You don’t often see a realistic story about sabotaging Texas oil infrastructure on American movie screens, but “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” dramatizes in detail the bombing plot of a group of young environmental activists.
Like their super-focused characters, the filmmakers moved from conception to production in under a year. The team, lead by the director, Daniel Goldhaber, prioritized their characters’ convictions and technical authenticity.
Here’s a look at the road to creating the movie.
Hatching the Plan
Andreas Malm’s call-to-action treatise “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” was published in January 2021. Goldhaber read it while feeling both creative and political powerlessness, and was inspired. He and Jordan Sjol got together with the actor Ariela Barer to co-write the screenplay after another project with her had fallen through.
“The movie felt like the first time I could express some things that I had felt for most of my conscious adult life in a format that I felt people might be able to listen to,” Goldhaber said. He had grown up around climate science — both parents worked in the field — and had worked on a climate documentary.
Yet potential backers wouldn’t take meetings with him. So he and Barer found their way to the Cannes Film Festival and crashed parties. They found a crucial financier Goldhaber had previously connected with.
There was just one small step left.
“We realized that we didn’t even have a final script yet, so we had to fly home and immediately get to finishing it,” Barer said with a laugh.
Getting the Story Straight
The movie takes up the book’s argument that the climate threat is so urgent that sabotage is a legitimate form of self-defense against the actions of powerful energy interests. The filmmakers talked extensively with people who had been involved in direct action. But they wanted to steer clear of producing agitprop.
“Making a piece of propaganda is alienating to an audience who needs an entry point to watch a movie like this,” Barer said. The characters’ varied backgrounds and rationales are articulated through a structure of succinct flashbacks.
For example, Michael (Forrest Goodluck) grew up in a North Dakota reservation affected by rampant drilling, and ends up leading the group alongside Xochitl (Barer). Dwayne (Jake Weary) is a young conservative husband who loses land to an eminent domain seizure. Despite her deep skepticism, Alisha (Jayme Lawson) joins up out of support for her girlfriend, Theo (Sasha Lane).
“We wanted you to experience what it actually feels like to be convinced that you need to do an action like this,” Sjol said.
Assembling the Cast
In the compressed time frame of the production, meetings for casting were underway before the script was finished. Actors were drawn to the characters’ motivations.
Lawson said she was intrigued by the complexity of Alisha’s sacrifices, especially “the lengths we’ll go even if they are opposite of our morals or ideology for the ones that we love.” Marcus Scribner leaped at playing Shawn, a documentary crew member who ends up brainstorming sabotage with Xochitl.
“It felt kind of rebellious and exciting, which sold me because I normally play it safe,” Scribner said in an email.
Barer based Xochitl’s motivations on her own feelings of disillusionment with structures and institutions she had once believed in.
“I realized at a certain point that these things had not just betrayed me, they had never existed to support me and they were never going to support my community or me,” she said. Although she hadn’t planned to, she took on the role of Xochitl herself.
Making It Real
Filming took place over 22 days starting in November 2021, principally in New Mexico, with a key sequence in North Dakota, filmed on the reservation where Goodluck’s family lived.
“It was just us out in the desert, and it felt a bit like there were no adults around and we were somehow allowed to do this,” Sjol, also an executive producer, recalled. “I don’t think any of our department heads were over 35.”
The warm weather conditions were harsh, with little or no cellphone service. The production was kept under wraps, operating under the anodyne code name “Wild West.”
Goldhaber and the cinematographer Tehillah De Castro filmed on 16 millimeter, which they felt captured the extensive daylight exterior scenes better than digital. Dynamic camerawork kept the story moving, whether with Steadicam shots or subtle adjustments in viewpoint.
“This was intended to endear the viewer to each character’s emotional perspective,” De Castro said.
For the bomb-making scenes, the team drew on the expertise of a “bomb nerd”: a government contractor who works in counterterrorism. They aimed to depict the process accurately “to the millimeter,” Sjol said, but the film does skip one protracted step that involved watching a plastic explosive dry. (“Not very dramatic,” Sjol said.)
It’s no spoiler that a pipeline is blown up onscreen, but it may be a surprise that the filmmakers actually exploded a structure, rather than creating a visual effect. A 150-foot mock-up was constructed from industrial cardboard and wood.
“Most explosions in movies are really explosion-y, and we didn’t want that,” Goldhaber said. “We just wanted to lean into the realism of it.”
Throughout, the actors mulled the issues their characters were facing.
“We talked about how hard it is to do the right thing and the overwhelming sense of dread for the future,” Scribner wrote in an email. “Y’know, just the usual.”
The End Is Just the Beginning
Editing the film took six months inside a cramped suite Barer nicknamed “the Box.” A big concern was how much to explain about the film’s ending and other moments. Test screenings influenced the streamlining of certain bomb-making scenes and debates of Malm’s ideas.
“More words wound up feeling less powerful,” Daniel Garber, the film’s editor, said of the ending.
That conclusion was locked only after the film was accepted into the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, where it premiered to acclaim. A distribution deal with Neon followed days later. In his review for The Times, Ben Kenigsberg wrote that the film “has a degree of suspense and efficiency that are becoming all too rare in the mainstream.”
The movie is now in theaters, but the cast and crew are realistic about what it can change. Still, said, Kristine Froseth, who plays one of the activists, “it’s important that we all try to stay hopeful.” Then she paused. “Because if we give up, we’re basically accepting death in a very passive way.”
