“To operate in the world of gangsters, you’ve got to be a little bit crazy,” Marty (Paul Guilfoyle) tells Steve (Taylor Gray) as the two ride around in the streets of Boston in “Any Day Now,” with the rumble from the trunk of the car sounding human, suggesting that the former knows of what he speaks. The thought has to pass through Steve’s head that the voice he hears from the back could be him someday, but nonetheless Marty makes a convincing case for helping him with a heist of some priceless paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where he works as a security guard when the financial payoff holds less appeal to him than the idea of being part of something exciting.
One suspects a similar instinct led writer/director Eric Aronson into the film business despite his better judgment, achieving more than most with two scripts of his becoming major productions, though he would be the first to tell you that they didn’t turn out as hoped. So there’s a sense in his directorial debut as Marty and Steve eventually start making plans to case the joint that the filmmaker was finding a way to break in on his own terms, showing the kind of craftsmanship that he had picked up from being part of the industry for years and the kind of creativity inspired by having to work outside of it in the crafty caper film involving the real swindle of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 where around $500 million worth of Manets and Vermeers left the building. However, Aronson is careful to introduce the story as tru-ish when the culprits in the case were never caught and that gives the leeway to the filmmaker to look towards another kind of chase as Marty needs to persuade Steve to let his crew into the building and in considering the illegal activity, Steve has to consider what he’s been running after in his life, stuck at a dead-end job and not quite having the confidence to make moves in either his professional or personal pursuits.
Whether Steve can push past any self-doubts he has remains an open question throughout “Any Day Now” as he’s taken under the wing of the overly cocky Marty, but Aronson proves himself time and again in “Any Day Now” as he works within the contours of a well-worn genre, but finds more intrigue around the edges as Steve suddenly finds himself amidst characters he couldn’t expect to cross paths with if he hadn’t stepped lightly into the underworld of a city he thought he knew well. The film gives audiences the same opportunity, roving around the city to explore all its nooks and crannies and the people that hide in the shadows, to entertaining effect, and as it turns out, making the film was only half the adventure for Aronson, who has since taken it upon himself to distribute it as well, showing as much inspiration in selling the story as putting his back into the narrative as he’s gone about recreating the museum alongside the theatrical runs of the film is different cities. Before turning the Monica Film Center in Los Angeles into the Gardner this weekend, the filmmaker spoke about how finally doing things his way led to the original thriller, finding an unexpected way to tell a personal story and eventually getting it out into the world in a way that would honor the singular experience that it is.
How did this come about?
Well, I’ve been a writer in Hollywood for 25 years and I’ve been saving up my money all this time to make a movie that I would direct and this is that movie. I knew that there are two big myths from my hometown of Boston — Whitey Bulger is one of them and the Gardner robbery of 1990 is the other from my lifetime from Boston, and I don’t think Whitey Bulger is that funny, so I picked the other one.
I imagine plotting a heist could resemble pulling off a movie shoot. Were you incorporating elements of your own professional journey through the system into this?
A hundred percent. The centerpiece of this story is a mentorship and in my journey as a filmmaker I found a mentor Jan Egelson, who taught me how to do this, and I wanted to tell a story about a mentorship, a story from my hometown and that’s how ideas have always come to me. I just grab what’s around me and I stick it in there. [Jan] is also how I got to Paul Guilfoyle because he’s worked with Paul for many, many years.
That is quite a coup. What was it like to have him at the center to build around?
Yeah, I had Paul in mind from the beginning because I know how good he is and he gets these great roles, but he doesn’t get the runway that I think he really could play with, and Paul is able to do multiple things at the same time, so the character was really made for him. This character is an art thief and he’s manipulating the guard to open the door for him, but at the same time he realizes that the guard can use a little bit of help in his life, so he decides to help the kid out at the same time and to watch Paul work every day was amazing.
We started with Paul and we were originally going to shoot during COVID, and Paul came over and everybody was sitting around the table, masked, and he said, “We can’t make this movie right now because if we can’t see it around a kitchen table, let’s wait.” So we waited until it was over and then we built around him. Taylor Gray, who plays the young guard, came from out of town, but we had a great casting agent Carolyn Pickman from Boston who got us these great character actors that are very, very Boston. They’re not your usual tough Boston characters because the people I hang out with are these oddball characters and that’s who I was looking for. And because Massachusetts has a really good tax break, these actors have enough work that we have some really good actors in town, so it was actually pretty easy to fill it out [locally].
When you’re shooting all around Boston, did the locations actually give shape to this as a story?
A hundred percent. Another thing that independent films have to do on a limited budget is location and we couldn’t dress all these big sets, so we just looked for places in Boston that looked like 1990 where could you put the camera and turn it 360 degrees and it still looks like 1990. I know those neighborhoods, so a location scout would come and they would give me some options, and I would say, “Okay, that looks good,” but I could also say “No, I drove by this place the other day. Can we look at that place?” So I was able to drill down into the Boston that I know and I haven’t seen any movies about Boston in a long time that are actually the Boston that I know. There’s a tax incentive there, so you get a lot of directors from out of town and you get these you know drone flyovers at Fenway Park. I live in Boston and I never fly over Fenway Park, so that wasn’t the Boston I wanted to show.
And what we were trying to do from the beginning is put the event [of the heist] in the background and make the characters and the relationships and that the crazy wisdom of Boston the foreground. I took that from French films that I loved, particularly “Shoot the Piano Player,” which took American genre films and subverted them, spending as little time as possible in the genre and more on the stuff that’s interesting to you. So for me, it’s not just the traditional “Ocean’s Eleven” plan the heist, do the heist, the heist is done or there’s a hiccup [storyline]. That was not as interesting to me to me. It was what were these characters going through, [like] what was the guard thinking when he opened the door [to the museum]. That’s how it all came from there.
Was there anything that happened once you got it in the hands of the actors that you may not have anticipated but could get excited about?
I knew from experience that as a writer/director, you write it, you have it all on paper and then you cast it and then you stop writing it and writers get very precious about their material, so I kept saying almost every day, “We’re firing the writer! We’re firing the writer!” I kept firing myself because you have to put on a different hat and say, “Okay, I had a chance to tell the story once, but now these actors are going to tell the story” and the way they interacted and the relationships become the movie. I think a really good director, at least on an independent film, moves away from the script and and allows it to be something else and show different sides of a personality. A Hollywood movie is very, very expensive and you’re going down a road and you’ve got to follow that road, you’ve got to get that script that day and you have to shoot the page.” But an independent set, you can show up and say, “Hey, let’s try this today. I saw this crazy movie last night. Let’s try that shot” and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but you have the freedom and you have the responsibility to take those kind of chances and let it become something else. Then when you edit it, it becomes something else entirely, but I had enough confidence in Paul and in Taylor that I wanted to see where it was going to go and I stayed curious all the time.
Was there a particularly crazy day on set you were happy to pull off?
Just walking on the set the first day and walking up to Paul and just wondering what’s the first thing I’m going to say to him. That was the first shot I had ever done [as a director] and it was our first shot of the movie. I walked up to him and I said, “Paul, just please don’t make me look like an idiot in front of all these people.” and Paul said, “Don’t you worry. I got you.” From then on, it was smooth sailing. It didn’t have that pressure and there were some shots or ideas that I tried out. One of the things the guards did is that they tried to maneuver around the sensors to see if they could walk around the sensors without setting them off. That was a game that they played with each other and we had Taylor do that and then [during] a bar scene, I said “What if we have everybody do that in this bar?” just a weird moment where the whole bar starts to do that for no particular reason just because I thought it would be amusing. I was curious, I tried it and it worked and I don’t know why it works and I still don’t know what it means, but I like it.
There’s another moment like that in the film that’s a nice change of pace where Paul Guilfoyle’s character tells a story about a samurai sword. Is there a story behind that story?
Paul Guilfoyle plays a thief and I know some art thieves in Boston and one of the things that [one of them] knows a lot about are samurai blades — I’d say there’s three or four or five people in this country that know more about samurai blades, but he would go into museums and have conversations with them and he had access to collections that he got however he got, but to be a thief and appreciate the art and know the art better than anybody else really I thought was a cool part of the personality [of that character]. He’s going to take from you something you own, but you don’t appreciate it and he does. I think that that scene showed that the blade that he showed to Taylor in the movie was just sitting in the basement of the Met and they had no idea what it was, so essentially [he thinks] “I liberated it and now look, it’s out in the world and I can give it meaning.” That’s a fun “Robin Hood” class reversal and Paul talks a lot about class and in Boston, class is a big deal and Paul’s thief is, in a way, rebelling against that class system.
Again, the parallel is there with the path of this film when you’ve bucked the system to bring it into the world and had a lot of fun recreating the museum in various cities, including this week in Los Angeles at the Monica Film Center. What’s it been like to forge your own release plan?
So we shoot the movie and now we got to get the movie out into the world and when we finish the movie, it was like the moment the film industry was collapsing, which I actually liked because now I can get creative. Because it’s just me that was financing it, I don’t have a producer over my shoulder or a loan from a bank where I have to pay interest every month, so it allows me to play. Now I can release the movie with the same spirit with which we made it, so we’re trying all kinds of really interesting things. I connected with some creative ad executives in New York City and they’ve never worked on a film before and I’ve never done any advertising before, so we came up with a really interesting campaign. They did campaigns for Snickers and FedEx and in entertainment advertising, you [generally] have a trailer and behind-the -scenes [promotional material] and that’s it. And they said, “When we sell a Snickers bar, we don’t walk around giving everybody a taste of the Snickers bar. What we do is we don’t even sell the wrapper, we sell the idea of a Snickers bar, so that was the approach and we’ve tried all these real fun things and we’re going to continue to try fun things to bring people to the movie.
One of the things that we’re doing is we recreated all of the artwork that was stolen that night. We opened it up in a Chelsea gallery in New York City and we used this company Improv Everywhere and we hired actors to wait outside in line and to be guards. You go into this art gallery and you’d look around you see all these Rembrandts and Renoirs and you’d say, “Wait a minute, this was stolen. Is this real?” And the guards were told to say, which is what [the real guards were told to say], “I don’t know. That’s what they told me.” So it was an event and people came to the gallery and we had the FBI raid the gallery. There was pretty interesting stuff. Now someone in Mexico City wants to bring the art gallery with them and show it in a theater as well and we’re doing the same or right now in L.A. at the Monica. We brought the whole art gallery, it’s in the lobby and it looks beautiful. It’s a way to interact with the movie in a different way that people don’t normally do and some people will be confused, some people will be interested, but I like all those reactions. It’s fun to do that and I just want to keep trying out different things like that.
It’s so difficult right now to get through. The festival circuit is rigged. You can’t get in unless you basically already have an in, so it’s hard to discover new movies and the market is so fractured that everything is it’s really hard to get a movie in front of people. But I am having so much fun. I might be the only person who’s going through this and having a blast because I’m defining that. That’s the other thing my mentor kept telling me, “Define what does success mean for you.” I’m always asking myself that. And getting it out to the world [is a process like others I’ve l’ve learned]. I learned how to forge art and we made these forgeries — if you think they’re forgeries, that’s up to you — but that fun, cheeky spirit is is an extension of making the movie. It feels like I’m making the movie again, so therefore it’s a delight and I’m not going to quit. I really like how almost like a political campaign you’re getting one vote at a time and I have enough energy that I’m enjoying it.
“Any Day Now” opens on August 22nd in Los Angeles at the Monica Film Center. It is also available on demand.