Director John Patton Ford Wanted Emily the Criminal to Show Los Angeles As It Actually Is

John Patton Ford wanted his Sundance feature film Emily the Criminal to look like Los Angeles — but not the version of the Southern California city that is usually depicted in movies.

“I’d seen plenty of movies that took place in L.A., and it was almost always, like, all white people in Santa Monica or something that’s completely relegated to another part of town, like South Central,” Ford said at a Q&A following the film’s premiere at Sundance on Monday.

He wanted Emily the Criminal — which stars Aubrey Plaza as a woman who turns to a life of crime in the hopes of being able to afford to live comfortably and pay off her student loans — to be different.

“There was nothing that felt like this kind of cross-section of L.A. Everything seemed to kind of treat it as these individual monoliths, and I wanted to create something that felt a lot more like the L.A. that I was seeing when I just drive around,” Ford said. “It’s an awesomely diverse place. It’s like something like 65% non-Anglo. Over half the people here are first-generation, and there’s just a level of diversity that’s kind of hard to quantify and hard to really show, ultimately, but I wanted to try.”

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The Los Angeles that Ford captures in Emily the Criminal is equal parts working-class and posh, depending on which crowd Plaza’s character finds herself among.

“There’s kind of a ragged energy to L.A. when you don’t have any money. It’s a very expensive place to be. And it’s the place where people move because they have a dream of some kind,” Ford added. “No one moves to L.A. for the same reason that someone might move to Cleveland, you know? People come here, no matter who they are, no matter what they’re doing, you can almost always assume they really wanted something. They wanted something greater than what they could get wherever they’re first from, whether it’s someone who came here from Cambodia to open a donut shop or someone who came here from South Carolina to make movies.”

Ford wanted Emily the Criminal, which marks his first return to Sundance since his 2010 thesis film Patrol, to honor the hustle.

“Everyone’s coming here with some kind of dream and ambition that they really love and they’re hustling for it, and I’ve never seen anything that quite told their story or represented that experience,” he said. “So I wanted to grab hold of that as much as I could.”

Main Image: Aubrey Plaza appears in Emily the Criminal by John Patton Ford, an official selection of the Premieres section at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Low Spark Films.