It’s not upbeat.

This is a superb and uncompromising adaptation of George V. Higgins’s bleak masterpiece of low-level criminality—and possibly Robert Mitchum’s finest performance.

That’s probably my No. 1. It definitely is vis à vis The Town. Same setting—they even had the same safe front in one of the bank robberies, like, the actual safe was the same in ours as it was in Eddie Coyle. I don’t know what that says except that they don’t update safes very much. We put a little piece of dialogue from The Friends of Eddie Coyle on the television that someone’s watching in The Town. It’s an exceptional film. It does what I try to do, which is to make it seem real. It’s not sexed up, it’s not glam. You feel like these are real guys, who really are doing this. And the stakes feel kind of dangerous and real in a sort of slightly scary, upsetting way; I think the way it would in real life.