American Animals director on the $750k Transylvania Library book heist

One morning in 2004, at the end of semester when the campus was quiet, four middle-class white college boys targeted Kentucky’s Transylvania University library. Two of them went up to the Special Collections section, tied up the lone librarian, threatened her and then tried to make off with $US750,000 in rare books.

Among the collection were four double-sized folios of John James Audubon’s Birds Of America, the library’s most prized possession.

It was a brazen plan involving old-man disguises, fuelled by a love of crime capers like Ocean’s Eleven and a desire to shake up their suburban lives.

“I don’t think they were ever going to cross the line until they did and then it was too late and they instantly regretted it,” director Bart Layton told news.com.au after the Australian premiere of his film American Animals at the Sydney Film Festival, a movie based on the unlikely heist.

The story of Spencer Reinhard, Warren Lipka, Eric Borsuk and Chas Allen was the subject of a lengthy 2007 Vanity Fair article that Layton came across.

“I was intrigued by the why of it,” Layton said. “What would have led these young men with all this privilege and opportunity to do something which seemed, to me, so obviously doomed? What was the motivation? Was it a bad idea that went too far or did they really expect to get away with it?”

According to the perpetrators, the idea started off as a fanciful plot cooked up between Lipka and Reinhard. The planning went through various stages, at which points, Borsuk and Allen were brought in when they realised they needed more manpower.

At every turn, it seemed like it would be called off. But it wasn’t.

“We made contact with them when they were still in prison and their letters, emails and phone calls was what I based the script on,” Layton said.

“It was this very misguided search for identity and masculinity, of trying to have a special life and leaving a mark on the world.

“I think they wanted to do something that was going to make their lives different and special, give them a story to tell and shake everything up.”

Maybe this is spoiling the ending, but probably not because there wouldn’t be a movie if those guys weren’t caught. American Animals’ drama is in the build-up to the heist, the exploration of what drove them and the stuff-ups that led to their arrest and incarceration.

It’s also in the sometimes contradictory stories the four men now tell about their experiences.

And it’s that unreliable narrator aspect of it, the fallibility of memory, that American Animals delves into with its hybrid filmmaking — a hybrid because it’s not quite a narrative movie based on a true story, and it’s also not a documentary.

Instead, it merges the two forms, injecting the real-life people — Reinhard, Lipka, Borsuk and Allen — into what is mostly a dramatisation.

To keep it from feeling like a doco weighted heavily with re-enactments, Reinhard, Lipka, Borsuk and Allen are played by well-known or up-and-coming actors — Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk, Sacred Killing Of A Deer), Evan Peters (X-Men: Days Of Future Past, American Horror Story), Jared Abrahamson and Blake Jenner (Everybody Wants Some!) — while the structure follows a traditional narrative and Layton’s direction is kinetic and suspenseful.

It plays like any other movie based on a real story, except that the actual people give piece-to-camera testimony and sometimes show up in the same scenes as their Hollywood counterparts.

“I didn’t know what form I wanted it to take until I started writing it,” Layton said. “I knew I didn’t want it to be straight fictionalisation because I felt that would only be half the story. I also knew I didn’t want it to be a documentary because it felt like it was much more than that.

“I wanted it to be this interesting hybrid which somehow reflected the story which is about four guys trying to live in a movie.

“There’s this temptation as soon as you put real people into a movie, suddenly everything is described as re-enactment. But you don’t describe I, Tonya or Molly’s Game or any of the based-on-a-true-story movies as that. I thought maybe there’s a new way of telling a story that I hadn’t seen before.”

Layton, whose other feature The Imposter is more of a straight-up documentary, said he wanted to convey the realness of the doco form with the gripping nature of a heist movie.

Giving the meshing of reality and movie magic, I ask Layton how important fidelity was to the project, positing that when audiences watch something like Molly’s Game, they assume almost 50 per cent is probably embellished.

“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to make sure the audience didn’t have the sense that the whole movie had been fabricated,” he said. “It’s enough of an insane and extraordinary true story to not need to fictionalise too much. It’s debatable how much you can ever know of the truth of a true story.

“They’re unreliable narrators, memory is unreliable but as best as I could, and I had access to police reports and the FBI files, I wanted to be as faithful as possible to true events.

“But I did feel they were all pretty honest in their telling of the story, in the emotions and the remorse they showed. Some people have questioned whether that’s crocodile tears but I did not get that sense at all. I felt they were genuinely very remorseful.”

It wasn’t that easy to secure everyone’s co-operation at the start. The Vanity Fair article didn’t feature the voice of Allen, who Layton admitted was the hardest to get on board with American Animals.

“Chas is a very guarded person. Maybe he was saving it for his book but it’s probably because he was concerned the other three were going to gang up on him. Chas initially didn’t want to have anything to do with anything the other three were doing and those three didn’t want anything to do with anything he was doing.

“So that was tricky and Chas is very money-oriented and we weren’t going to pay Hollywood money for the story rights, so he took a while to convince. He’s an entrepreneur and a hustler and a super-ambitious young guy.”

For the Transylvania four, the conventional life they rebelled so hard against is no longer an option as felons with criminal records — they wanted a story to tell, and now they have one.

American Animals is in cinemas from today.

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