How Caught Stealing’s Director Brought the Novel’s Intense Violence To the Screen

These are lenient times for violence depicted on screen, but a perfectly faithful adaptation of Charlie Huston’s novel Caught Stealing might be too bloody for even the most desensitized audiences. The story is set in New York City in 1998, following a former baseball player named Hank (Austin Butler) as he is thrust into a life of crime, and the trailer alone shows how brutal it may get. In an interview with ComicBook ahead of the premiere, director Darren Aronofsky said that managing violence on screen is a delicate balance, as even an open-minded audience can be alienated by the “cringe.” Caught Stealing hits theaters on Friday, August 29th.

“Yeah, I mean, there was a balance,” Aronofsky said. “I think the film is very strong for some people, and I definitely don’t want it to be too strong. I want it to be fun. There is something about, like, a little cringe. That’s okay when you watch a movie. But, if the cringe gets too big… So, that’s a hard balance to get. You sort of hope that it happens quick enough and the film moves fast enough, and that you don’t lose people’s trust.”

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Caught Stealing is an adaptation, so in that sense, Aronofsky didn’t have complete control over how violent this movie is, nor when and where that violence is deployed. He told us that he planned the biggest shocks in this movie around the story and the audience’s experience, not any kind of censorship.

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“The film’s got just a lot of natural violence, and I’m actually not interested in softening violence,” he said. “It’s so strange man, it’s a hard question, because it’s exactly that people react to things in such different ways that some people are like, ‘What? That wasn’t violent at all,’ and then other people were like, ‘Oh s—! That was too violent.’ So, once again, it’s hard to know where the sweet spot is when you’re actually being truthful and honest, but you’re not turning people off.”

It remains to be seen how the balance of violence in this movie lands with general audiences, but it’s clear that Aronofsky earned that R-rating. The director has an eclectic filmography, and while there’s definitely some blood and gore in movies like The Wrestler or even Black Swan, there’s nothing quite as overtly violent as Caught Stealing, which is explicitly billed as a crime movie.

Caught Stealing hits theaters on Friday, August 29th.