LaRoy introduces us to a dark, absurd world where nobody can be trusted, good guys always lose, and arbitrary events dictate our direction. So, reality, except funnier. After introducing us to a menacing hitman in one of the greatest opening scenes in recent memory, LaRoy introduces us to its sadsack protagonist and his comically pathetic equal.
Our ‘heroes’ — a pushover with a cheating wife, and a wannabe private detective who has much more confidence than is warranted. John Magaro and Steve Zahn play these men to perfection, and Dylan Baker is a revelatory surprise as a ghostly killer.
These are the losers who get trampled on in the cruel universe of LaRoy, but happenstance leads them into opportunities (and danger) far beyond what they’re probably capable of. Writer and director Shane Atkinson takes the tropes of classic film noirs like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity — the femme fatale, the sucker, the nihilism — but adds morbid humor and some slapstick comedy, all with the backdrop of cowboy hats and rural Western scenery.
In the film, a quiet man discovers his beauty queen wife is cheating on him with his own brother; before he can bring his own suicidal ideation to completion, he’s mistaken for a hitman and tasked with killing somebody. The case of mistaken identity escalates as the original hitman hunts down who’s impersonating him, and a reckless, ridiculous private investigator gets involved with the case. Atkinson spoke about LaRoy, the expectations of a debut feature film, and his excellent cast.
Shane Atkinson’s Great Debut Film
LaRoy is a startlingly assured film. It begins with an incredibly tight opening sequence that’s jittery in its live-wire tension, before presenting a world of well-developed characters trapped in a Rube Goldberg machine of a plot. With its delicate mixture of genres and dark sense of humor, Shane Atkinson’s film is a mature meditation on genre and moods themselves, and audiences would be forgiven for thinking he’s an established feature filmmaker. And yet, LaRoy is Atkinson’s first feature film as a writer and director. It wouldn’t have been, though, if he had his way, but as LaRoy itself often explores, life is wholly indifferent to our plans.
“Well, I’ve written a few scripts over the years, and I had one in particular that I tried to get made for a long time,” explained Atkinson, who had a different beginning in mind for his directorial career. “It would start to go, and then it would fall apart, and a new producer would come in, and we’d get some money, and then we’d lose money. So I had this other one that I always hoped was going to be my first film, but then I just kind of got frustrated with it after a long time of starting and stopping. It wasn’t going anywhere. So I just decided to put it on the shelf and write something new and fresh.”
“So I just sat down to write this,” continued Atkinson. “I didn’t tell anybody about it. I didn’t want anybody asking about it. I just kind of sat down and wrote something that I was going to be excited about, something for me, my sense of humor, my interests.” It worked. He elaborated:
And so I just had this little idea that I developed and eventually finished a script and showed it to my wife, who’s the first person that sees everything. And she said it was okay, so I just kind of sent it out and thankfully got some other people interested, and so this one kind of unexpectedly and quickly became the first feature.
Sometimes, passion pushes past plans, and sometimes, the blindness of history can be a boon. “I just decided to do something fresh and new, and get hopefully a bit of an injection of energy and interests. And so yeah, that became LaRoy.”
Some scripts have a lot of drafts, but this one for whatever reason didn’t have too many, maybe two or three or something like that,” explained Atkinson. The unique little gem of a film was birthed from some strange void, a filmmaker raring to go, dissatisfied with all past failures and just ready to push forward. Somehow, in a kind of miraculous event only understood by independent filmmakers, everything seemed to work out with LaRoy. All the pieces simply lined up.
“This one somehow came out decently formed, and we didn’t do too many drafts. We didn’t do any rewrites for the cast. I didn’t write for anyone in particular, but it almost seems embarrassing that I didn’t, in hindsight,” said Atkinson with a smile. “You mentioned Steve Zhan in that part, I mean, he’s just so wonderful and so terrific […] We were trying to find somebody who would work for sh*t but also who paired nicely with John, because they have this relationship in the film, and it’s really about their dynamic.” He continued:
And my wife suggested Steve, and as soon as she did, it was immediately like, ‘Oh, of course, nobody else could possibly do this. I’m gonna be devastated when he says no.’ But thankfully, we sent it to him and he was interested. He’s a big fan of John’s and wanted to work with John, and so he came on, and then yeah, we got Dylan Baker, who is just phenomenal, I can’t picture anybody else in that role.
“A big reason why I wanted to work with these specific actors, is because they got it,” admitted Atkinson. “They just understood what I was going for, and they didn’t need a ton of direction. It’s a hard thing to describe. It’s a hard thing to explain. It’s a hard thing to direct, if somebody’s doing something different. But you know, we didn’t have a lot of time ahead of shooting. So people really just needed to come in ready to go. It was also a very quick production. So we didn’t have a ton of time on set to experiment and try out different things, or maybe take a wrong turn and circle back. So it was important to me to find people who understood the tone and what I was going for, and got it, and could come in and deliver, because we just didn’t have a lot of time to mess around.”
Relating to the Losers of LaRoy
There’s an interesting connection between film noir and fatalism or just plain depression that LaRoy taps into. The only people worth rooting for are the battered losers of the world, and even then, we glance behind our shoulders to make sure that nobody else sees us sticking up for them. Magaro (First Cow, The Big Short) and Zahn (Treme, The White Lotus) perfectly portray losers in over their heads here. Atkinson explained with both radical honesty and dry humor:
I think that’s probably just who I relate to naturally, losers. And I’m just better at writing that, instead of attempting like an Aaron Sorkin-type script, where everyone’s just super smart and competent. That, I think, is out of my wheelhouse. But the sort of down on his luck, lovable losers may be a little closer to home somehow.
While Magaro and Zahn are hardly losers, they are hilarious and heartbreaking portraying them. Ironically, Atkinson reverses expectations with another of his cast members, the great Dylan Baker, and transforms his pale and thin physicality into something truly menacing. The actors are perfect in their roles, which was integral; Atkinson didn’t have time for them not to be. “A big reason why I wanted to work with these specific actors, is because they got it. They just understood what I was going for, and they didn’t need a ton of direction,” explained Atkinson. “It’s a hard thing to explain. It’s a hard thing to direct if somebody’s doing something different.”
“We didn’t have a lot of time ahead of shooting. So people really just needed to come in ready to go, and it was also very quick production. So we didn’t have a ton of time on set to experiment and try out different things,” continued Atkinson. “So it was important to me to find people who understood the tone and what I was going for, and could come in and deliver, because we just didn’t have a lot of time to mess around. And Steve, after talking to him for five minutes, I felt like we were just on the same page.”
Finding Humor in Noir
About that tone. Atkinson’s film has a very unique vibe to it, part Coen brothers, part Aki Kaurismäki, part Robert Altman, drawing on film noir and Western cinema but with a great deal of humor. “You know, I really love all American pulp detective stories. I grew up outside San Francisco, so Dashiell Hammett was always my favorite. I love those old time detective stories, and this is kind of my modern day, bumbling version of that,” said Atkinson, who elaborated:
Everything I write — I’m working on like a horror script right now — everything that I write, I guess I maybe have a hard time taking it too seriously, or taking myself too seriously. So everything that I write, whatever the genre, always has some amount of comedy or humor in it. Maybe I’m hiding behind it, I don’t know. But everything I write, I try to inject with a little bit of that, to sort of offset the drama and suspense or whatever else is going on.
“The cast and I, our first meetings talked about the tone. It was really important to all of us that we weren’t hitting the comedy too hard; honesty was what we talked about the way to play this type of comedy is just played as honestly as possible. No winking at the camera, no tongues in cheeks, you just play the circumstances. These characters are having the worst days of their lives, so let’s just lean into that and play it as honestly as possible. For me, that’s the comedy that I liked the most and was most interested in, and I think that plays best when you keep it just kind of bubbling under the surface.”
People have been loving LaRoy ever since it had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, and the film holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It may have not been the path Atkinson assumed he’d tread, and not his previous vision of his first film, but it seems to have worked. So, now that Atkinson has directed his debut, was it everything he wanted it to be? What was his biggest takeaway? He explained:
You write something, and you know what it could be, and you know what the potential is for it. And then with a low budget film like this, before you get on set, and every moment of every day, you’re cutting something. You’re compromising something. You just, you have this vision of what you know it could be, but the reality of what’s actually possible are two very different things, and that is honestly very discouraging. Every night after we would shoot, I would go home and just be really discouraged.
“But then every morning,” continued Atkinson, “I would look at the dailies from the day before, and I would see the performances that we were getting. And I would realize, you know, like that shot might have been nice, but at the end of the day, the thing that’s most important is these characters and these performances that are up on screen. And so that was really the thing that kept me going.”
“[Am I happy] with the film? Yeah, yeah, definitely,” said Atkinson with a nod. “I’m really proud of the work that people did. I’m really proud of the performances. It’s a little too close to judge it right now. But so far, the response has been pretty good. So I just worked really, really hard on it and I hope people like it.” He may sound like one of his own characters a bit, but Atkinson’s a winner.
Adastra Films, FLOTE Entertainment, and Ellly Films, watch for LaRoy later this year. You don’t want to lose out on this one.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
