The film follows an American safe-cracker (Eric Stoltz) who travels to Paris to aid a childhood friend (Jean-Hugues Anglade) with a bank heist.

Loosely a modern take on Frankenstein, the film features Wil Wheaton, Rutger Hauer, Nia Peeples, and Ron Perlman.

In 2006, Avary wrote a screenplay adaptation to the Konami video game, Silent Hill (2006), with French director and friend, Christophe Gans, and Killing Zoe producer Samuel Hadida.

After winning an Oscar for Pulp Fiction, he was originally attached to direct an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's comic book The Sandman, which merged the "Preludes and Nocturnes" storyline with that of "The Doll's House".

[19] Avary had originally intended upon directing his script of Beowulf himself as a live action film, to be shot in Iceland with a $10 million budget.

[21] Avary and Coscarelli spent years trying to get the film made and even had financing in place in 1997 before that company changed hands and the deal evaporated.

[21] Through the 90s and early 2000s Avary attempted to direct a film based on the life of Salvador Dalí that had Al Pacino attached to star as the painter at one stage, but the project fell apart and never came to fruition.

[26] By 2008, it was reported by MTV that Gaiman and Avary had left the production and that their script would not be used for David Fincher's planned version,[27] which was ultimately not produced.

[28] While in prison, Avary came across an "old Penguin paperback" on a book cart of a Robin Hood story written by E. Charles Vivian and decided to adapt the material, sending the pages he wrote to his lawyer to have his daughter type up into a script.

[29] Also in 2012, Avary was planning to reteam with author Bret Easton Ellis to direct an adaptation of his novel Lunar Park, with financing from Wild Bunch.

[citation needed] Avary has also written an as-yet unproduced script based on The Devil Soldier by Caleb Carr, which was in development with Antoine Fuqua directing and Mark Burman producing.

[32] On January 13, 2008, Avary was arrested under suspicion of manslaughter and DUI, following a car crash in Ojai, California, in which his passenger, Andreas Zini, was killed.

The Ventura County Sheriff's department responded to the crash after midnight Sunday morning on the 1900 block of East Ojai Avenue.

[33] In December 2008, he was charged with, and pleaded not guilty to, gross vehicular manslaughter and two felony counts of causing bodily injury while intoxicated.