Crime 101: Director Bart Layton on his new heist thriller starring Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Halle Berry

The movie business has evolved to a point that most pictures are separated into two spheres.

One is the “four-quadrant” blockbuster designed to appeal to eight year olds and 80 year olds. The other is smaller, often indie movies that have fervent fans but fewer ticket sales. Rare is the film that sits in the middle.

You know the one. We used to make and watch them all the time. They can be thrilling and plot-driven, but they’re often grounded in characters, have a mid-range budget and feature movie stars wearing regular clothes rather than costumes.

Crime 101 is what we now call “a movie for adults”.

The heist thriller stars Chris Hemsworth as Mike, a methodical jewel thief who practices intense discipline on every job. Not an ounce of DNA left behind, no violence and if it doesn’t feel right.

Despite leaving no trace, he still has a discernible pattern, and that is that every hit has been close to the 101 freeway which weaves up and down southern California, including through Los Angeles.

That’s been noticed by a local detective, Lou (Mark Ruffalo), who’s on the case just as Mike readies another job, trying to recruit overlooked insurance executive Sharon (Halle Berry).

All three lead characters are outsiders to an extent. Mike’s profession, if you can call it that, makes isolation mandatory, Lou is on the outs with this boss and precinct, unable to follow the book of closing out cases for the sake of stats, and Sharon is under-valued at a company that has taken every opportunity to not promote her.

Hemsworth and Ruffalo are previous scene partners from the Marvel movies where they had a playful onscreen dynamic, but as a criminal and a cop, they had to reset their energy with each other.

Bart Layton, who wrote and directed Crime 101, adapting it from a novella by Don Winslow, told The Nightly the characters are little bit different from the archetypes you’d normally see in a Hollywood crime thriller.

“It’s not like Chris’s (character) is a kind of James Bond type who’s flawless and invincible. He’s got problems, and that was something that we wanted, like the classic movies of the eighties and nineties,” he said.

Crime 101 is not Layton’s first ride on the heist merry-go-round, whether its previous films or serving as a producer on the likes of The Tindler Swindler.

The London-based filmmaker cut his teeth in the documentary world and his first feature, The Imposter, was about the 1997 case of a French conman who pretended to be an American who had vanished when he was 13.

His next project was a hybrid of documentary and narrative feature, the under-watched 2018 movie American Animals which told the story of a 2004 heist of rare books from a university in Kentucky.

It featured actors such as Barry Keoghan (who is also in Crime 101) and Evan Peters playing the student thieves, and cut it together with pieces-to-camera interviews with the real-life perpetrators.

When it came to making his first all-narrative movie-movie, Layton relied on his grounding in the doc space to infuse Crime 101 with some of that same philosophy and approach. He said it was a big step for him to go from The Imposter to American Animals, and yet another one to level up to Crime 101.

“I was sh*tting my pans, quite frankly,” he recalled, and the only way he knew in terms of how to deal with that is to do a massive amount of preparation, researching and planning.

“If you come from docs, and I can’t speak for everyone, but you bump up against the things that feel the most artificial when you’re shooting a movie,” he said. All of his characters are “heavily researched”.

For this film, when Layton was writing, that meant finding real-life counterparts to the fictional characters.

“A real jewel thief, in this case,” he explained. “I found one who was in prison. I talked to him over letters and email about his history, and a lot of that became part of the backstory for Chris’s character.

“Nick Nolte plays a fence, you can find them, there are a lot of them. They fence stolen good, diamonds, they’re fascinating. I spoke to a real LAPD officer, several of them were the base for Mark’s character.

“The more research you do, the more actors appreciate it because you can tell them a story or you can give them an example. That’s all very strongly rooted in the real world, and that was something I brought from all the doc work.”

Layton wanted to film the car chases on real LA roads, rather than have his actors sit in a stationary car on a gimbal against a blue screen in a studio.

“I would’ve felt uncomfortable doing that.”

But it’s not easy to shoot movies in LA. On lots and in studios, yes, “but it’s not easy to lock down 10 blocks to shoot a car chase, people aren’t about all of that stuff, but I think when people saw what we were trying to do, that there something of a twisted love letter to LA, people started to get behind it.

“Not that many people are shooting on the streets in LA, and they haven’t for a while.”

It’s such a cliché to say a city is the other character in a TV or film, a la New York City and Sex and the City. So, think of it as more how much Los Angeles is woven into the fabric of the film’s characters, how much the psyche of the city informs how Mike, Lou and Sharon see themselves in LA’s embrace or rejection.

“This is a town which tells you if you want to be somebody, you better have the money, the apartment by the beach and all of that stuff, and if you don’t, well maybe you’re not a success,” Layton said. “They’re all chasing this thing in their way and it drives a lot of the decisions people make.”

But that’s just one face of the city, the gleaming towers and the bougie yoga studios. The other side, the part Crime 101 doesn’t hide, is the poverty and the growth in unhoused persons. The threat of becoming one, maybe again, explains someone’s motivation to step outside the boundaries of the law and the system.

“It’s a lot about the haves and the have-nots, and if you’re in LA now, you see that very clearly.”

But that’s only if you’re willing to look. Layton continued, “If you get on the freeway from your beautiful home by the beach and go to your office in Beverly Hills, you might not see anything that resembles poverty, but beneath the freeway, the 101, there are people in living in tents.”

But Crime 101 is not a polemic. What it is, is this film that has tropes of a heist story but also lives in the real world, in the real city it’s set in. Yes, it’s a thriller with chases and guns being drawn, greedy villains and multilayered heroes that make questionable choices, the things that make a movie edge-of-your-seat. But Layton wanted it to be more.

“It’s your job as a filmmaker to smuggle in the stuff that maybe leaves you thinking a little more deeply after the movie,” he said.

“You’re not trying to spoon-feed an audience. It’s a smart movie. We treat the audience with respect that maybe Hollywood movies aren’t doing as much it could, and so you take away that, without feeling like, ‘oh, you’re trying to make a point about this and that’.”

In other words, a movie for grown-ups.

Crime 101 is in cinemas on February 12