The letters they wrote were incredibly articulate, very philosophical.

“Frankly, the real guys were very compelling,” Layton says. In the process of recreating the attempted crime, from its planning to its enactment to its disastrous resolution, the film makes the bold move of including the real men – Spencer Reinhard, Warren Lipka, Eric Borsuk and Chas Allen, a decade older than they were at the time of robbery – alongside, sometimes literally, the actors he cast to play them: Barry Keoghan ( Dunkirk), Evan Peters ( X-Men: Days of Future Past), Jared Abrahamson ( Fear the Walking Dead) and Blake Jenner ( Everybody Wants Some!!). But it’s also a heist movie, a deconstruction of heist movies and a psychological thriller about what it’s like to grow up in capitalist America. The film he eventually made, American Animals, which premiered at this year’s Sundance (and opens in limited release on June 1st), isn’t not a documentary – it is a doc, yes. “It was like, well, let’s find a way where the form of the movie actually reflects that idea: of falling into a movie.” “The starting point has to be the story, and this was a story about a group of young men who are almost trying to inhabit a movie fantasy instead of their real lives,” Layton says, sitting in the blinding sunlight on a balcony at the London in West Hollywood. Then he started exchanging letters with the guys, who were – spoiler alert – sitting in prison, their crime having failed spectacularly. When filmmaker Bart Layton first began to investigate the story of four young men who tried to steal $12 million worth of old books from the Transylvania University library, he intended to make a documentary.

Eric borsuk american animals