How to Rob a Bank’s premise breaks the rules of its genre, and starts with a premise that most first-time bank robbers actually get away with the money. “Suddenly the question for me wasn’t just how someone robs a bank, it was why,” screenwriter Mark Bianculli says. “If the barrier to entry is so much lower than most people imagine, what would it take to convince you to cross that line? From there, everything else was born.”
As with every good heist, assembling the crew is the most important part of the job. As Bianculli creates his vision of a heist film fit for the modern age, his script draws in director David Leitch and his longtime producing partner Kelly McCormick.
Leitch has made a name for himself making thrilling action sequences in his films such as Bullet Train and The Fall Guy in a style that only a director with firsthand experience in stunts could create. “David is the right guy because this movie needed style, and David obviously oozes style,” Bianculli says. “But he also stressed the idea of collision, and not just physical collision. He wanted every character pushing against someone else, every scene to have tension, every set piece to be earned. I always joke that he took my script, plugged it into an amplifier and played the electric version.”
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McCormick was immediately compelled by the timeliness of the material, feeling the spark of the film from the get-go. “We were thinking about the sort of energy behind that frustration people are feeling,” McCormick says. Was there something to this script? And could we be part of that conversation in a way that felt very 87North, that felt very David Leitch-ian – that it could be fun and wild, but also put a message forward – be part of an important conversation our society is having right now, and strike a chord that so many people are feeling today?”
For Leitch, the goal was to put a spin on the classic heist film that honors the genre but jazz it up in a way that makes it feel participative. “Our job was to build one cohesive world out of two very different visual languages,” Leitch says. “The movie had to feel cinematic, but it also had to feel immediate and authentic to the way this generation creates and consumes media. Every choice we made came back to serving the characters and making those two worlds feel like they belonged together.”
How to Rob A Bank arrives in Philippine cinemas on November 11.
