How to Blow Up a Pipeline was filmed in secret: sans trade announcements; delivered directly into the finished-product discourse of the Toronto International Film Festival mere weeks after the film’s existence was finally revealed. The thriller, inspired by Andreas Malm’s climate crisis manifesto of the same title, follows eight individuals from different regions of America who travel to rural Texas to blow up an oil pipeline and disrupt the pricing market—with hopes of inspiring other groups to do the same. That is, if they can get away with it.

Can filmmaking be activism? Is it enough just to make a film that has a point of view? Or is it still, as a cultural product that needs to make somebody some money back, just part of the capitalist machine?

Now that How to Blow Up a Pipeline is being funneled from its cinema window into the VOD realm, its message is able to spread more widely—and its story told more broadly. So, with the help of actors Jayme Lawson (Till),  Sasha Lane (American Honey), Ariela Barer (who also co-wrote and produced Pipeline) and director, co-writer and producer Daniel Goldhaber (Cam), I take a timely look at the film’s journey from secret shoot under the fake name Wild West, to its explosive TIFF premiere, to partnering with activist groups on theatrical screenings. 

Confidentiality and community 

The highly confidential nature of How to Blow Up a Pipeline’s production was all for the safety of cast and crew, while they filmed a project with such an incendiary title. “We couldn’t tell the locals too much of what we were doing, and had to be incognito,” Jayme Lawson tells me. “There was a real, genuine concern amongst family and friends: ‘Are you going to be okay? Should we be concerned about you and the FBI? How deep is this film going?’”

Lawson plays reluctant revolutionary Alisha, a housecleaner who becomes a driver for the pipeline activists. She is there solely to her terminally ill girlfriend Theo (played by Sasha Lane), who is keenly aware of her own ticking clock. Theo s the cause via a childhood connection with Xochitl (Barer), the group’s organizer, thus pulling Alisha into it.

The rest of the crew consists of a DIY bombmaker (Forrest Goodluck) that Xochitl discovers via his online tutorials, a classmate who veers from documentaries and fundraisers into direct action (Marcus Scribner) and a local Texan (Jake Weary) whose property was annexed to make way for the pipeline. Finally, Lukas Gage and Kristine Froseth play a couple who haven’t been strangers to protest nor property destruction in their stomping grounds of Portland. Many of them are unlinkable to each other, particularly in a remote spot in Texas, “but everyone has their own part they bring,” as Lane describes their coming together.

Reality and Reservoir Dogs

I was blown away by the film at TIFF ’22, but have been curious since then about what might lie beyond the hype. What happens once an activist product like this meets its audience, and how does that impact those on-screen?

Lawson tells me, point blank, that people around her were stressed about her partaking at all. “We weren’t sure if we were going to finish it,” she says. “I’m starting to feel some of that tension from filming is starting to creep back up, because it’s like, ‘Oh yes, now how is this going to be received? And what kind of conversations is this going to spark?’ Not even just out there, but in my own home. But I am excited to hear what people think.”

In fact, most of the online film discussion is about how tense and well-made Pipeline is. Zoë Rose Bryant writes on Letterboxd: “How to Blow Up a Pipeline is what you’d get if the Safdies directed Ocean’s Eleven—an unrelentingly (and unbearably) tense ensemble-led eco-thriller that entertains, educates and enrages in equal measure.” She’s on the money: as Daniel Goldhaber tells us in a video interview about the film’s influences, Ocean’s Eleven, along with the structure of Reservoir Dogs, was indeed one of the foundational films for the director and his co-writer Ariela Barer. 

Then, of course, there are the expected Fox News anti-Hollywood “propaganda” segments that they gleefully ran against Pipeline. But this was an independent production that didn’t enter the larger US film ecosystem until it needed to find an audience and distribution (in a limited rollout). There are economic trade-offs inherent in any movie’s release, but it’s telling that Pipeline only played one festival and held its press days virtually. That’s a tiny ecological footprint in comparison to the standard multi-festival rollout that many films undertake to build buzz, racking up the air miles along the way. Or the blockbusters that not only fly their casts and crew around the world, but many journalists along with them. 

It’s a similar stance as that taken by Malm in his climate crisis manifesto, which provided the source material for the heist thriller. Goldhaber recounts just how he and Barer came up with the risky idea to make their narrative adaptation: “I met Ariela for another project that I was actually working on with Isa [Mazzei, co-writer/producer of Cam] that died shortly after the pandemic hit; we had cast Ariela in the lead of that one. That was very unfortunate, but I really loved Ariela as an actor.”

Goldhaber continues, “She’d shared some writing with me, and we got to talking and had a real creative kinship. We were hanging out a lot and watching movies and talking about stuff towards the end of 2020… [Executive producer] Jordan Sjol came to visit me to finish another thing that we were writing, and the three of us got to hanging out and talking and experiencing the same political moment together. When Jordan found the book and recommended it to us, it became very clear that this is the thing that we needed to work on.”

Perhaps the other project’s Covid-induced cancellation created an even better outcome for Barer, since it allowed her to work on Pipeline creatively from beginning to end. “I’ve never been this involved on this side of film in my life,” she says. “This was really a crash course in everything I’ve ever dreamed of doing. Danny was always so collaborative; I immediately read this book and became obsessed with it, and it was all we could talk about. These ideas, these real debates we were having in real-time, slowly became the narrative and emotional hook of the movie.”

Friends, and friends of friends 

Each character, much like a heist movie, brings a distinct skill and a specific viewpoint as to why they’re involved in attacking a vulnerable spot of a major oil pipeline. To make their expertise shine through, Goldhaber and Barer had to find someone who could explain building a bomb, since Malm’s source material—as the film points out in a bookstore scene—does not give instructions. The “how to” in the title is a salacious misnomer; instead, it’s all about “why.”

Finding their bomb specialist really tested the ‘six degrees of separation’ theory, Goldhaber notes. “You’d be surprised how close random people are, one or two degrees of separation,” he says. “The bomb guy was somebody who was a friend of a friend who I was telling about the movie, and they were like, ‘You’ve got to meet my friend; he’s a bomb guy.’ [Then] Jordan’s sister lived in Texas and was like, ‘I know a pipeline guy.’

“Of course, there were a lot of people that we were connected to through Andreas. Once we started rolling, we could always say, ‘Hey, is there anybody else we should talk to?’ and he’d say, ‘I got five people,’ and then three of them respond to your emails.”

The organic nature of assembling this behind-the-scenes team of experts elegantly reflects the coming together of the ramshackle bunch of pipe-heisters on the screen. In a way, I observe, Pipeline is a nod to the independent revolutionaries of cinema history: a scrappy underdog of a movie notable for the community approach to how it was made—and how it’s being marketed and seen. 

Goldhaber agrees: “From the beginning, we knew that we were going to try to make a movie that felt like it could represent that this is us and our friends trying to do something.”