“Friedkin saw American Animals and summoned me to lunch”: Bart Layton on his LA heist thriller Crime 101

Bart Layton’s previous feature, docu-fiction American Animals (2018), suggested the British writer-director had a smart, original eye for a heist film, and his pacy new adaptation of Don Winslow’s novella Crime 101 reinforces that with intelligence and depth.

Deriving its name from the highway running north from Los Angeles, rather than some Orwellian punishment, the story sees a disciplined, patient jewel thief, Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth), planning a series of precisely calibrated robberies up the coast. He aims to make enough to pack up his life of crime, while being tracked by sad-sack detective Lou Lubesnick (played with melancholic charm by Mark Ruffalo) and trying to avoid being double-crossed by ageing fixer Money (Nick Nolte) and feckless young criminal Ormon (Barry Keoghan). When he starts looking into the work of insurance agent Sharon Colvin (Halle Berry), a lucrative diamond heist is on the cards – though she too is being investigated.

As the film goes on UK release, Layton sat down with us to discuss William Friedkin’s influence, Berry’s reaction to the script and the pressures on real-life LA cops.

What was it about the novella that made you want to adapt it into a film?

It offered the opportunity to do something of scale – a big movie with a really big cast. The story hinted at movies I grew up in love with, that we’ve got fewer and fewer of in the cinemas in the last decade or so. In the 80s and 90s, those were the high point of my cinema-going experience with my mum or dad.

How did you decide what you wanted to remove and what you wanted to add or build on?

It was a cracking narrative that allowed me to smuggle in some more thought-provoking ideas. If you’re going to live with a movie for months, years, it has to have a metaphor, in this case LA being a place where the pressure of status drives everything: you are what you own, the car you drive, the clothes you wear. What happens if you allow that to be the driving force of all your decisions in life? Are you going to end up at a place where you think, “I spent all of this time and effort in the hope that other people would think I was a big shot?”

Crime and deception are things you return to again and again in your work. What is it about these subjects that interests you?

It’s less about crime specifically and a lot to do with identity and decision-making. We live in a pretty conventional way, most of us. What happens if you step outside of that, if you leave the norms? It’s really about systems, the way we’re expected to behave and what happens if you reject that, that I find interesting. 

Surveillance is used throughout the film by cops and criminals. Are you trying to say anything particular about the way it’s used?

More systems than surveillance, but surveillance certainly is part and parcel of those systems: the insurance industry, the police. When I was doing research into the character played by Mark Ruffalo, the reason one of the policemen I spoke to left the LAPD was because he felt there was more pressure upon him to hit the numbers, in a corporate way, rather than deliver on protecting a community or being a public servant.

There is a question as to who’s morally right. Who is the criminal? And is the guy who’s stealing the insured goods more corrupt than the insurance companies that are happily taking the premiums from their paying customers, then looking for ways they can weasel their way out of paying the claims?

The film’s look at LA reminded me of Heat (1995), Collateral (2004) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985).  Were any of those an inspiration?

I really wanted to create a movie for the cinema that felt like a throwback to those classic movies of the 70s, definitely Billy Friedkin. After I made American Animals, he saw it and summoned me to lunch. That was wild because obviously The French Connection [1971] and To Live and Die in L.A. were huge for me. I asked how he shot those car chases. They did it in ways that you could never do now, the health and safety rules were just not there. They were so lucky they didn’t have tragedies. What I wanted to do was create that sense of realism and visceral danger but obviously not doing the actual dangerous stuff that he was.

If you film some robbers film in LA, it’s very hard to get away from Heat, which I remember being a completely exhilarating experience in the cinema. I wasn’t trying to necessarily emulate that, but I definitely wanted it to have a noir feel and be really contemporary.

It’s great to see Halle Berry in an interesting role – what discussions did you have with her about the character?

One of the first things she said is, “I know how to play this character. I actually have been this character. I know what it’s like to be in her shoes.”

She’s had an amazing career, but she’s also had her own brushes with misogyny and people who are exploitative. She immediately connected with the character. We had a very open conversation about her life and the similarities between her and Sharon.

There were times when I had to remind myself this isn’t Halle, this is Sharon. She was very willing to go to places that maybe an actor of her stature [wouldn’t normally]. The fact that when she opens the film when she comes on screen, she’s got no make-up on at all, that’s a brave thing to do.

Were you amused by the film being an Avengers reunion for Chris (Thor in the MCU) and Mark (who plays the Hulk)?

It never really occurred to me. I’m not a big Marvel guy. But I also think – even though they’re very close – when they got together on the set, I think they were quite struck by how different things were to what they expected. They were playing in a very different world. Weirdly, I think they both got quite intimidated of each other in some of the scenes. That ended up really playing to our advantage, because they’re very suspenseful scenes.

Chris also produces the film. What was his input in that respect?

He came on pretty early in the process. We built it together when we started thinking about who the other cast members were going to be. We both decided, even though we had offers from a lot of places, we really wanted it to be a cinema movie. He was part of that decision-making process about how it gets financed and which studio we go with.

How did you work with DP Erik Wilson on getting the look you wanted for the film?

We came across a book called Atmosphere of Crime, which was a photo essay commissioned by Time magazine in the late 50s by a Black photographer who became a filmmaker called Gordon Parks. It has a quality to the way everything is photographed, a lot of it at night. It was shot in Harlem, documenting what the police were doing at that time. They’re very cinematic images, but very raw and real. That became a touchstone for how we designed the colour palette.

Crime 101 is in cinemas, including BFI IMAX, from 13 February 2026. 

A preview screening takes place at BFI IMAX on 11 February.