Gone In 60 Seconds is a film that stumbles into the same category as that of Night Of The Hunter and the collective works of Yasujirō Ozu, in that it’s so disconnected from a traditional understanding of how films are shot that it points another direction the medium could have gone. The story appears fairly simple at first: a car thief who uses a respectable job as an insurance investigator as a cover is given a job to steal forty-eight cars in five days. This is a really compelling hook for a dramatic story; indeed, the remake uses it for a conventional Hollywood thriller, constantly ramping up the tension. The original takes a different tack, showing a riff on the exact same process of stealing cars, over and over, with a few scattered uses of consequence to set up the final sequence: one of the protagonist’s victims, with the help of a disgruntled member of his crew, tips off the cops to his plan to get the last car on his list, kicking off the longest car chase in film history. This film is less a tension-filled thrillride, and more of a laidback series of observations held together by a single process. There are very few traditional conversational setups in this film – as far as I can remember, only one case of shot/reverse-shot – and indeed, the very early scenes that set up the premise are conversations between unseen people over montages of people working on both cars and their plans to steal more cars. These scenes remind me, in a scrappy and rag-tag way, of the opening act of Martin Scorsese’s Casino, but rather having the journalistic sense of our hero explaining to us How Things Work, it feels like we’re getting a sneak peek into someone’s thought process. When the film gets its premise out of the way, it takes on a more observational tone. There’s almost no cinematic underlining – no dramatic zooms, no playful edits, no camera movement that’s motivated by anything other than the subject physically moving, no freeze-frame, no slo-mo. Instead, the movie maintains interest by constantly showing us new, often bizarre imagery. They might always be stealing cars, but they’re always stealing a different car in a different location with a different obstacle (favourite: one guy goes to steal a car only to find a baby tiger sitting in it). This extends to that final car chase; it might be forty minutes long, but it compensates for that not just with a different incredible stunt, but with constant changes in scenery and cars. To put it another way, it’s not thrilling but it is energetic.

This is a film made by an enthusiastic amateur; director/writer/producer/star/stuntman HB “Toby” Halicki was the owner of an impound and towing business, and filming of the movie would frequently stop for a few days so he could work in his shop to raise more funds. I’ve read a lot of amateur fiction and comics, and the difference between the amateur and the professional is profound and clear: professionals follow a clear set of rules that everyone agrees on. This can be either a good thing or a bad thing; if the professional is following rules that make sense, then they never waste the audience’s time. On the other hand, following the rules too strongly can completely wipe out the spark of inspiration an individual can have, and of course, if the rule isn’t rooted in truth, the audience’s time does in fact become wasted as we have to wait for the story to go through the motions. The amateur is not taught the rulebook, and has to glean it from what they’ve seen in other works (and perhaps behind-the-scenes footage or interviews or Twitter posts). Most amateurs recreate the superficial details of things they liked; the smarter amateurs go on to figure out the connection between their actions and the effects. The beauty of the professional is that they so deeply understand the rules everyone has to follow that they can follow them to somewhere nobody thought to go; the beauty of the amateur is that they can discover totally new rules nobody knew existed. It’s interesting which common amateur instincts Halicki falls into and which he doesn’t. That indifference to traditional film setups extends to the genre tropes; he doesn’t have things like the Getting The Band Together scene, or the Superfluous Romance, or any Scenes You’re Supposed To See In These Films. I suspect his creative process was to ask himself “how would I steal cars?” and then film that. The result is a fascinatingly inventive process; giving all the cars female codenames is the most iconic part, but I’m tickled by the touch that all the cars had to be insured. If anything, he has the opposite problem, making the logic of an individual scene make sense while losing sight of its purpose in the larger narrative. I sometimes got lost in the first half of the movie because Halicki would throw something at the viewer and only explain it afterwards, if at all, and in conversation about the film, beloved Soluter Son Of Griff remarked that the protagonist’s route through the car chase is a detailed, perfectly logical route that would get you from International Towers in Long Beach to the car wash in Carson, and wondered if Halicki realised you don’t have to film a car chase in that much detail. It’s worth comparing to Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz, a film with a similar choppy style that disregards traditional setups for a looser style, invents cool processes that the characters follow, and was even motivated by the writer/director looking at their home and thinking “how could an action scene be shot here?”, but holds together as a film more strongly, with each shot and scene having a purpose in the larger narrative.

SCATTERED NOTES

• It’s funny to recognise a reference in reverse – Quentin Tarantino lifted shots from the opening credits to use in the opening credits to his film DEATH PROOF. It’s also funny to consider Tarantino’s style in comparison to this film; he’s an amateur with the ethos of a professional, learning all the rules cinema can follow and using whichever one he feels like in the moment regardless of it fits in the current genre.
• Halicki’s performance varies more often than the quality of his film. He does his best acting when he’s behind the wheel of a car – I love his various moments of disgust or amusement in the final car chase – and he’s pretty great at conveying a witty professionalism, but outside of that wheelhouse, he’s awful.