deep fried movies

Year – 2018
Decade – 2010s
Director – Christian Gudegast
Cinematographer – Terry Stacey
Genre – Action
Keywords – 2010s action; Heist
Studio – STX
Shooting Locations – Atlanta and Los Angeles
Schedule – 48 days (5 in L.A. and the rest in Atlanta)
Aspect Ratio – 2.39
Camera – Arri Alexa Mini
Lenses – Arri Zeiss Master Primes 
Format – Digital (Super35-sized sensor) with spherical lenses

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The Movie
Tightly-knit clans of cops (led by Gerard Butler) and robbers (headed by Pablo Schreiber) face off when the latter schemes to steal $30 million in cash from the Federal Reserve. Set in Los Angeles but shot largely in Atlanta, Den of Thieves plays like Heat with a Usual Suspects twist, but the cult flick is elevated by its specificity and well-staged action set pieces (shot by a DP in Terry Stacey who spent a good portion of the previous 25 years of his career specializing in comedy, including a few favorites of mine in Adventureland and 50/50).

“The whole drive thematically for me, the whole reason for really making this movie, was all about these two tribes, these two gangs, these two cliques, these two crews. They’re basically all the same dudes. They went to the same high schools. They eat at the same restaurants. They dated the same girls. They go to the same strip bars. They’re basically the same kind of guy and they just happen to be on opposite sides.” – Director Christian Gudegast (1)

 “I think the best plainclothes cops and undercover cops were walking a fence at one point in their lives and could’ve fallen on the bad guy side of the fence but fell on the good guy side of the fence (instead). Those guys are so good, because they understand the mentality of the adversary, think like bad guys, and anticipate like bad guys.” – Technical consultant (and retired undercover operative) Jay Dobyns (2)

Frame Gallery #1

Frame Gallery #2

Frame Gallery #3

****Spoilers****

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Scene Breakdowns

A shot-by-shot dissection of Den of Thieves’ opening heist – an armored car hold-up in front of a donut shop.

Scene Length – 5:56
Edits – 172
Avg. Shot Length – 2.1 seconds

Quotes from director Christian Gudegast

On the genesis of the script, which Gudegast began writing in 2003 – 14 years before the film was finally made…

“There were two parallel tracks that led to putting the story together. The first one was that years ago, I saw a photograph of a money tub from the Federal Reserve Bank in the Los Angeles Times. It was this plexiglass tub that was on wheels, and it was about three-and-a-half feet high, and three feet wide. Inside of it was $30 million in cash, in $100 bills. It was such a visually fascinating picture, and I thought, “Wow.” So I did some research into the Federal Reserve, and it’s a fascinating world. It’s the bank where banks put their money. I also went there and visited it. It’s a visually fascinating world, and takes your breath away when you go down five stories beneath street level. There’s a football-sized floor, and all of the glass is bullet-proof plexiglass, so you can see into everything, for security purposes. Then you pass through all of these rooms, and all of these rooms have counting machines that count various denominations of bills. Inside the rooms there are also shredding machines. When the counting machines count the money, they decide if a bill is unfit and old. If a bill is deemed to be too old, it’s put into a new compartment. At the end of the day, they shred that money…So, there was that, and at the same time, I also wanted to make a film about the world in South Los Angeles, which is the gang capital of the city. It’s where all the different crime groups are represented. I know a lot of people in that world, and grew up in that world. So, I set this story surrounding the Fed in this world, to ground it in reality. That’s how the whole story came together.” (3)

On the long road to getting the film made…

“I went to the UCLA Film School to direct, not write. To graduate, you had to write a script. I wrote a script with a writing partner, and we sold it to Oliver Stone before we graduated. So, that changed my career trajectory at the time, and I just became a screenwriter. I was doing well, and making a lot of money, but I never intended to be a writer.
The first time we went into pre-production for this (Den of Thieves) was in 2008. After that, we then went into pre-production for it about six more times. For various reasons, it never got done…So, I’ve been in director purgatory since 2008. But it was a blessing in disguise, because I was very prepared when we did start filming. I’ve been a still photographer my entire life, so I documented the actual locations and the gangsters and cops (that inspired the story) in still photographs before we began shooting. That way, I was able to show everyone who was involved in the movie the actual world, and the lenses and angles we were going to use. I was also able to show the characters, and what they dress and look like, including the tattoos they have, as well as the cars they drive. So, I basically had the entire film extremely mapped out before we shot even one frame of film.” (3)

“(The project) was at Relativity Media, you know the studio that went bankrupt, from 2007 to 2015 when they all went belly-up. So, the project and myself were in director purgatory for all those years – we were greenlit about four different times while at Relativity and just never made it there because the company itself was, as we all know now, dysfunctional. So, once they went bankrupt we were able to – myself and the producer Tucker Tooley – get it out of bankruptcy court just before it went in. It if would (have went in), then we would have lost it probably forever. But we were able to get it out at the last minute before it went into actual court, and we got to STX, and once we got to STX we were greenlit immediately, and went off and made it. It was really a function of (now) being at a company – a studio – that’s healthy and fully operational.” (4)

On the film’s opening scene originally being different…

“In the script there was a character called Willie Lump Lump. It was actually a flashback and he was sort of a samurai of bank robbery and he was talking to somebody and basically giving them the rules of bank robbery and how to do it. You don’t know who he’s talking to, but then in the middle of the film when you see Merrimen getting out of prison, we realize (it was Willie Lump Lump)  talking to Merrimen…Unfortunately we weren’t able to shoot that because of the dictates of production. We just didn’t have the time, didn’t have the money.” (1)

On the locations…

“This town (where we shot the pool party scene shown above) is about an hour south of the airport in Atlanta and we turned it into Carson [which is a city south of downtown L.A.). It was the only location we could find anywhere in the greater Atlanta area that had Spanish tiled roofs. Atlanta looks absolutely nothing like L.A. and we did not want to let go of L.A. as the setting of the movie because it was just all too specific and too detailed. I spent too much time researching everything and setting things in the exact locations where they take place. So, we actually found every location ourselves. We drove around the city of Atlanta for six months. Atlanta’s at 1,200 feet. It’s in the forest. It’s 200 miles inland in Northern Georgia. Everything is brick. Great city. Love it. But it just looks absolutely nothing like Los Angeles. So we just scoured all over Atlanta, all over the suburbs, for all the locations that we chose and I think we got some great ones. Most people see the movie and they have no idea that we shot it in Atlanta.” (1)

“Shooting in Atlanta wasn’t a decision; it was a mandate, on behalf of the producers and studio. It’s a reality, unfortunately, that’s it’s cheaper to shoot in another state. California hasn’t figured it out yet, which is shocking to me. We were able to shoot in L.A. for a week, so we could shoot the exterior (scenes), which was an enormous help. Down in Atlanta, we found all of our locations ourselves, because the film is very specific to the locations. We knew where everything was set in the real world, and we tried to reproduce that. The producers and I drove around Atlanta for six months, and hand-picked every location ourselves.” (3)

On working with DP Terry Stacey…

“I’ve got to give a shout out to our DP Terry Stacey. He’s just a wonderful human being. A Brit who lives in New York…Before this he’s never really shot anything this style, but he’s so experienced and he and I just hit it off right away…We wanted a very kind of saturated, almost reversal stock kind of look. A lot of wider lenses and then some longer lenses. We actually ended up using a lot of 25s, 32s and 40s for the stuff that’s closer. I kind of fell in love with those lenses while shooting this. That was all because of Terry and Terry just did an amazing job and he shoots fast in a very naturalistic, European kind of way, which I love.” (1)

On the film’s visual playbook…

“We had a few rules of engagement. So, the gangsters, the criminals, we always basically shot either locked off on sticks or on a Steadicam, because the gangsters are much more in control of their environment. With Big Nick and the cops, their lives were wild. They’re getting divorced, they fucking drink, they’re hungover, that was all handheld. They would go in and out of frame, and it was much more chaotic. We tried to be pretty disciplined with that [dichotomy]. And then when they came together, if you look closely, we would say, “Who has the power in this scene?” And we would intro the scene with that look. So, if it’s the outlaws, the criminals, it would be Steadicam, then we’d transition into a handheld, as we did in the Pico Rivera [band robbery] for example. When we go in with Nick into the bank, it’s Steadicam pulling him in, and then we slowly transitioned into the handheld….because that’s where the worlds really collide. That was our self-imposed mandate to shoot it.” (5)

On the actors’ prep…

“We all met in Atlanta, where we primarily shot the film, for two months during pre-production. We had the whole cast there, and divided the actors into two groups – the criminals and cops. We kept them separate, to keep their rivalry, and did tons of boot camp and training. The cops (in the film) hung out with (real) cops, and did undercover training. At the same time, the criminals (in the film), who were all ex-military, did military training, and hung out with (real) gangsters. So, by the time we shot the film, everyone was completely in it. Spending that time together was invaluable, and the performances show it…Then every night (during prep) we would all eat together. The criminal crew and the police crews would stay separated as groups, just like they would in reality. The actors who were playing the criminals were only allowed to drink water, because their characters are in AA, and are ex-military. I would then go to the dinner with all of the cops. Of course, they’re all hard-charging mad men, so they’d all be drinking beer. So, the two dinners had a whole different energy, but it was purposeful.” (3)

On the twist ending…

“As strange as this may sound, that was never initially the plan. We never meant for it to have a twist at the end. It was supposed to be a straight heist of this Federal Reserve….(The twist) was something the studio was really high on. For me, the movie had to work without the twist as well, and it has to be about the characters and if you’re emotionally invested in all of them, it would survive without the twist. But everybody really liked (the twist) so we went with it, stuck with it, and audiences seem to have really dug it. So, I’m glad that we stuck with it.” (4)

Posters

References

(1) Blu-ray commentary track with Director Christian Gudegast and Producer Tucker Tooley

(2) https://www.slashfilm.com/554334/den-of-thieves-set-visit/

(3) https://www.themoviewaffler.com/2018/01/interview-den-of-thieves-director.html

(4) https://screenrant.com/christian-gudegast-interview-den-thieves-director/

(5) https://behindthelensonline.net/site/interviews/interview-exclusives/christian-gudegast-tucker-tooley-are-thick-as-thieves-in-collaborating-on-den-of-thieves-exclusive-interview/