American Animals: Bart Layton’s New Breed of True Crime

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2018

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2012, Bart Layton made his directorial debut with The Imposter — an ambitious true crime story that mixes documentary and narrative filmmaking. His latest movie further blurs the lines between fiction and reality: American Animals depicts a 2004 book heist by interspersing interviews with real people and the fictionalized version of the events. “I found myself thinking maybe there’s a new way to tell a true story,” Bart Layton tells Kurt Andersen. “Where you kind of get to have your cake and eat it.”

Layton breaks down how he made one of the inventive, meta moments of the film, and discusses the possible motivations behind the senseless crime. “We’re all inhabiting a culture where we’re told that we have to be special,” he says. “It came from a place of wanting to leave a mark on the world.”

American Animals opens in theaters on June 1, 2018.

This podcast was produced by Studio 360's Sam Kim.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From PRX.
0:07.0	This is Studio 360. I'm Kurt Anderson.
0:14.0	Bart Layton has had a successful career as a London-based producer of unscripted nonfiction shows for TV in the UK and the U.S.
0:24.6	Documentary series like Locked Up Abroad, which ran on the National Geographic Channel.
0:30.0	I was now in the worst place in South America.
0:33.1	If it means killing somebody, then that's the attitude that you have to have.
0:37.4	You know the form. True crime stories combining interviews with dramatic reenactments.
0:43.8	Layton's debut as a feature-length documentary director a few years ago was a film called The Imposter,
0:50.2	which was a more ambitious and aggressive hybrid of documentary and narrative filmmaking.
0:57.2	It's a true story about a young French con artist who had posed as a boy who disappeared from Texas.
1:05.2	I bought a product to color my hair totally blonde.
1:09.9	Took big sunglasses. I took a hat, I took a scarf,
1:14.2	I took a glove. I thought that if she couldn't see me, then she wouldn't be able to say,
1:18.7	I'm not a brother. Now, Bart Layton has found another fascinating real-life story set in
1:26.4	Middle America for his new film.
1:28.4	The movie is called American Animals.
1:31.2	I'm going to say this one time and one time only.
1:34.2	You're either in or you're out.
1:35.9	How can I tell you if I'm in or I'm out without you telling me the first thing about what I might be in or out of?
1:40.2	This would be something dangerous and very fucking exciting.
1:51.6	It's also about young criminals and the blur between various lines of fiction and reality, but it is not a documentary.
2:00.4	Interspersed with the fictionalized version of the events, the actual real people the movie is based on appear as well.
	...

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