I keep returning to one sentence from the record: on paper, he was a model cadet. Solid academics. Cleared the psychological screening. High marks at the Academy. Seven arrests in his first months on patrol. Everything the city asks of a young man, he did, and he was robbing the same bank the whole time.

That contradiction is the film. There is no crew, no plan, no clever score. There is a twenty-one-year-old who was good at everything, a young woman behind a teller window with a piece of information, and the discovery, made once and then never un-made, that the distance between the two sides of the law is about four feet of counter.

I'm not interested in explaining him, and I'm not interested in condemning him. I'm interested in sitting in the room while it happens, close enough to see the moment he decides, and to notice that it doesn't look like a decision at all. It looks like a Tuesday.

Inspired by true events, the picture is built as an anatomy rather than a thriller: a close, patient, procedural study of how an ordinary young man crosses a line he has been trained his entire adult life to guard. The robberies themselves are short, ugly, and unglamorous. The film lives in the rooms on either side of them: the kitchen table, the locker room, the interview room, the visiting room.

I want performances with almost nothing on the surface. No monologues about ambition, no speeches about the neighbourhood. Two young people who love each other, telling each other smaller and smaller truths until there's nothing left to tell. If we do it right, the audience won't be able to name the scene where it became inevitable, only that, somewhere back there, it did.

Shot in real branches, real precincts, and real apartments, with handheld coverage and long unbroken takes, this is designed as an actor's picture first. Come play it quiet. I'll shoot it close.