Director John Patton Ford on the Long Journey of ‘Emily the Criminal’ to the Big Screen

Thanks to the extraordinary response by critics and filmgoers to his first movie, one might think of filmmaker John Patton Ford as an overnight success. Of course, there are a lot of sleepless nights that lead up to the so-called overnight success. Such is the case of the creator of Emily the Criminal. After Ford’s award-winning short premiered at Sundance in 2010, it took him twelve long years to secure his first feature length film as writer and director. A film that has recently been nominated in four different categories by the Independent Spirit Awards. 

Taking pieces of his personal life and leaning into his influences, Ford has made a crackling crime thriller that feels very current to modern times in terms of the economy, student loans, and the value of work. In our conversation, we touch on all those themes and discuss the brilliant support Ford received from his leads (Aubrey Plaza and Theo Rossi), as well as from his relentlessly gifted director of photography, Jeff Bierman.

Awards Daily: It didn’t occur to me until earlier today, but with a name like John Ford…what else were you gonna do with your life? (Laughs).

John Patton Ford: Oh, man. I know. People always ask “Why do you go by three names?” I’m like, really? Did you not even put any thought into that question? My name is John Ford. Come on. What do I do man?

Awards Daily: Well, the Patton works. It’s got a good flow. 

John Patton Ford: Yeah, it’s pretty pretentious, but it’s the best I can really do.

Awards Daily: I talked to Aubrey recently. One thing that she said that drew her to the film in general was the screenplay, which of course you wrote as well. Sometimes when you write a screenplay, it’s not always the easiest to direct that screenplay too, especially if you’ve never directed a film before. A studio will often want to take it and hand it over to somebody else with experience. Did you find it challenging to get the directing spot too?

John Patton Ford: For sure. I’ve been trying to direct my first movie for like ten years. I’ve had projects come together and fall apart. I had something fall apart really close to production one time. I think as long as people classify you as a first time filmmaker, it’s going to be really hard. In terms of this one, I just never sold the rights. I just held the rights to it and Aubrey wanted to make it, and I was like, well, it’s only gonna happen if I’m directing. I’m not gonna sell the rights to anyone. And I still held the rights to the movie as we went into production, I only sold them to the producers at the last possible minute so I couldn’t be replaced by anyone. Not like they ever expressed interest in doing that. I don’t mean to suggest that. And Aubrey certainly never pressured me to not direct it. But you know, I had to leverage the writing.  

Awards Daily: It’s sort of a Sly Stallone move, right? I’ll let you have Rocky, if I can star in it.

John Patton Ford: It’s the only comparison between myself and Sylvester Stallone. (Laughs).

Awards Daily: The film is incredibly taut, efficient, and muscular at the same time. It has a real drive, but there is significant subtext about the gig economy and student loan debt, and I think the overall value of work. When you were writing the screenplay, were you hopeful that these parts would remain in it when you went to film it? Because I think they add something to the movie that otherwise would’ve been a really enjoyable thriller. But the desperation piece and the way it speaks to our current day, is really significant.

John Patton Ford: I hope so. You know, those things were never top priority. Those were things I just took from my own life and that I understood and felt true, you know? And a more mercenary way the student loans was something I knew might kick off her journey. It was only after making the movie, did I realize how important those social issues are to many audiences. People latched onto that and focused on that in a way that I did not fully expect. If you go online and read audience reviews, like every single review is about student loans or internships, and the economy. It’s very clear that people were ready to talk about those things. So yeah, to your question, did I hope those things would make it into the movie? Yeah. They were never on the chopping block. There was never any move to get rid of that stuff. I just underestimated how much mileage we’d get out of it . 

Awards Daily: I said the same thing in my review of the movie. When I spoke to Aubrey, she also said that while those things added value to the movie, at the end of the day, she just wanted to make a good movie. 

John Patton Ford: Yeah. I think she and I shared that. You know, we didn’t get together like, “Hey, let’s make a movie about these issues.” That’s not at all what we thought. We thought, let’s make a good movie about this character and it happens to involve these issues, but that’s not the point. 

Awards Daily: Speaking about character, I think for a long time Aubrey was kind of seen in a certain space, right? Probably because of Parks and Recreation, her strength of personality, I suppose. But whether it’s Black Bear or Ingrid Goes West or Emily, she’s expanding on the idea of what people think that she can do. Can you talk about what it was like to direct her in a role that maybe people didn’t necessarily see her in?

John Patton Ford: It was great. A pleasure, man, I mean gosh. Here’s the thing. We met, quite a while ago, like four years ago, and then we talked about the movie for like two years or three years, whatever it was. The script kind of changed and she thought more about the character, but she was always working, you know? She was off in Italy making this whole other movie like right up until the last minute. And then she came to the States and I think maybe she got here two weeks before we started shooting, if that, and I still hadn’t ever really seen her do the character. I wasn’t gonna ask Aubrey Plaza to do a self tape, you know? (Laughs). We did a little rehearsing, but those were more just kind of hanging out and then on day one we started shooting. I was really nervous. Like, man, I have so committed to this and I don’t know how she’s going to do it. What’s her take on it? 

And then we started filming and she was just like, so good. When I first met her, I was surprised. She was not what I was expecting. I was expecting something closer to the character I’d seen on TV as silly as that is. And I got someone who’s far more dimensional and has all these angles and all these things going on. She’s so…she’s such a disruptor. She kind of makes you nervous in this way. You never know what she’s gonna do. And I just remember thinking, what an awesome quality she has. I’ve never really seen filmmakers just use that. You know, we’ve seen the deflective sardonic thing that she can do, but that’s not like her. She’s so much more complicated than that. So I was excited to see her do this character that felt a bit more like, oh, now she’s bringing some of the color that I know about her from her actual life. The irony is that I wish there was more. After having made the movie, I feel like we played it safe. She could do a lot more than this and I could have gone further. It just makes me wanna make another movie with her.

Awards Daily: While this isn’t a two character film, it’s Aubrey largely, and there are important supporting parts, there’s obviously no more significant supporting part than Theo Rossi’s as Youcef. In the sense that you said that you didn’t necessarily know what you were gonna get from Aubrey on day one, did you have that same sort of anxiety about what you might get from Theo and Aubrey in terms of chemistry?

John Patton Ford: Totally. Theo, we cast very late in the game and I never had a chance to really see them together until we got going. I was very nervous that they would work well together. It speaks a lot more about me and my anxiety than it does about either of these actors who are both incredible. I think in the case of Theo, he’s just really professional. He kind of does the math, you know? He reads the script and he figures things out and he has a definite way of doing things. And there’s never a bad take. He’s incredibly consistent. Once you see him working, you’re like, this guy is just laser-guided. To your question, I had plenty of anxiety. Once we were rolling, once we were shooting, their performances were the least of my worries. It was really, oh, this is gonna work. These two are really good. Now I just have to make this movie actually. I have to do this on schedule somehow.

Awards Daily: Perhaps to a smaller degree for Theo, he’s in a somewhat similar place as Aubrey. For most people, when they think of Theo Rossi, they think of ‘Juice’ from Sons of Anarchy, right? One thing that he seems to bring with him from performance to performance, even in this role where he’s playing a guy who’s part of a fraud scheme of course, is a certain level of sweetness. I don’t know if it’s innate. I don’t know if it’s who he really is, but you feel that come across. I joked to Aubrey, I said between Youcef and Emily, Youcef is actually the sweeter character, which isn’t necessarily how a film about a woman engaging with a criminal usually plays out. 

John Patton Ford: Yeah. I wanted him to be redeeming. I wanted him to have different goals in life than hers. I very much saw it as like, he’s a criminal and he is trying to go straight and she’s straight and she’s trying to become a criminal. They, for a short period of time, meet halfway and aid each other in their respective directions and then they part . That’s how I always saw it. But Theo, I remember first kind of looking at some of his stuff and then I had a Zoom call with him and he’s very tough and he has this certain background. You kind of feel like this is a guy who could get into a bar fight and win. At the same time, you sensed this humanity beneath the surface. You sense this guy who just wants to be a good person and take care of people, but doesn’t really come from a world where that was the first thing he learned how to do. There’s a humanity and redeemability about him that’s just undeniable. 

Awards Daily: When I was watching the film, we had what, writ large, is an LA crime story, right? It was hard for me not to feel, especially with some of your tracking shots being over the shoulder shots, a certain Michael Mann influence. I don’t wanna put too much of that on you. This may be my own trip. I mentioned it to Aubrey and she agreed about Mann, but she also mentioned Jacque Audiard and other French films as influences of yours. I don’t wanna get too caught up in your influences or make anybody feel like you’re aping anybody else’s business, but hose tracking shots just put me in the mode of feeling just a step behind what was going on all the time, which is a nice place to be because it creates a little bit of anxiety when you’re not ahead of or level with the character. And it also makes you feel like you’re almost in the room, like eavesdropping.

John Patton Ford: I remember in terms of the style of the movie, the first thing we talked about was okay, if Jacques Audiard were in his thirties and lived in LA, what kind of movie would he make? Probably something like Armenian gangsters in it and stuff like that, but like how would it look? I’m obsessed with Audiard the way that people are obsessed with Harry Styles. I know everything about Audiard. When he worked with Stephane Fontaine, who was his old cinematographer and for a while Fontaine was also the operator – he’s low-key the best camera operator ever, of all time. And so me and my DP got obsessed with everything that Fontaine had operated on. The way his operation kind of interfaces with the actors, it’s just incredible. The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Read My Lips. A Prophet — fabulous as well: kind of the biggest references. 

But you know, here’s the thing, Audiard’s style was developed around the same time that Michael Mann developed his. Both of those guys were huge fans of Jean Pierre Melville, Le Samourai, and Melville was just trying to do his own kind of artful French take on American noir. It kind of hearkens back to this old kind of standoffish way of filmmaking that doesn’t tell you exactly what the character is thinking, but very much puts you in their shoes and kind of allows you to get curious about them. I don’t mind aping that stuff at all. Even the title Emily the Criminal comes from Bob le Flambeur, which is a Melville movie from the forties. I definitely wanted to take as much from that as I could. It’s funny cause we made it and everyone was like, oh, this is like low-budget Safdie brothers. I was like, really? I was like, oh man. And it just made me realize, well of course that’s what people say because that’s who kind of uses that vocabulary now. Contemporary audiences aren’t gonna go, oh, he’s imitating Jacques Audiard from the late nineties. That’s not on their radar, but it’s on mine. Also, throughout that entire time, from the late seventies until now, there have been the Dardenne brothers who were documentary filmmakers first. They were famous for tracking behind characters on a 50 millimeter lens, which is a longer lens than you typically use for those sorts of shots. This came from docs and then they took that doc style and just started making movies with that exact same style. They don’t use editing, so all their scenes are one shot. Then it cuts to the next scene, it’s one shot. They’ve never cut scenes, ever. They’re never credited for that. I feel like Mann and Audiard both kind of took from what the Dardennes started doing in the eighties as well. Those were the big influences. 

Awards Daily: I mentioned before that there’s a lean nature to the film. The film runs 95 minutes. Was that part of it, that you really wanted to compress this space? It’s like listening to a pop song that’s exactly three and a half minutes, has absolutely no fat. And then the more you listen to it, the better it gets. I’ve watched it three times now and it gets better every time. Was there any intention behind keeping it in the timeframe that it runs in?

John Patton Ford: A lot of that was just necessity, man. We had so little time, we had 20 days. I mean, how much, how much movie are you gonna make with 20 days to shoot? 95 minutes is, you know, what, what is that? Four? Four and a half? Okay. 4.7 minutes a day. So look at 4.7 minutes of that movie. That’s what we had to shoot every day. I would love to have developed the characters further and have even more of it, I just didn’t have that option. I think also I’m attracted to movies that start and within the first 10 minutes you can tell they’re not wasting any time. And keeps me engaged and lean in a little bit more. Movies now for the most part are trying to over-deliver. That’s how I feel. They’re trying to pack in like 900 things. To give you a sense of value. Because the marketplace is so crowded, they’re going “Look at this movie that’s got everything and the kitchen sink, this is worth your time.” (Laughs). And for me, I kind of go, I don’t really know if that’s how value is predicated. The marketplace is so crowded. People are like, all right, we have to just deliver the biggest, bestest thing to grab people’s attention. I kind of go the other way: there’s nothing better than just a really good story that’s being economic. What’s better than that?

Awards Daily: You had mentioned your DP, Jeff Bierman. Aubrey made me aware that you and he had met at AFI. How did you guys connect for this film? 

John Patton Ford: I met Jeff in 2007 at AFI. He was like 20 and he’s sick. He’s always been good. There was never any learning curve. He was just good on arrival. And for this, I knew we needed the right person who could shoot in a certain kind of way. I just knew it would be physically hard. Jeff is like a good hang, he’s fun to hang out with and he has this ability to just figure out lighting so quickly and so intuitively. He’s not precious, I mean, he can be. He can be incredibly cinematic, but he understands the boundaries really well and can flow with it. I wrote the script and I thought of him and I called him up and he was on board for like three years as we waited to get money together and he had a whole other life in shooting commercials and other movies. Then finally we got this one together and he was fortunately free to do it. I wish he was getting more attention. I think the thing that he pulled off is probably imperceptible to people because they don’t understand the challenges. Jeff had 20 days to shoot this. We were shooting like 50 set-ups a day. He operated on it. A lot of it’s handheld. There’s like a 120 foot tracking shot that’s handheld. We start tracking on her face and then she passes us, goes to the back of her head, and then he wraps around to get her face again. It’s just insane stuff he did on this that’s so natural feeling, you don’t even really notice it. It’s not like showing off. Jeff, he’s an unreal talent. I mean, he’s great.

Awards Daily: So now you, now I suspect you’re spoiled. (Laughs).

John Patton Ford: He moved to France after this movie. It was so hard for him. We were in a hundred degree heat in August and he was hand-holding this camera, which itself is hot. It’s burning his face. He did that for a month and then he was like, I’m never…I’m done. And he lives in Paris now. I drove him away. Yeah. I just texted him another day. Didn’t text me back. I dunno. (Laughs).

Awards Daily: The sequence where Emily gets held up at her own house while she’s watching the dog. There’s that moment when after she gets robbed and the dog that she’s sitting for is taken away too. She stomps around her apartment for a minute. And then you can just see on her face her making the decision that no, this is not how this story ends.

John Patton Ford: It was kind of approaching a midpoint to me in the script where she begins to take control and feel a bit more agency where she has the potential to control her own narrative in a way that perhaps she didn’t totally understand beforehand. There’s a movie called The Hunt, which is a Thomas Vinterberg movie that Tobias Lindholm wrote, that has this incredible scene halfway through with the central character (played by Mads Mikkelson) who has been accused of being a pedophile and is completely excommunicated from his community basically. He goes to the grocery store and he is just buying groceries, and then the manager sees him and comes over and says you gotta leave, we don’t want you here and he refuses, and then they beat him up. This grocery store manager punches him and then they throw him outside, and he’s bloody and he’s defeated and you feel so horrible for him because he’s not guilty of any of the things that people think he is. There’s this incredible moment where he puts all his groceries back in the bag and then just walks back into the grocery store and just goes to the deli counter and is just like “I need some turkey.” Him walking back in is this awesome turning point in the movie. It was something as simple as shopping, but you feel like, oh, this is a moment where this guy, he’s done backing down and placating people. He knows he’s innocent and he’s gonna just aggressively demand what he needs to live. 

So, the scene where she goes after the people who robbed her was inspired directly by that moment. I remember just shooting it and just letting all these things play out. We were doing sort of a Derek Cianfrance rip off where we were staying on her on the long lens. I think the scene as it actually plays was always much longer. It took much longer for her to make that decision to go after those people. In editing I think we kind of had to make it a bit shorter. 

Awards Daily: Probably because it would feel to the audience that the perpetrators could have already driven away as much as anything, I imagine.

John Patton Ford: Yeah. Full credit to Aubrey, she was so in it that night and so committed. The guy who plays the person who robbed her really legitimately freaked her out. I don’t know, man. We were shooting it and I feel like she was really experiencing those things. The uncertainty of the movie itself, and the exhaustion from it, and the fear, it was all very real in that moment to her. I’m happy with how it turned out. 

Awards Daily: And she saves Liz’s dog. Liz is sort of a bad friend that I think all of us have had in our lives. The type of person who you help them move, but when you want them to help you move, they aren’t available or they seem to never lift anything, you know? (Laughs). But I thought the dynamic of that relationship was really interesting because, for Emily, she’s the closest thing she has to a support system. So she’s clinging to somebody who is continuing to prove to her that she’s really not adding value to Emily’s life. 

John Patton Ford: I think we all have those friends who have the job that we want or seem to have the life that we would aspire to have. I think it’s easy for us to go, oh, if only I were smarter, or if only I were harder working, or as clever as this person. Rarely, for me at least, do I consider the advantages that perhaps that person had that make them hard to compare to myself. In terms of Liz, I like the idea that this was a friend who Emily kind of aspires to be like, and she could see herself being like her. And then along the way she kind of learns, you never were gonna be like this person. You don’t have the resources that it takes to live this person’s life. Therefore you need to live your own life. That was kind of how I saw that. 

Awards Daily: There’s an interesting thing too that happens between women in this film. Liz isn’t really throwing a rope over the wall. Not really, or the rope’s too short, you know, it can’t quite reach it. Then there’s the fabulous scene between Aubrey and Gina Gershon. What I think is marvelous particularly about that scene, is a couple of things. One is that you have two, what I would call, fuck you interview scenes, right? One at the beginning of the movie and one towards the end. That’s usually one more than a movie gets. Usually you wait till there’s a boiling point and then that happens. Gershon is from the same area that Emily is. They’re both women and she turns into being a roadblock. That whole sequence is two people who refuse to give a shit about each other to a certain degree, right? I mean, they’re saying like, okay, you don’t wanna work here, I don’t care. Go away. No, you’re right. I don’t wanna work here, but by the way, fuck you. That whole playout is just fabulous. Having Gershon in that one scene, it’s just brilliant. How did that scene form? 

John Patton Ford: Number one, we were so fortunate to get Gina Gershon to come show up for half a day and do that. It was really generous of her. I remember just really enjoying writing that scene. There’s certain scenes that you write and then you kinda get up and pace around because you’re so excited by the content of the scene. That scene just felt like me lapsing into a moment of getting to say stuff in a movie that I’ve always wanted to say in reality. We’ve all been there so many times, but thematically speaking, I always felt that these two are from the same place. They’re from a very similar world. They even kind of look similar. And yet they’re from a different time. Gina didn’t have to work for free. Not saying she had it easy, but she did have a paying way into it. Not to mention, if Gina’s character got that job in the eighties or the nineties, it would’ve paid so much more compared to the cost of living and wages would have increased at the rate of inflation. There would’ve been just a whole host of things that would’ve led to her enjoying the lifestyle that she currently enjoys. 

So, there’s something interesting to me about having two characters who are very similar from the same place, from the same culture, and yet divided by an era. And what does that mean? The way that Emily behaves in that scene, I have to think, is probably not too far off from the way that Gina’s character probably behaved when she was younger: rejecting certain norms, and knowing that she’s smart, and not accepting certain things, and taking control. That’s what she did. And that led to her being a CEO of this major company. To Emily, it’s not gonna lead there. There’s something that’s very true generationally about all that for me. Look man, I played by the previous generation’s rules for a long time. I took out loans. I went to school. I made a short film. It got into Sundance. That’s the dream. I went to Sundance. I got agents, I got managers, all this stuff. I wrote a script. I was ready to make my feature debut forever ago. Twelve years ago I would’ve been ready. I couldn’t do it because there wasn’t any fucking money. All of that capital that financed all those great independent films in the nineties and the early aughts was gone. Then there was a housing crisis and there was a war and there was all this stuff and it was just like, how do you do it? The way that the people before me had done it was not gonna work for me. That was this major realization and I had to go back and work catering, the job that Emily had. I don’t mean when I was 23, I mean I was 33 delivering pizza, trying to be a movie director.  By the time I sat down and wrote that scene, I really felt those things. I really felt like don’t dare even attempt to give me advice because what advice are you gonna give me? How to succeed in 1991? Thanks. (Laughs). It felt very deeply true. I’m not like defending the character’s behavior there, because Emily is all kind of shitty, but I feel the way I do. The fact that I got this movie made is an absolute miracle. It almost shouldn’t have happened.

Awards Daily: One thing that you said there that I thought was fascinating was, talking about doing gig economy type work at 33. I actually had an argument with somebody who swore up and down that somebody at Aubrey’s age, and I think she’s probably about 36, 37 when she made the movie, wouldn’t be in this position. I’m like “Are you fucking serious?” I mean, look out your damn window. There are a lot of people in that position right now who are in their mid to late thirties. That’s not abnormal at all. I’m gratified to hear that you pulled that part of the storyline from your mid thirties.

John Patton Ford: I was in that position. Your friend is voicing something that they think is true. Fine. But the only answer I can add to that is like, well, I don’t know. I went to grad school and went to Sundance and won all these awards. I was living off of $30,000 a year, living in a studio apartment, working 60 hours a week, with two different jobs. Had I gone somewhere else, had I been to law school for instance, I’m not sure I would’ve fared a whole hell of a lot better. All those careers took a nosedive as well. 

Awards Daily: The need for lawyers dipped precipitously around that time.  

John Patton Ford: One hundred percent. There’s probably more anger about that. The struggling artist is an age old dilemma. That’s not unique to now, but what is unique to now is that across the board, people just don’t make as much money as they used to. The math is really simple. It’s just the cost of living has skyrocketed and wages have stagnated. That’s kind of it. I’ve had my experience for better or for worse.  

Awards Daily: The film is obviously garnering great reviews. There’s all the Spirit Award nominations. You’ve been shortlisted in a number of places. It’s gotta be very gratifying. 

John Patton Ford: Yeah, that’s great. I mean, it’s so much more complicated than I ever thought. Number one, there’s the gratification that you might expect. Like, oh, I finally did it. I did the thing. I got over the hump. And it’s gratifying to go, ah, I made a thing that’s out in the world and now it exists and that provides for me a certain identity. I see myself a little differently now. Those things are wonderful to the point where I almost can’t quite believe them yet. It just seems like I don’t even have the neuron receptors to accept something so good. 

On the other hand, it also makes me feel very vulnerable because now you’re naked. You’ve made this thing and people can see it, and you never quite did the math on how that would feel. Like your friends from high school discovering that you made a movie and watching it is like, oh, I don’t know what they’re gonna think about that. A lot of them won’t like it, and that’ll change their perception of who I am. So you suddenly feel very exposed and you never think about that. The other crazy thing is when you’ve made something that’s been well received, it makes you very afraid to make something else. All I have is credibility now. I don’t want to lose that. It feels very precarious. I just arrived at this place and I don’t wanna leave. If I make a bad movie, I’ll have to leave. Right now I’m out to actors on my next movie. I’m absolutely mortified that I’m gonna lose this. I’m really, really terrified that I’ll lose credibility. It’s a scary feeling. It’s not at all how I ever expected to feel at this point. 

Awards Daily: Can you tell me anything about your next movie?

John Patton Ford: There’s a much bigger, more elaborate movie that I wrote and it’s set up at a studio. It’s far more complicated than Emily, and that’s what I’m trying to make next. It is similar in its class conscious approach. It’s also a thriller. It’s dissimilar in that it is funny. So, if you take like the darkly funny moments of this movie, it’s kind of like that turned up the whole time. It’s much more of a dark comedy. It’s also very much a contemporary remake of an old British movie from the forties. And that’s what I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you about that.