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April 25, 2008 5:55 pm
q&a
cash and carry
One August morning in 2003, J.L. “Red” Rountree walked into the First American Bank in Abilene, Texas, and handed the teller an envelope on which he’d written the word “robbery.” Not long after he’d made off with a bag of the bank’s cash—$2,000 in small bills— police chased down Rountree’s beat-up Buick Regal, took the thief into custody, and started the wheels of legal justice turning. As bank heists go, this one would hardly be worthy of remark, were it not for the fact that at the time of his arrest, Red Rountree was 91 years old. The world’s oldest bank robber is now the star of “This is Not a Robbery,” the first film by directors Lucas Jansen and Adam Kurland, and the third to come to screens courtesy of Andrew Lauren Productions. Since launching the outfit three years ago, Andrew Lauren has proved himself a man of eclectic good taste—a bit like his father, Ralph—but according to both Lauren and his company’s president, P. Jennifer Dana, Andrew Lauren Productions’ consistency is its laserlike focus on compelling characters. “What I love about Red is that he’s this guy who decides, at the end of his life, to write a whole new chapter,” comments Lauren. “I think that story deserves to be told.” The directors at the Tribeca Film Festival appear to agree: “This is Not a Robbery” premieres at the festival tomorrow. As they readied themselves for the film’s debut, Lauren and Dana talked to Style.com about the timeless wisdom of F. Scott Fitzgerald, filmmaking in the iPhone era, and unlikely fashion icon Red Rountree.
Andrew, you grew up immersed in the world of fashion. Has that influenced you as a producer?
Andrew Lauren: I think the influence goes in the other direction. Great cinema creates a world, you know? Or it makes you look at your own world in a different way. That’s incredibly powerful, and my father would be the first to tell you that he’s taken a lot of his inspiration from movies. I probably inherited my love for film from him.
Well, there’s the Gatsby connection—he did the costumes for the Redford film; you kicked off your producing career with “G,” the hip-hop version of the story.
A.L.: Yeah, I was always a big Gatsby fan. It’s the great American cautionary tale, isn’t it? And Jay Gatsby is the classic American striver. As a character, Red Rountree had a similar appeal to me—here’s this guy, the perfect American, he worked his way out of the Depression and never got so much as a speeding ticket, and then, just when the expected thing for him to do would be to, you know, wind down his life watching the world pass him by from his easy chair, he turns to the dark side. Young or old, you can always create a new persona. I find that quite inspiring in a perverse way.
P. Jennifer Dana.: Lucas and Adam have basically adopted the Red Rountree persona. They’ve both grown beards, and I’m pretty sure they’re wearing their pants higher than they were when we met them.
A.L.: You heard it here first: Old-man pants are coming into style.
This is the first documentary you’ve produced. Are you planning on doing more?
P.J.D.: Docs weren’t part of the game plan—we’re a company that really likes writers. But we’re also a company that, more generally, is interested in great stories, and in finding and developing new talent. In Red, Adam and Lucas had a story that was undeniably compelling, but because Red died in 2004, telling that story presented some inherent challenges. Which is an invitation to creativity.
A.L.: The fact that we came from a feature background really helped the film, I think. We were willing to play with unconventional solutions to problems like, how do we show the robberies? That’s where the idea of adding animation to the film came from; a desire to show Red in action, and get away from talking heads and old interview footage of him from prison. You always ask yourself, “What’s going to serve this particular film?” Like, our last release was “The Squid and the Whale,” which we shot on Super 16. Now, that’s not the ideal format for shooting a movie that you want to show on a big screen, but it was appropriate to that story. And ultimately, if the story holds up, if it’s told really well, then it will hold up in a movie theater and it will hold up on an iPhone.
P.J.D.: There’s our digital strategy in a nutshell: Tell good stories.
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