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“American Horror Story” star Evan Peters joked he wanted to know what it felt like to rob a convenience store with his real-life counterpart he portrays in the film, “American Animals.”

Peters plays Warren Lipka in Bart Layton’s movie — a hybrid of a fictionalized heist film and a documentary about four young men who tried to rob some priceless, rare books from a library in Kentucky. Irl Lipka serves as a charismatic, unpredictable and unreliable narrator of sorts in the film. He’s the ring leader of the lawless crew. And though Layton asked his actors not to interact with the feature’s real subjects, Peters said he embraced the spirit of the project and broke the rules.

“I was channeling Warren and I found Warren on Twitter, and messaged with him and started a correspondence, and one of the main things I wanted to ask him was, ‘Why?...

Stars: Evan Peters, Blake Jenner, Barry Keoghan, Jared Abrahamson, Ann Dowd, Spencer Reinhard, Warren Lipka, Eric Borsuk, Chas Allen, Betty Jean Gooch | Written and Directed by Bart Layton

A few months ago in the midst of the turmoil that is Film Twitter, a question was asked: “What is the quintessential American film?” Inevitably the onslaught of answers served to be intriguing, after much thought iIbelieve in 2018 alone we have had two. The first being Scott Cooper’s devastatingly captivating and stoic western Hostiles. The second is Bart Layton’s devastating, traumatic dramatic/documentarian feature American Animals. The latter is a chaotic onslaught of horrifying consequence with the prompting of such a crime a varied and interesting delve into the white privileged psyche.

Layton utilises both a dramatic feature narrative threaded with a series of documentarian interviews with the real culprits of the crime. In doing so all rules and restrictions...

American Animals. Bart Layton: 'There was no road map in terms of the template and that was the thing with the producers and the financers, it was a totally unconventional process' Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival American Animals may look on the surface like a straightforward heist thriller, but Bart Layton's fiction debut is considerably cleverer than that. He draws us in to the true story of Warren Lipka (Evan Peters), Chas Allen (Blake Jenner), Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) and Eric Borsuk (Jared Abrahamson), mixing footage of the men's plan to steal rare books with interviews with the real-life perpetrators. All is not what it initially seems, however, and what starts as a thrill ride for all concerned because a examination of toxic masculinity and the nature of memory.

I caught up with Bart Layton and the cast at Sundance after the world premiere, and Layton explained how...

American Animals is a unique piece of cinema. Blending the documentary with drama, it comes from Bart Layton, the director behind The Imposter, and stars Barry Keoghan in the leading role. To celebrate the film’s release we sat down with the talented duo.

We asked Layton about the genesis of the project and if it was always his intention to blend this film with the documentary format, and whether he, as a filmmaker, now visualises real life stories on cinematic terms.

Keoghan discusses why the leading cast lived with each other before the shoot, and how helpful that experience was, and when he recalls that moment of clarity where he felt like he could consider himself to be an actor, and the luxury that comes with that; to be able to pick and choose projects. Layton then finishes by discussing his next project, and why he’s decided to...

(l-r) Jared Abrahamson as Eric, Evans Peters as Warren, Blake Jenner as Chas and Barry Keoghan as Spencer in disguise, in Bart Layton’s American Animals. Photo courtesy of The Orchard.

American Animals opens with a screen showing the familiar words “this is based on a true story” but the text quickly changes to “this is a true story,” a hook sure to get your attention,

American Animals tells a strange but true story, of a daring daylight art heist, by four college students who attempt to steal a rare and valuable Audubon book from a Kentucky university, but it is the way it tells it – with the actual people involved periodically commenting on the story as the actors recrete the events like any crime film.

The combination of narrative film and documentary film techniques makes writer/director Bart Layman’s film unique. Sometimes a narrative film closely recreates real...

American Animals is a fascinating true crime story; made even more engaging by its brilliant format. The film intercuts the portrayal of an infamous heist with interviews from the actual people involved. We learn the motivations of the characters from two key perspectives, real time and hindsight. It is a meticulous and highly creative exploration into the vagaries of human nature. Acclaimed documentarian Bart Layton reaches greatness with his first narrative feature.

American Animals opens in 2003 Kentucky. Barry Keoghan stars as Spencer Reinhard, a disenchanted art student at Transylvania University. His middle-class, suburban life has left him hollow. He yearns for the passion and adventure that inspired the great artists. A chance tour of the school's library leads to a presentation of its rare book collection. The showcase piece, John Audubon's "Birds of America", is the most valuable book in the world.

Evan Peters co-stars as Warren Lipka, Spencer's best friend from high school.

With “Oceans 8” and “American Animals” now in theaters, heist movies are having a moment. It’s not hard to see why: During this chaotic chapter in the cultural history of the country, there’s nothing more fun than watching an elaborate cast of characters planning a near-impossible crime, one successfully pulled off with smooth moves, sleight of hand, and winks at the camera.

“American Animals” has become a surprise summer hit at the specialty box office, grossing nearly half a million dollars in its first two weeks. But it’s a different kind of heist movie than anything in the “Ocean’s” franchise. The crime draws from a real-life incident — when four college-aged Kentucky men attempted to steal some rare books from Transylvania University in 2004 — and director Bart Layton flips the script on the audience, by bringing in the real people involved to tell their story alongside the actors midway through.

Surely the 21st century equivalent to the old Hollywood trope “Let’s put on a show!” is, judging by the movies that get made, “Let’s pull off a heist!” What that says about the evolution of our wish-fulfillment fantasies is a tad worrisome, so it’s refreshing that “American Animals,” which recreates and dissects a real 2004 robbery committed by a quartet of thrill-seeking college kids, grasps that there’s something singularly regrettable in how our popular art glorifies criminality.

And yet, for a good deal of its running time, writer-director Bart Layton’s slick, music-fueled assemblage of recreated narrative and documentary manages to be as deftly comic and suspenseful as the bank job movies from which Layton, and the incident’s perpetrators, took inspiration. Until, that is, the reality of bad decisions and corrosive entitlement act as an all-too-necessary dampener.

The crime was known as the “Transy Book Heist.

You'd call this heist film un-fucking-believable, except that American Animals really is rooted in fact – that is, whenever the British documentarian Bart Layton, in a mightily impressive narrative feature debut, doesn't mess around too much. "This is not based on a true story," reads a title card at the start ... before the words "not based on" slowly vanish from the screen.

It's 2004 in Lexington, Kentucky, when homeboys Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) and Warren Lipka (Evan Peters), students at local Transylvania University, decide to pull off a robbery. They don't need the money,...

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. Then he started exchanging letters with the guys, who were – spoiler alert – sitting in prison, their crime having failed spectacularly. That's when his plan changed.

"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,...

13 years ago, four privileged teenagers with bright futures and everything to lose went through with a half-baked scheme to steal millions of dollars worth of rare books from a local college. The story behind the brazen and bizarre heist, which has gone down as one of the most famous in history, is now coming to theaters in American Animals, out Friday.

“Lots of people make bad decisions when they’re young and nothing comes of those mistakes,” Spencer Reinhard, one of the group’s two original organizers, tells People. “In our instance, we picked something a little more extreme and...

This June has no shortage of potential summer-movie crowd-pleasers, from the return of Pixar's unstoppable super-family to a heist packed with famous faces to a cataclysmic meltdown featuring gigantic, genetically-altered dinosaurs. Thankfully, if blockbusters aren't your bag, you're also getting a cavalcade of Sundance favorites heading your way, including a doc on public television's unstoppable real-life superhero and a cataclysmic horror-movie meltdown featuring a hell-hath-no-fury Toni Collette. Here's what you'll be seeing at (hopefully air-conditioned) theater near you this month.

Action Point (June 1st)

Buckle that seatbelt and adjust...

You don’t often see filmmakers alternate between documentary and narrative fare. Most of the time, a director of docs sticks with nonfiction cinema, with the same being true on the flip side. Those who move between worlds are rare beasts, indeed. Even more so, documentarians who go narrative often end up with workmanlike projects. This week, the exact opposite is the case. American Animals is hitting theaters and it’s a stunningly good showcase for filmmaker Bart Layton’s talents. Once a hot doc maker because of The Imposter, now he just has to be considered a hot director in general. He’s certainly got the goods, going by this work. This film is a heist drama/thriller, based on a true story. IMDb sets you up like so: “Four young men mistake their lives for a movie and attempt one of the most audacious heists in U.S.