed Warren, and Warren needed him.”
Layton nods. “Warren provided Spencer with the closest thing to an adventure and a life out of the ordinary. Warren’s one of those rare people who doesn’t see limitations. Most of us are completely inhibited by them – what we see as our own limitations, or as social limitations – but Warren doesn’t see any of them. You don’t meet that many of those people. And often they’re incredibly successful, because they take massive risks, or they’re…” He pauses. “Fucked!” Everybody laughs, but Peters steps in to defend Lipka, who has since returned to college. “Now that Warren’s going back to school,” he says, “he thinks that having that structure is good for him. He’s going into filmmaking, and trying to take that energy and put it somewhere good. Which is a great thing for him, and I’m excited about that, because I think great things will come out of it. I think he was just misguided and lost at the time, and he channelled that into a bad fantasy.”
And what did the real Warren think of the finished movie? Layton screened it to all of them before the premiere, individually, as a courtesy. “There was a lot of stuff that they were deeply ashamed of,” he says, “but they all said it was pretty accurate. They all thought it was really, incredibly true to their memories and their experience.” He smiles. “But what’s interesting is that, in time, the memories of what really happened will be replaced by the movie, y’know?”
AMERICAN ANIMALS opens on 7 september.