Adapted from Don Winslow’s acclaimed novella of the same name, Crime 101 is a neo-noir love letter to Los Angeles and its high-gloss, high-stakes way of life.
Written and directed by Bart Layton, the BAFTA‑winning filmmaker behind The Imposter and American Animals, it’s a pulse-pounding, big-screen adaptation about a jewel thief whose last job may become more final than he realises, is alluring, exciting and effortlessly cool.
For Crime 101, Layton saw an ideal setting in the status-obsessed city of Los Angeles, where what you have is very often confused with who you are. “I felt like many of the characters are slightly trapped in that sense of ‘I’m never going to feel good about my place in the world unless I have this,’” Layton says. “L.A. is a place that really nurtures that sense of: if you want to really be somebody and feel like you are of value, you need to have all the external trappings of great success. I think status anxiety is a constant thing.”
Layton was inspired by a lifelong love of classic heist thrillers such as Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998), Michael Mann’s Thief (1980), The Sting, and Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).
“They were grownup movies,” he says. “They had real characters and were kind of tonally not simply a comedy, a drama or a thriller. They had light and shade. I definitely thought it would be nice to remind people that those are still great experiences to have in the cinema.”
“I read the script and loved it because it felt like a real throwback to ‘90s thrillers,” Chris Hemsworth says. “There was a sort of nostalgia to the story that you don’t see too much these days. I was a fan of Bart’s work and loved American Animals. It was a very character-driven drama with elaborate intersecting storylines. After our first meeting I thought not only has he written an incredibly compelling script, but he also has a brilliant vision for the film.”
Set against the sun-bleached grit of Los Angeles, Crime 101 weaves the tale of an elusive
jewel thief (Chris Hemsworth) whose string of heists along the 101 freeway have mystified police.
When he eyes the score of a lifetime, his path crosses that of a disillusioned insurance broker (Halle
Berry) who is facing her own crossroads. Convinced he has found a pattern, a relentless detective
(Mark Ruffalo) is closing in, raising the stakes even higher. As the heist approaches, the line between
hunter and hunted begins to blur, and all three are faced with life-defining choices–and the
realization that there can be no turning back.
Reality Behind The Fiction
The Novella “Crime 101” was first published in Don Winslow’s story collection, Broken in October 2020, and soon afterwards, producers began jockeying for the rights to land a big-screen adaptation. “There was quite a lot of heat around it,” recalls producer Dimitri Doganis, Bart Layton’s partner at RAW productions.
“The central question of crime fiction for me is how does one try to live decently in an indecent world?,” says Don Winslow. “So I often have characters with good intentions that they’re not always able to carry out. I like characters that have internal conflict. I like characters who are morally flawed. I’m not trying to write white knights. At the same time, I’m not trying to write totally dark villains. I like those ambiguities. I think that that is reality, and I tend to write realistic fiction”.
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“My agent sent it to me and said, I think this is right up your street,” Layton adds. “I read it in the depths of winter during the pandemic lockdown that year, and it was such a breath of fresh air. It was all set along this sun-drenched strip of road.”
After securing a deal with Winslow and his producing partner Shane Salerno of The Story Factory, the London-based Layton traveled to Southern California to meet with the author and visit some of the settings in the story. The novella was based around the San Diego area along the lower end of the Pacific Coast Highway, but Layton proposed moving the majority of the action up the coastline to Los Angeles. “He was talking about Solana Beach and all these places that are actually really small little towns and I felt like it needed to have a bigger canvas,” Layton says.
While there’s something romantic about the notion of a gentleman jewel thief, Layton wanted his adaptation of Winslow’s story to have the feel of stark reality as a foundation.
Hemsworth’s Davis may look like a Norse god, and may personally idolize Steve McQueen, but he comes from humble origins. Knowing what it’s like to be afraid or hungry keeps him doing this dangerous job, but now that he has had unfathomable success, he is searching for a way to land one final score and retire—without getting caught, or inflicting any material harm to others. To understand this psychology, Layton and Doganis, who have spent two decades collaborating on documentary projects, took a journalistic approach to researching real-life criminals in the jewel trade.
“For us, that isn’t unusual. That is absolutely the standard place that one starts building a story. Real people, real experiences,” Doganis says. “Then you make sure that what you are doing really feels like it’s anchored in truth. I think that’s what we were always struggling for, even with something which is entirely invented. It has to plug into broader truths about who we are and how we live and what we want if it’s going to stay with people. Both jewel thieves and the policemen who chased them were really important sources to get certain details.”
“It turns out there are real people who are jewel thieves. There are real fences, there are real detectives, obviously, and there are real street kids,” Layton adds. “If you can find them, sometimes you can talk to them. We’ve made lots of documentaries in lots of hostile environments, and you often find the same things: generally, people who are doing bad things are people who haven’t really ever had much in the way of care for them or love. Some of them have codes and moral boundaries, and some don’t.”
What sets Davis apart from other criminals is his determination not to hurt or kill anyone. Having grown up without a steady home, or much of a family, he also returns the cell phones of some of the guards he holds at bay in the course of his hold-ups. In a line taken directly from Winslow’s novella, Davis is reluctant to destroy the devices, even though that would be safer for him, because he knows people seldom back up their family photos. While that might seem like pure fantasy, Layton’s research showed him that many thieves also try their best to be “good guys,” of a sort. “We did meet criminals who were like, ‘Yeah, my M.O. was always to break into somewhere if there was definitely not going to be anyone there,” Layton says. “There were thieves who did their research very thoroughly.”
BART LAYTON (Director/Writer/Producer) The British filmmaker wrote, directed and produced his debut feature documentary The Imposter (2012) about Frederic Bourdin, a charismatic French con artist and serial identity thief, who pretended to be the missing Texan boy Nicholas Barclay. His follow up, the critically acclaimed debut feature film American Animals (2018) which he developed at the Sundance Lab. In the mid 2000s, Layton co-founded the leading London-based production company RAW. His work as a creator, director and producer spans numerous well-known television series and feature docs, such as Locked Up Abroad, The Tinder Swindler, The Deepest Breath, and Fear City, amongst many others.
DON WINSLOW (Author of the novella “Crime 101”) is a New York Times bestselling author, having written twenty-four novels, including “The Force,” “Savages,” “The Winter of Frankie Machine,” the highly acclaimed Cartel Trilogy – “The Power of the Dog,” “The Cartel,” and “The Border” – as well as the epic Danny Ryan Trilogy – “City On Fire,” “City of Dreams” and “City In Ruins.” In addition, Winslow has published a collection of short stories and novellas – “Broken” – with another collection – “Collision” – to be released in January of 2026. He has written stories for Amazon Audible, as well as numerous short stories in anthologies and magazines such as Esquire, the LA Times Magazine and Playboy. His columns have appeared in Vanity Fair, Vulture, Huffington Post, CNN Online, and other outlets here and abroad.
His novel “City On Fire” is under way as a feature film starring Austin Butler and directed by Matt Ross.
Previously, Winslow’s novel “The Death and Life of Bobby Z” was made into a film. His novel Savages was made into a feature film directed by three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone. Winslow is also an outspoken political activist, known for his commentaries and videos on X, which have garnered more than three hundred million views.
The son of a sailor and a librarian (“My father was a sailor who loved books, my mother a librarian who loved a sailor”) Winslow grew up with a love of reading in a small coastal Rhode Island town. He left at age seventeen to study journalism at the University of Nebraska, where he earned a degree in African Studies. While in college, he traveled to Africa, sparking a lifelong involvement with that continent. Moving to New York to try to become a writer, Winslow instead found work as a movie theater manager (“The New Yorker wasn’t exactly beating down my door”), and later as private investigator, working mostly in Times Square “before Mickey Mouse took it over” and Hell’s Kitchen. During this time, he acquired his love of crime fiction. Winslow returned to college to receive a master’s degree in Military History and intended to go into the Foreign Service but instead joined a friend’s photographic safari firm in Kenya. He led trips there as well as hiking expeditions in southwestern China, and later directed Shakespeare
productions during summers in Oxford, England. While bouncing back and forth between Asia, Africa, Europe and America, Winslow wrote his first novel, “A Cool Breeze On The Underground,” which was nominated for an Edgar Award. His breakthrough came with his signing with The Story Factory, the book and film agency run by his close friend Shane Salerno. He and Salerno had earlier written a television series UC/Undercover, and the two collaborated on the screenplay of Savages. The success of Savages and The Cartel finally allowed Winslow to become a full-time writer and settle on an old ranch in his beloved California, the setting for many of his books. Winslow is the recipient of the Raymond Chandler Award (Italy), the LA Times Book Prize, the Ian Fleming Silver Dagger (UK), The RBA Literary Prize (Spain), The Maltese Falcon Award (Japan) and many other prestigious awards.
