American Animals: How to blend documentary interviews with cinematic elements to create an engaging narrative

American Animals, which tells the story of 4 university students, wanting excitement in their lives, robbing their university library of rare books, is an interesting flick, in that it’s not your typical true story based movie. More rather, as the movie says in it’s opening, it IS a true story. And right from the opening scene, it establishes it rather quickly, though not in the ways you’d expect.

The movie begins with Warren Lipka (played by Evan Peters), Spencer Reinhard (played by Barry Keoghan), Eric Borsuk (played by Jared Abrahamson), and Chas Allen III (played by Blake Jenner) all putting on makeup and fake beards to make themselves look like older gentlemen. They are of course, staging the heist. While they prepare and head to their target as the clock ticks, this is intercut with interviews by the real life people who were affected by the robbery, establishing a documentary-esque vibe for the movie.

Even then the movie chooses to play around with those elements.

Following the opening and title card, we then are introduced to our main protagonists, starting with Spencer. We are also treated to interviews of the real Spencer Reinhard, whom we quickly learn, might be the only truthful ones of the bunch. Soon after that, we then are introduced to the unreliable narrator, the wild card, the reckless one.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Warren Lipka. The orchestrator of the whole heist (at least from his perspective). The minute he enters the picture, the lines between fiction and truth and blurred as he is the most unreliable narrator in the film and all of the details he provides of the story clash with other accounts. We also see other people’s interviews and how they were affected by the robbery but for the sake of the point, I’m going to be focusing on the interviews of the protagonists.

Here are a couple of examples.

One is when Spencer first comes to Warren and tells him about the rare books in the library. By Warren’s account, he told him about it at a party, while Spencer recounts him telling him about it in the car. Right then and there, we get our first sign that Warren may or may not be as truthful as we think. We also get a nice moment when Evan Peters is briefly conversing with the real life Warren in the car and asks him if he remembers it like this, with Warren saying that if Spencer remembers it like this, then they should go with it.

Another example is when Warren has to go to Amsterdam to meet with the fence. This is one is more hazy as we don’t get the whole account of what went down and Warren did travel alone, meaning his account is the only one that holds water. Though his friends, Spencer in particular, believes he didn’t go to Amsterdam at all and just made the whole thing up.

What does Warren have to say about that one? “ I guess you’ll have to take my word for it.”

And finally, a more subtle example is when Warren is giving out the code names, opting to use colors, akin to Reservoir Dogs. Spencer was Mr Green because “he smoked lots of green”, Warren was Mr Yellow, because “he’s his mom’s sunshine”, and he even names Chas Mr Pink just to mess with him. He also names Eric Mr Black because at some point in his life, he said his soul was black.

In that segment though, we see real life Eric shaking his head in response to that statment, implying that it wasn’t true. It possible that he got caught up in the excitement of the heist and made that part up too, showcasing more of him being an unreliable narrator.

In conclusion, American Animals takes the usual true story movie structure and flips it completely on it’s head and smashes it, using it to create a more unique and unusual narrative that has us questioning what actually happened.