Filmmaker John Patton Ford Tells Us How His Own Struggles With Debt Inspired ‘Emily the Criminal’

Sandra Miska

The student loan crisis is currently a hot topic in the U.S., and it hits close to home for Aubrey Plaza in writer-director John Patton Ford’s compelling thriller “Emily the Criminal.” Plaza plays against type with impressive results as the title character, an art school grad living in Los Angeles and working a dead-end job. A prior criminal record and other factors outside of her control prohibit her from jumpstarting her career, and with her student debt incurring interest, she finds herself looking outside of the law for cashflow. Crime pays here, and the money is so addictive that she puts herself in increasingly escalating situations.

While Ford is different from his title character in many ways, though Emily’s story was born out of his own fears and anxieties about debt and the job market in the years following grad school. Ford sat down with Entertainment Voice to discuss the ways in which Plaza surprised him, how making a film is not unlike committing a crime, and why mounting debt for young adults and wealth inequality is no joke.

I assume you never got sucked into crime like Emily, but something in your life must have led you to tell this story. Take us inside your inspiration for the film.

You’re right. I didn’t do any credit card fraud, yet, but the night is young. But I did go to grad school, and I got myself into a lot of student debt. I had a ton of anxiety and fear and all these feelings for years after school. I had to deal with it, and trying to get work, and the high cost of living, and all of those things. I knew that I wasn’t alone. So many people in the U.S. are going through the same process. In a way, we all have this mutual elephant in the room that we’re dealing with, so I wanted to make a movie that would kind of honor that stress that we’re all doing. That’s where it initially came from.

Aubrey Plaza gives such an impressive performance here. She is primarily known as a comedic actress. How did she get involved?

I gave the script to a friend of mine for notes, and that friend knew her on a personal level and was like, “Hey, can I give this to her? I think she’d dig it.” I was like, “What? Okay.” I just thought that was the craziest idea. She read it really quickly, and we got in touch. I met her in person, and immediately, I was caught off guard, because I don’t know what I was expecting, but I didn’t get this dark, sardonic personality. I got this full human being with this full spectrum of colors and all these interesting angles. I was like, “Wow, this is fascinating? Wouldn’t it be cool to give an audience the experience that I’m having right now?” I was expecting one thing and got something so much more complicated.

Was it always your intention to have your protagonist be a woman? 

I started writing them as a male character, and it was pretty boring (laughs). It just felt like we had seen this before, and I had the idea to switch it to a female character, just to see what would happen, and it immediately became more interesting. The stakes were greater. At that point, I just stopped thinking about gender and I never thought about it from that point on. I just concentrated on her as a person. What would this person do, regardless of sex or gender? It wasn’t that I wanted to write a female character. I wanted to write this character. I liked this person. This person is interesting.

In what ways would you say Emily is like you? And, how is she different?

With filmmaking, you constantly feel like you’re getting away with murder. The odds are up against you, and you’re showing up with a team of people. Just shooting something feels like you’re performing a heist. You have limited time. You have to get this ephemeral, impossible thing that’s so tricky to get to. Finally, the day is over, and you barely make it, and you feel like you just pulled something off. You feel like you stole something that is not rightfully yours, but now you have it. There’s a great gritty, criminal energy to making a movie, especially an independent movie. You feel like a gang. It’s a thrill and a lot of fun.

In your director’s statement, you compare making a film to committing a crime.

With filmmaking, you constantly feel like you’re getting away with murder. The odds are up against you, and you’re showing up with a team of people. Just shooting something feels like you’re performing a heist. You have limited time. You have to get this ephemeral, impossible thing that’s so tricky to get to. Finally, the day is over, and you barely make it, and you feel like you just pulled something off. You feel like you stole something that is not rightfully yours, but now you have it. There’s a great gritty, criminal energy to making a movie, especially an independent movie. You feel like a gang. It’s a thrill and a lot of fun.

Will you take us inside Theo Rossi’s character, and what is was like working with him?

Theo’s a terrific guy and an amazing actor. He’s so professional and so consistent. There’s never an untrue moment with him. A lot of that character comes from my feelings about what it means to live in the U.S. and how this is a nation full of people who aren’t from here originally. This is a country full of immigrants, and we just forget that. There is no U.S. It is a transient space that people have passed through for a couple of hundred years. I wanted Youcef to be this latest line of person who’s coming here and doing whatever he can to get by and get to the next level. We’re so quick to forget that our ancestors did some version of the same thing. My ancestors from Ireland, God knows what they got up to when they came to Boston and New York (laughs). They were probably doing way worse stuff than this. 

Then, at the end of the movie, our central character becomes an immigrant herself. There’s something thematically going on there that I wanted people to, at least subconsciously, pick up on, that we’re all in the process of trying to get to a better life, and we’re all doing whatever we can to get to that better life, and we’re not unique. This has been going on for generations.

This was your first feature, and it contains plenty of compelling one-on-one scenes, as well as a car chase and other action-packed moments. What were the biggest challenges of being a first-time director?

It was all challenging, man. You’re right, this is a movie with fights and a car chase. We shot during Covid, and we went to another country, all this in 20 days. It was unreal. I’ll never have a month like that again in my life, thank God. It was all hard, but the hardest stuff was, there were a couple of long dialogue scenes in the movie, a scene with Gina Gershon, and a scene where Aubrey and Theo get into a fight near the end where they disagree about something. Those were actually the hardest scenes to shoot. 

A car chase is logistically hard, but when you’re shooting it like it’s a car chase, it’s going to look pretty cool when you edit it together. Whereas a scene with two people just talking in a room that goes on for four minutes, that is, in so many ways, one of the most taxing, difficult to do. It seems like it would be easy, but then it is wrong and you can’t figure out why it’s wrong, and you’re in this room for five hours trying to fix it and you’re losing your mind. Those are the hardest things.

Speaking of that scene with Gina Gershon, it’s great because it really highlights the differences between the generations of these two characters.

It was a pretty gratifying scene to write. Those are all things that I felt and that I’ve wanted to say so many times, especially in the film industry and entertainment industry. The level of abuse is beyond real. The important thing there was that I did not want to villainize Gina Gershon’s character, nor her generation. I wanted people to identify with her in certain ways, and for audiences to feel like she was also right. Emily is right to feel the way that she feels, but this person is also not wrong to feel the way she feels.

Life is never so easy. You can’t just villainize one group of people and say it’s their fault. Everyone has reasons for doing what they’re doing. No one is acting out of a pure desire for malice. Everyone is just doing what they think is the right thing… When the movie plays for older audiences, they are on Gina’s side. It’s a very divisive movie for age groups.

Emily eventually ends up in Puerto Vallarta, MX. Why did you decide to end the story where you did?

I knew I wanted it to be a story, ultimately, about success, and about someone finding what they want to do, and realizing who they are and what they are good at, sort of a coming-of-age story. I wanted us not to arrive at this sad place, but to arrive at a place of self-actualization.

In terms of specifically where we shot, I needed it to be a place that immediately was not Los Angeles. We couldn’t go anywhere dry or orange or brown looking. It needed to be verdant, lush and green. I was adamant about this. We could have gone to Baja, but my issue was that it looked like California… Yet it needed to be someplace urban enough where it felt like her crime wasn’t ethically negligible. If you could imagine her doing crime in a small town, it would have felt messed up.

What do you hope the audience takes away from the film?

Number one, I just hope they feel like it was a good ride. I hope they feel thrilled and entertained. Beyond that, I hope they feel empathy for people who have a lot of debt and people who are boxed out of finding the right job. We have an entire generation of people who are saying these things, and it seems like people just make jokes about them and don’t listen to them. 

There’s a baby bust in the United States right now. No one talks about this. Kids aren’t being born. That is a huge, huge problem, and that is a direct result of debt and wealth inequality and people being boxed out of the economy. I hope that audiences began to feel a bit more empathy with people in those situations. 

“Emily the Criminal” releases Aug. 12 in theaters nationwide.