American Animals reinvents the true-crime film, and gets away with it

There’s a title card at the beginning of American Animals that immediately suggests this won’t be your average true-crime drama. “This is not based on a true story,” it reads, and then a couple of words disappear. “This is a true story.”

That’s an audacious claim for any film to make, but English writer-director Bart Layton knows from truth, as they say in America; his background is in documentary, both feature-length (he made the remarkable 2012 film The Imposter, about a young Spaniard who tries to pass himself off as the missing son of a Texan family) and TV series (most famously as producer of the ob-doc Locked Up Abroad).

American Animals, his account of the 2004 theft of some extremely valuable rare books from the University of Transylvania library in Kentucky, is “very, very factually accurate,” he says. “I had the police reports and FBI files at my disposal, and I was very keen to stay as close to the facts as possible. Of course you write dialogue and you write a screenplay and you are taking some artistic licence, but the essence of the truth is very firmly ingrained within the film.”

That said, he adds, “How truthful is any true story going to be? You have conflicting accounts, and memory is not the most reliable thing either. We have this idea that it’s this document of things that have happened to us, but often memory is not as accurate as we think it is.”