San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘True story’ of heist that went awry
Producer Robert Evans’ quote, “There are three sides to every story: your side, my side and the truth,” is a notion at the heart of British filmmaker Bart Layton’s “American Animals.”
The story is based on the 2004 theft of Audubon folios and rare books from the Transylvania University Special Collections Library in Lexington, Ky., by four students. But Layton, who normally makes documentaries, chose to blend documentary and drama in his telling of the tale.
“That came out of the fact that they didn’t remember the same things, the same events in the exact same way,” Layton says during a chat in San Francisco, where “American Animals” screened at the SFFilm Festival. “You’re left with a choice: Do I choose to fictionalize the one that is the most convenient or do you make a virtue of the fact that you’ve got lots of unreliable narrators?
“Also, memory is pretty unreliable. I like the idea that it’s hard to get a sense of what happened. There is no single truth. … I think all of that presents opportunities for me, as a filmmaker, to kind of shake up the idea of what a true story is. Because we’ve all seen
American Animals opens at Bay Area theaters June 8.
that ‘based on a true story.’ ”
Layton was so intrigued that the teenagers — Spencer Reinhard, Warren Lipka, Eric Borsuk and Chas Allen — would attempt such a heist that he reached out to them. At the time, they were serving their prison sentences, but a correspondence began. Layton wasn’t sure if there was a movie in their story; the theft itself struck him as slight, but he was impressed by their honesty and curious about what would motivate four young men from privileged backgrounds to throw away their futures in such a flamboyant manner.
“They didn’t know who I was, particularly, and they probably didn’t have anyone with whom to pour their hearts out,” Layton says. “A lot of the stuff they put in their letters was really surprising and really honest.
“That’s probably what made me think I wanted to tell the story, because particularly Spencer, who I ended up making the central character, the sort of audience proxy, he talked about wanting to become an artist and feeling that he was never going to have anything
“They had a secret that put them apart from everyone else, made them better than everyone else who were just going about their normal lives.”
Director Bart Layton worth making art about, because he was never going to have anything approaching a meaningful life experience. His life (before the theft) was sort of too nice, in a way.”
All four men appear in the film, sharing their memories and observations. Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters, Blake Jenner and Jared Abrahamson play the fictional thieves, youngsters playing at cops-and-robbers, who watch heist movies to learn how to commit crimes. That most of these movies end with their antiheroes jailed or dead never dawns on them. Neither does the idea that real-life crime has real-life stakes.
“I don’t think really it was about the crime and the idea that they would get rich from it,” Layton says. “I don’t think they ever could imagine they would. I think it was about the fantasy. I think that’s what they were seduced by, and I think they just got more and more lost in that fantasy until it got to the point where they’d left reality behind.
“I don’t think they thought they’d ever go through with it. I think they thought they would get right up to the precipice and not jump off it. But specially in a gang, no one wants to be the one that calls it off.
“One of them, I think it was Eric, in a letter, talked a lot about ‘Fight Club,’ the book, and how that had a huge impact. and talked about how when Warren presented him with this idea, of being part of this thing, for him, it was almost like a kind of version of ‘Fight Club.’
“They had a secret that put them apart from everyone else, made them better than everyone else who were just going about their normal lives. That’s, I think, what they fell in love with.”
Layton acknowledges that “American Animals” is packed with ideas and observations about privilege, masculinity, the imprecision of memory, a society where individuals monitor their value by social media clicks and likes and fleeting fame, and more. But all of that is wrapped in the trappings of genre.
“Everyone loves a heist movie,” Layton says. “I think what I always look for in a story for a film is, first and foremost, kind of a page turner, but actually it’s about something else. It’s sort of a heist movie by stealth. You get all the things that you demand from a great heist movie but, hopefully, you come away thinking about something other than, ‘Oh, yeah, it was just a crime, and that’s that.’ ”
Pam Grady is a Bay Area freelance writer.