Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Evan Katz & Macon Blair On ‘Small Crimes,’ SXSW [VIDEO EXCLUSIVE]

Small Crimes, a crime-thriller film directed by Evan Katz, stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Joe Denton, a former cop who just got off a six-year prison sentence for attempted murder.  He returns home, seeking redemption, but ends up trapped in the mess he left behind.

“[Denton] tried to kill the local DA,” Game Of Thrones star Coster-Waldau told uInterview in an exclusive video interview. “He claims it was a complete accident. And so he’s let out of prison, he doesn’t have a place to stay, so he moves back in with his parents. But his hope is that he’s going to reenter society, and reconnect with his two daughters.”

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau On ‘Small Crimes’

For director Katz, there were many aspects of the story that drew him in.

“I love noir, pulp, just in general,” Katz said. “This book had all of the fun ingredients that I’m pretty attracted to: a bunch of psychotic criminals, people are very self-involved.”

“It’s just interesting to see how long they will follow a guy, even if he’s doing things that are pretty awful. And this seemed like it had a lot of room to play that game,” the director continued.

The screenplay was written by Macon Blair, who has been a longtime fan of Katz’s.

“I would’ve been happy to work on anything that he was working on, but he kind of pitched me his version of the book,” Blair said. “he was into highlighting a very darkly comedic aspect of it… it was fun to take this kind of conventional crime story and blow it up with this weird family dynamic.”

Though the film is titled “Small Crimes,” it certainly isn’t constrained to misdemeanors.

“It does kind of start with a lower scale, and then kind of build,” Katz said. “I think at page eight, he was already getting drunk. So you play up that, maybe it’s going to be a quiet little drama about him and his father, in the kitchen.  These little things, fighting over a truck. But you kind of want it to be a movie that people will watch, so things need to go wrong on a bigger scale.”

Coster-Waldou believes that although Joe commits crimes, he has a way of absolving himself of the guilt — to himself, at least.

“Yeah, I’m going to do the right thing. I’m almost going to do the right thing. I’m not going to do the right thing. But I like the idea of doing the right thing. And the idea is enough. The fact that I thought I was going to do the right thing shows that I’m a good guy,” Coster-Waldou said, explaining his character’s thought process.

Shooting the film was not without its challenges, like the day the crew shoot the complicated final scene. “You’ve basically got half a day, it’s raining like crazy, everybody’s standing in the mud, you can’t have a wide shot,” the director said. “You just shoot everybody in singles, with a giant umbrella over their heads… He’s gotta be fighting a giant Russian explosion and fire, he’s standing in the rain, there’s all these lightning possibilities. Giant rats, there’s a hornet’s nest that could be disturbed.”

Coster-Waldou agreed that the hornet-nest-scene was the most difficult to shoot. “There’s a moment when the stunt coordinator comes to me just before this explosion’s going off, and he’s not telling the rest of the crew. He goes, ‘Nick, just so you know, there’s a hornet’s nest. If I look at you and go, run, then just run as fast as you can.'”

Interestingly, the most difficult member of the cast to work with was not a person, but a feline.

“We had a cat who didn’t really behave. We had an actor cat, who was the most high maintenance actor on set,” the director divulged. “It’s supposed to hiss on command, but it won’t sit still.”

Small Crimes is to be released on Netflix on April 28.