Bart Lay­ton: ​‘By the time I made con­tact with the real guys, they were in prison’

Amer­i­can Ani­mals is the new film from The Imposter direc­tor Bart Lay­ton. Once again, he seeks to shove at the walls around the tra­di­tion­al def­i­n­i­tions of a doc­u­men­tary. Telling the strange true sto­ry of four col­lege stu­dents who tried to pull off a heist of rare books from a Ken­tucky uni­ver­si­ty library, it com­bines actu­al inter­view with those now-grown guys with a more tra­di­tion­al fic­tion­al ver­sion of the events. To dis­sect this unique com­bi­na­tion of fact and fake, we sat down with Lay­ton ahead of the film’s release.

LWLies: Did you plan from the begin­ning that the film would be pre­sent­ed in the way it is?

Lay­ton: It was always intend­ed to have this uncon­ven­tion­al mix. The Imposter had a lot of dra­mat­ic ele­ments, but it real­ly was a doc­u­men­tary in terms of the emo­tion­al and nar­ra­tive dri­ve of the sto­ry. It’s com­plete­ly dri­ven by the real peo­ple. With this, I was more inter­est­ed in ask­ing, ​‘Is there anoth­er way of telling a true sto­ry that we haven’t seen before?’ It cer­tain­ly isn’t a doc­u­men­tary, but it also isn’t straight non-fiction.

I think, more than any­thing, it was prob­a­bly down to the process by which the film came about. I read about the sto­ry and thought it was amaz­ing. By the time I made con­tact with the real guys, they were in prison, and we began this sort of pen pal rela­tion­ship. It was how they talked about their moti­va­tions and who they were that made me think this was a sto­ry that was real­ly worth telling. It’s about some­thing which felt more rel­e­vant now than it was at the time. And because their voic­es were so hon­est and unusu­al, I was keen to find a way to include them in the movie.

Was the script then based on what you heard from them?

We were cor­re­spond­ing with the four guys, just get­ting more and more infor­ma­tion over either email or in the occa­sion­al phone call, and lots of long hand-writ­ten let­ters. I wrote the script based on that. I includ­ed their real voic­es, things that they said in their let­ters or which I antic­i­pat­ed they would say, in one form or anoth­er, when we would even­tu­al­ly be able to sit down and shoot inter­views after they got out of prison.

Of course, what hap­pened was when they did come out of prison and we shot the non-fic­tion stuff, a lot of what they said was very dif­fer­ent. Unlike with actors, you can’t just make real peo­ple deliv­er lines. A lot of what they’d said in their let­ters, either they didn’t feel com­fort­able say­ing them, or maybe they’d changed their minds. For what­ev­er rea­son some of it was dif­fer­ent, and some of it was way better.

And then we were faced with a slight­ly tricky sit­u­a­tion, hav­ing had the movie financed based on the screen­play. I had to call up the pro­duc­ers and financiers and say, ​‘I need you to give me a cou­ple of months to go back into the script and rewrite it around what they real­ly said, rather than what I expect­ed them to say.’ I didn’t want any­thing that felt inau­then­tic. The last thing you want to do with your doc­u­men­tary sub­jects is turn them into actors, because then you lose the thing that they’re there to do.

So moments like when the real-life Spencer Rein­hard watch­es the actors play­ing him and his friends dri­ve by on their way to the heist – did those inter­sec­tions arise orig­i­nal­ly in the script or come later?

I would say pret­ty much every­thing was incor­po­rat­ed in the script. That scene that you’re describ­ing, I shot the two halves of that [the real fig­ure and the actors] a year apart, know­ing I want­ed this occa­sion­al con­ver­gence between the world of real­i­ty and the world of fic­tion. It’s this idea that there is this sort of Ghost of Christ­mas Future, that he’s watch­ing his younger self whilst he’s on the way to do this incred­i­bly ill-advised thing which has the poten­tial to irre­versibly change the course of his life.

And what mean­ing do you try to wring out of these juxtapositions?

I think we’re often look­ing for omens which are either going to rein­force our belief that what we’re doing is right or tell us not to. And I think one of the things with Spencer – both the real one and not – is that he doesn’t real­ly know how to read the omens. He doesn’t real­ly know what it is he’s sup­posed to be doing. He’s con­stant­ly drawn to play Russ­ian roulette with his life, to shake every­thing up in order to give him­self a sto­ry to tell – to find a voice, have an iden­ti­ty, become an artist. I think he’s torn between the desire to have that and the desire not to destroy his fam­i­ly and his future by doing this quite self-destruc­tive thing.

How do you view the rela­tion­ship between the doc­u­men­tary and fic­tion ele­ments in the film? Do you think of the recon­struct­ed scenes as flash­backs, or the real inter­views as glimpses of the future?

I have a slight issue with the word ​‘recon­struc­tion’ or ​‘reen­act­ment’ or what­ev­er. I’m not sure that you would describe Jack­ie or Molly’s Game or I, Tonya as recon­struc­tion. As soon as you put real voic­es in the movie, does that make all of the dra­ma a reen­act­ment or recon­struc­tion? It’s still based on a true sto­ry, like count­less oth­er movies. And we don’t describe them that way.

For me, this is a dra­ma very, very close­ly tied to the truth. And the inten­tion with this is to find a new way of telling this sto­ry where you’re con­stant­ly remind­ed that it’s real. These peo­ple are real, the deci­sions that they’re mak­ing are real, and the con­se­quences are going to be real. And so the inten­tion is that you have a greater degree of emo­tion­al invest­ment in the sto­ry and con­nec­tion to the char­ac­ters. Rather than there being a ​‘Real Spencer’ and a ​‘Fic­tion­al Spencer’, it was more like an old­er Spencer and younger Spencer. We’re very famil­iar with movies where you have the old­er char­ac­ter as a kind of fram­ing device.

I want­ed the audi­ence to think about it in those terms. You get this added lev­el of verac­i­ty and emo­tion­al invest­ment because you’re not being told to sus­pend dis­be­lief and go into a movie world where we know that we’re safe because the con­se­quences don’t real­ly affect us. With this, the events are always oper­at­ing in the same world that you and I inhab­it. And so we’re con­stant­ly ask­ing our­selves, ​‘Where is this going to go? How far is it? How far are they going to take it?’ Because we play along in a slight­ly dif­fer­ent way because we are clos­er to being able to expe­ri­ence it through them, hav­ing removed that lay­er of ​‘movie veneer‘.

Amer­i­can Ani­mals is released 7 Sep­tem­ber. Read the LWLies review.