It’s the end of Indiecast Week and in anticipation of tomorrow’s Oscars, Bernard and CJ share their picks for who should and will win! Also, two special guests join the show as director John Hillcoat and Breaking Bad actor Aaron Paul talk about their new crime-thriller, Triple 9, out in theaters now. Bernard shares his impressions of the film and the boys offer two more Indie Picks of the Week. What more could you want? We hope you enjoyed Indiecast Week as much as we did!

Topics

• Indie Picks (3:17)
• Oscar Picks (15:42)
• John Hillcoat (37:57)
• Aaron Paul (47:47)
• Triple 9 Review (50:16)

Articles Referenced

• Triple 9 Review
• Tobias Lindholm Interview
• Aaron Paul Long Interview
• John Hillcoat Long Interview

Subscribe to the Way Too Indiecast

• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Subscribe on Stitcher

As is the case with Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight, you’ll find no heroes in John Hillcoat‘s likewise numerically titled Triple 9, a solid, well-acted crime-thriller in which nearly all of its dozen-or-so main characters carry a badge, though about half of them are crooked. These slimeballs use their position in law enforcement as a guise for a big-time heist operation; their non-criminal counterparts on the force are bent on smoking out who’s behind the bank robberies as the perps hide in plain sight just one desk over. The “good cops” aren’t as straight-laced as you’d imagine, however: Policing the rough Atlanta streets keeps their skin and wits tough and their scary obsession with putting the heist-pullers away could put innocent people in danger.

By all accounts, it was Hillcoat’s name that first compelled the stacked, A-list ensemble to flock to the project, and it was the complex, unpredictable, multi-protag script that got them to stay. Each talent—Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kate Winslet, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, and the list goes on—makes a big impression; this is an ensemble piece through and through. But the egalitarian approach to the ensemble doesn’t work as well as it does in Hateful Eight or even Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight because the characters’ murky motivations, combined with the dizzying, often disorganized plot, make the experience as a whole a little hard to follow. There’s too much to keep track of, too little to latch onto.

A team of trained professionals led by Michael (Ejiofor) pulls off a bank robbery in the heart of Atlanta. They’re working (reluctantly) for Russian mob boss Irna (Winslet), who’s tasked them not with bringing her bags of loot but with retrieving a safety deposit box she needs to free her husband from prison. Jorge (Clifton Collins Jr., terrific as usual) and Marcus (Mackie) currently work as cops and Michael and Russel (Norman Reedus) are ex-Special Forces. These four are cool as cucumbers but Russel’s strung-out younger brother, Gabe (Aaron Paul) nearly causes the caper to go South. Going forward, as they resume their lives post-heist, the sloppy Gabe will more than likely become a liability and the rest of the team knows it.

Draped in woefully mismatched, fake-fancy garb, Irna is a welcome change from the familiar crime boss archetype, at least in tone and, of course, gender. Considering this role and other, villainous turn in the Divergent series, it seems the Oscar winner’s developing a taste for the wicked. She’s really good at it: The blood boils when we learn Irna’s holding Michael’s son—who also happens to be her own nephew (Gal Gadot plays his mom)—captive, blackmailing him to reassemble his team and carry out yet another risky operation, breaking into a Homeland Security facility of all places. To pull it off, the team resorts to using a “triple-nine” (code for “officer down”), distracting local law enforcement as they snatch Irna’s precious cargo in the shadows.

They need a good (unsuspecting) cop to be the “triple-nine” and Marcus nominates his new partner Chris (Affleck), who’s just transferred from another division. The new guy has just been branded a walking dead man by his own partner. One of the many x-factors in the scheme is Chris’ uncle (Harrelson) is a detective on the force himself and is leading a tireless investigation on Michael’s undercover gang. When the shit hits the fan and Chris sits in Marcus’ crosshairs, it’s amid a tornado of unexpected betrayals, murders and changes of heart that change the complexion of the “triple-9” altogether.

The plot’s too intricate and the dialogue is too expository to give the character work the clear focus it deserves. The performers are terrific and enrich their characters even when their screen time is woefully limited but one can’t help but wonder how much smoother the movie would flow with less attention dedicated to the plot. There’s no central character, after all, so every moment the actors get is incredibly precious. Fortunately, the actors make the best of their constraints, with each of their characters ultimately sticking in your mind in one way or another. None of them (besides Winslet) are playing against-type, so they all seem comfortable in their roles, which works greatly in the movie’s favor.

Aside from the acting, the movie’s greatest strength is the action sequences which, despite being preposterously elaborate and chaotic are presented with great care. The action is surprisingly easy to follow, and Hillcoat’s gift is that his set pieces, as they move briskly along through interiors and exteriors and different neighborhoods, simultaneously immerse us in the gritty surroundings and thrill us with expertly staged gunfights, foot-chases and fisticuffs. As far as the action is concerned, the presentation is slick, slick, slick. If only the narrative would take a few steps back and let the human drama and gunfire take more of the spotlight, Triple 9 could have been tremendous.

A genre adventurer of sorts, filmmaker John Hillcoat has made a western (The Proposition), a post-apocalyptic drama (The Road) and a period gangster movie (Lawless) in his career thus far. Now, with Triple 9, he tackles the crime thriller genre, assembling an A-list cast (including the likes of Kate Winslet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Clifton Collins Jr., Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Norman Reedus, Aaron Paul, Anthony Mackie and more) to tell a gritty, urban tale of crooked cops, bank heists, double-turns and gang violence. Set in Atlanta, the film holds authenticity as its highest priority as the dozen-or-so protagonists maneuver, duck and dodge around each other until the bloody, bitter end.

In a roundtable interview, I spoke with Hillcoat about the film, which opens tomorrow nationwide.

You’ve expressed your desire to elevate genre movies. How did you elevate the crime thriller with Triple 9?
I feel like this genre, in recent years, has become very unrealistic. Initially, there were the golden years when film noir was created and all these fantastic, murky shades of grey were created. In the ’70s, they took all of these great genres and shook them up and gave them this kind of gritty realism. That’s what I miss in contemporary crime thrillers. The characters always seem to be chasing the plot. I wanted to find something where you didn’t know what was coming. In a lot of this genre, I feel like I already know what’s going to happen before it happens. [I also wanted to show] shades of grey instead of black and white. Again, in this genre, it’s become, “there’s the good guy, there’s the bad guy.” With all of that, I also wanted to bring it into a contemporary landscape. The world of crime out there in urban cities has completely changed.

When this script crossed your desk, was it something where you were looking to do something in this vein? What got your neurons firing?
I’d been looking for a contemporary crime thriller to do for well over a decade. My problem was, every time I’d read something, I felt like I could predict what was coming around the corner. My manager and producer brought a first-time writer and showed me this script because they knew I wanted a crime thriller that was a bit more unpredictable and grounded in reality.

There’s a lot to keep track of in this movie. It’s a controlled chaos. As I was watching the movie I thought, the casting is so key because these characters have to make big impression in just a small amount of screen time.
That was the single biggest challenge out of anything, to assemble that cast and line it up to where they all had a window available at that one time. It was beyond any rubik’s cube out there. The intention was to create a milieu and world you’re immersed in as opposed to the classic, two-hander thing. I love a film like Nashville where you’re just with characters very briefly but you feel like you could disappear into their lives. Life is like that too in a crowded urban environment. I wanted to get that sea of humanity. That’s what was great about this cast—they’re all so different and bring such idiosyncratic detail. We were conscious of that going in. They had to make interesting choices and create layers because of exactly that: screen time.

I was impressed by the action mostly because the things that are happening onscreen are unpredictable and chaotic and unexpectedly change location frequently. But I never felt lost, geographically. That must be incredibly difficult to pull off.
It took immense planning. We had whole maps of neighborhoods, we had meetings with different departments, we had models made. We had different visual references made for different departments saying, “Look, here’s an accident. We want it to look like that.” There was a lot of research as well. I was working with a very gifted second-unit action guy who did the Bourne Identity films and has an immense knowledge of that. We love realism and accidents, so we’re always on the lookout for how we find those and reference those in each situation and make it work cinematically.

I think you’ll know what I mean when I say this—I feel like you as a filmmaker respect the act of violence.
I take violence very seriously. I feel like there are no real victors. There’s always an element of chaos and, psychologically, no one comes out unscathed. I think that’s the key, for the actors to feel very much like it’s their choice or whatever they do that creates the situation, the build-up to it. Then, it’s how they process it afterward. When I’m working with an actor on these sort of things, I’m looking more at the before and after than the actual incident. We are human, and that’s the thing I try to do, get that human experience instead of just seeing bodies flying apart. That doesn’t mean anything. And you’ve just reminded me, that’s something we were very conscious of: We wanted to make every single death that happens matter. It’s a significant event every time. In crime thrillers, that’s really not considered. The body count is just, like, very gratuitous.

I thought there was strategic value to the decision of killing off a particular actor early on in the movie. Audiences are very familiar with this person. It was kind of like a Janet Leigh in Psycho thing.
That was very intentional. We wanted to create a situation where even the characters would suddenly take this situation very seriously. It’s that feeling of not knowing who’s next. And yet, we all know—and they know as characters—that they’ve chosen this life and nothing’s going to change that. They kind of know that, eventually, they won’t be retired on a tropical island. That’s not really what comes of this. And they never know when that moment is going to happen.

You’ve said before that you’ve witnessed violence growing up and have been a victim of violence. Do you think, as a filmmaker, that you have to have had that hands-on experience to portray violence onscreen authentically?
I think it’s definitely helped and given me more respect in trying to get to the truth of the matter and take it more seriously. I’m very influenced by other movies, but I do love that kind of one foot in reality. That has, unfortunately, [happened to me]. But I would never perscribe that as a prerequisite for film students. [laughs] “Doing a crime film? Shoot yourself in the leg!” [laughs] I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone but it certainly has impacted the work I do very much.