Acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky is widely known for his dark dramas, like Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan. In Caught Stealing, Aronofsky presents a change in pace by making a movie that is “first and foremost fun—a movie that for two hours would fully distract and hold your attention, and while you’re at the theater, you have a great time.”
Austin Butler, Matt Smith, and Darren Aronofsky on the set of Caught Stealing. © 2024 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Aronofsky has been interested in working on the project for years, with the novel of the same name by Charlie Huston being the inspiration. “I was so entertained and pumped by the book when I first read it 18 years ago,” he says. “Then a bunch of time passed, and Charlie tracked me down with an email out of the blue—they now controlled the book and had written a screenplay.”
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Caught Stealing is the story of Hank Thompson (Austin Butler), a former baseball player living in downtown New York City. Now a burnt-out bartender, he falls into the dark world of New York’s criminal underground when his neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) asks him to take care of his cat for a few days.
Matt Smith and Austin Butler in Caught Stealing
Author Charlie Huston, who adapted their own screenplay, says that Caught Stealing was a story close to their heart. “I wrote this book way back in 1998, the year the story is set in,” they say. “There’s a ton of my own lived experience in the story’s main character. When Darren Aronofsky reached out to me 18 years ago to say that he was interested in the book, it was super exciting. I loved the idea of Darren taking his visual sensibility and the dynamism of his storytelling and applying it to this story.”
Huston believes that Aronofsky is the right man for the job even though the director is wading into a new genre for Caught Stealing. “There’s a lot of humor in the story. It’s great to see him applying his sensibility to it. It has a very dark sensibility, and that’s Darren’s wheelhouse. Darren’s work has a deep earnestness to it, and an emotionality that’s very strong and very present. I like that his characters feel so deeply, and they always go on journeys,” Huston says
A hell of an adventure awaits as Caught Stealing opens in Philippine cinemas on September 10.
