Darren Aronofsky knew he was truly capturing the essence of New York’s wild and unpredictable nightlife when his new movie got hit with a sprinkling of urine.
The uncomfortable encounter happened last fall as Caught Stealing shot scenes beside a tenement in a New York neighborhood that’s famous for its boisterous and bohemian residents and club-goers. Aronofsky rubs the back of his neck and brings up The Incident. “Well, a PA got peed on from someone on a fire escape. That was intense,” he says.
Austin Butler, who plays a hard-luck former ballplayer who becomes the target of an assortment of underworld thugs and sociopaths, fills in the strange details. “That was really intense,” Butler says. “She got peed on by a fully naked woman on a fire escape. She thought an air conditioner was leaking on her from above, and looked up and saw that.”
“Terrible,” Aronofsky concludes. But such are the risks of shooting on location, especially when that location is known for its offbeat atmosphere. “The thing about the East Village is that there’s so many of those great kind of characters,” the Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan filmmaker tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive first look. “It’s just filled with oddballs, this movie. And that’s kind of my experience and why I love the East Village so much. It’s just such a magnet for that, still to this day.”
The East Village is practically a character itself. “Filming overnights, it was madness,” Butler says.
“Everyone thinks that East Village belongs to them. And it’s funny, because I believe the East Village belongs to me,” Aronofsky adds. “I’ve been going there since I was in high school. I was a little kid from Brooklyn, and that was the coolest place in the world to be, partly because it was the only place that served underage minors at the time. We would just always go to the East Village and get into trouble.”
“Trouble” is the best way to sum up Caught Stealing, which hits theaters on August 29. Butler’s Hank Thompson is trying his best to avoid it, but not doing a very good job. He was once a promising ballplayer in high school, but his sports career fell flat. “It all went wrong,” Aronofsky says. Now he’s tending bar at a dive to make ends meet, but he’s got some good prospects, like his romance with Yvonne, played by Zoë Kravitz. “She’s great for him. She’s an EMT, and she’s a caring woman and she’s cool and she’s strong,” Butler says.
“She’s a solid New York girl,” Aronofsky adds.
“New York strength, but also levity and lightness,” Butler says.
“I think she sees the stupor that he’s in and is trying to shake him out of it,” Aronofsky says. “But she’s also got her own life. When I was casting, I was looking for someone that was the kind of real downtown New York person that I knew back then, that just didn’t take shit. And it makes sense that Zoë was able to jump in.”
Hank is trying his best to demonstrate to her that he’s the trustworthy and reliable type, someone who can be counted upon in a crisis. Maybe that’s why he happily obliges when his punk rock neighbor Russ (House of the Dragon’s Matt Smith sporting a ceiling-scraping orange mohawk) asks him to check in on his pet cat while he’s away. Later, a couple of thugs catch Hank coming out of Russ’s apartment and mistake the pet-sitter for the punk rocker, whom they believe knows the whereabouts of $4 million in laundered mob money.
That’s when his luck turns even further south.
Caught Stealing was crafted as a kind of period piece, set in the bygone era of 1998. Screenwriter Charlie Huston, who adapted his own 2004 novel, set the story in September 2000 in the book, but Aronofsky wound back the clock a couple more years to satisfy his own nostalgic craving. “There are lots of weird characters and lots of weird sub-stories going on. But I think it’s very much a crime caper,” he says. “I tried to make a genre film with the best actors in the world, with the best crew in the world, and bring it to life with the kind of energy that I felt in ’98.”
The Twin Towers were still standing, Rudy Giuliani was mayor, and the around-the-clock surveillance of cell phones and closed-circuit cameras was not yet omnipresent. Dirty deeds could still be conducted out of sight in a city that had its spirit hardened but was not yet on high alert. For Aronofsky, it’s the perfect backdrop for a group of oddballs to lash out at each other over some illicit cash. The filmmaker had once tempted fate himself in Manhattan’s Lower East Side as an underage party seeker, and he missed the good old days of getting away with things.
While on the awards circuit in late 2022 for The Whale, Aronofsky found himself turning back to Huston’s book, which he’d read about 15 years before. He liked Huston’s script, and the emotional anguish of The Whale had him yearning for something that would make him laugh. “I was really upset that I couldn’t figure out what was next. And I kind of had this urge to do something fun,” he says. “I felt like there was just so much tension in our normal lives that I felt like the one thing that Hollywood has always done great is entertain. I looked at my projects and I said, ‘You know what? The most fun one I have is Charlie’s script.’”
During the awards campaign for Elvis, Aronofsky found himself on the same event circuit as Butler. “We had bumped into each other a few times and we hit it off,” Aronofsky says. Butler was also unsure about to take on next. “It was the beginning of December,” Aronofsky says, “I was, like, ‘Give me till the beginning of the year, and I’m going to have something for you.’ I just worked really hard through December. We wrote, I think, six or seven drafts to get it more polished.”
When Aronofsky and Huston sent the script, Butler was already primed to say yes. “I was 11 or 12 or something, and the director of the first audition I ever went to—Jacob Chase was his name—cast me in this student film. I remember talking to him. I’m this little kid, and I said, ‘Who’s your favorite director?’ I’m trying to seek mentorship in whatever way. And he said, ‘Darren Aronofsky.’ He said, ‘Go watch Requiem for a Dream.’”
“At 11 or 12?” Aronofsky interrupts. “Get away from that director as quick as you can.”
The harrowing drug addiction drama is a hard watch for anyone of any age, but Butler was transfixed. “It became my favorite film,” he says. “Highly inappropriate as a youngster, but I remember watching it, going, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize you could do this. How inventive and visceral. As the years went on, then I dug into every one of his films and always wanted to work with him. And so when we met, I remember having this moment of: That’s actually Darren Aronofsky!”
For that reason alone, Caught Stealing was an easy yes for him. “Also, the setting being ’90s New York, which Darren knows so well,” Butler says. “It’s something that I could sink my teeth into as an actor and explore this guy who’s tortured and has been sort of numbing himself and then, suddenly, is thrown into this world…”
“The world really spirals out of control,” Aronofsky says.
But there was one point of disagreement from the start. “Darren kept talking about how fun the movie was,” Butler says. “And I was, like—the stuff I’m going through is not a lot of fun.” But now that he’s seen it, he gets it: “Something that can be a nightmare for the character can actually have humor.”
The first misfortune to befall Hank is the brawl with a pair of bad guys outside his neighbor’s door. Then he gets a warning from a New York Police Department detective named Elise Roman, of the organized crime unit, who informs him that he’s not tangling with low-level crooks. The people targeting him are out for blood if they don’t get their money—and he doesn’t actually know where it is.
Roman is played by If Beale Street Could Talk Oscar winner Regina King, who tries to reason with the headstrong young man. “She comes in at a very sobering moment, when the film needs it,” Aronofsky says.
“The word gravitas comes to mind with her as well,” Butler says. “She has a power and this internal weight.”
During filming, Aronofsky recommended that Butler rewatch Martin Scorsese’s 1985 comedy After Hours to get a feel for the vibe he wanted. That movie, about a clean-cut young man’s strange encounters during one wild night in New York, starred Griffin Dunne, who also turns up in Caught Stealing. Not only was this a chance to pay tribute to that earlier movie, but Dunne is also a longtime resident of the neighborhood in real life. “He is an East Village character,” Aronofsky says.
Viewers can be forgiven for not recognizing Dunne right away because he’s not so clean-cut this time. “He’s got a ponytail and a handlebar mustache,” Aronofsky says. “He’s in the trailer. He screams the line, ‘They killed my lizard!’”
The lizard, sadly, is a victim of this whole morass involving the missing money. And more than one gang wants to squeeze Hank for information about it. “Basically, it’s Austin versus all these different types of criminals,” Aronofsky says. “The Russians, the Hebrews, the Puerto Ricans— they’re all out to get him.”
The Jewish mobsters are represented by Liev Schreiber’s Lipa and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Shmully, two Orthodox brothers who appear reverential and gentlemanly, but rigorously following religious strictures does not mean they always obey the laws of the city, county, and state of New York. “I just don’t know how much I want to give away, but they’re a bunch of badass motherfuckers,” Aronofsky says. “In their own minds, they think they’re doing the right thing. Mayor Giuliani might’ve thought that they were on the wrong side.”
Even then, they’re not all bad. The brothers may be strong-arming Hank, but they also introduce him to the comforting matzo ball soup of Carol Kane, playing the prototypical nurturing Jewish mother, who thinks the young man is far too skinny.
Butler says Schreiber and D’Onofrio’s chemistry was so good, he found himself making videos of their conversations between takes. “They had me in stitches at times because they just had this rapport back and forth that was comedic gold,” he says.
Caught Stealing also features Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, a.k.a. music superstar Bad Bunny, as Colorado, a trigger-happy member of the Puerto Rican gang who rounds out the underworld figures who are closing in on Hank. “He’s, like, the sweetest guy in the world. My casting director Mary Vernieu was, like, ‘Benito’s interested in acting,’ and we ended up talking,” Aronofsky says. “There was a character that he fit really well and he was great. He was so down-to-earth, and he was so one of us, and so part of the team.”
The only trouble is that, even in a movie packed with star power, Ocasio caused an especially big fervor. “We were constantly terrified that the neighborhood would be overthrown as soon as they found out that Benito was there,” Aronofsky says. “He was also a good sport. He actually would come to set and then just camp out there, knowing he was not going to be able to get back to his trailer or anywhere.”
But ultimately, he did have to arrive and depart, which meant shielding him from view and getting him in and out of locations without onlookers recognizing him.. “There were a lot of back exits and going through tunnels that no one ever knew existed in the East Village to get him out and back and over fences, so he didn’t have to go through the street,” Aronofsky says. “It was constantly like: ‘Hide the Benito.’”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
Inside the Case of Kim Kardashian’s Paris Robbery
-
How Sebastian Stan Became Hollywood’s Most Daring Shape-Shifter
-
Explosions, Hacking, Spoofs: Inside New Security Threats in the Skies
-
What Ivanka Trump and Anti-Trumpers Have In Common
-
Inside Elon Musk’s Grievance-Fueled MAGA-morphosis
-
Sinners’ End Credits Explained
-
The Original Girl of the Year
-
Elon Musk’s Breeding Spree Is So Much Wilder Than You Thought
-
Every Quentin Tarantino Movie, Ranked
-
Meet Elon Musk’s 14 Children and Their Mothers (Whom We Know of)
-
From the Archive: Sinatra and the Mob
The post ‘Caught Stealing’ First Look: Austin Butler Goes On the Run in Darren Aronofsky’s Crime Caper appeared first on Vanity Fair.
