PIPE SCHEMES

Eight exciting rising stars and the director of acclaimed tech horror Cam unite to somehow turn a non-fiction political manifesto into a nerve-shredding, fiery and mainstream-accessible heist thriller. Total Film meets the team rewriting the rulebook with How to Blow up a Pipeline.

- JOSH SLATER-WILLIAMS

We tried to get Gene Hackman out of retirement to play the pipeline, but unfortunately negotiations broke down at the 11th hour,’ jokes director Daniel Goldhaber to Total Film. We’ve just pointed out to the filmmaker how unusual his new thriller, How to Blow up a Pipeline, is as a heist movie, in that the target is entirely a system’s infrastructure, with no human stand-in as the villain facing its ensemble. No respected veteran actor turns up to antagonise the meddling crew, though we suggest William Fichtner could have worked well. ‘That’s what Michael Mann would do,’ he replies.

Made on a considerably lower budget than any Michael Mann film (even his earliest works), How to Blow up a Pipeline is nonetheless worthy of Mann and many other masters of tension when it comes to thriller credentials. That includes Henri-Georges Clouzot, whose French classic The Wages of Fear – an adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s novel of the same name – springs to mind when watching, given the shared plot factors of oil and transporting explosives, as does William Friedkin’s subsequent re-adaptation, Sorcerer. The latter’s Tangerine Dream score at times seems consciously referenced by composer Gavin Brivik’s galvanising electronic musical accompaniment for Pipeline.