Cohen creates storm of the century on camera for heist film

THE US Federal Reserve shreds damaged, out-of-date, or just plain shabby banknotes worth billions regularly and sends them out to be incinerated, and mostly no one notices.

But what if a historically-powerful hurricane and a gang of sophisticated thieves happened to be headed right towards where it’s kept?

That’s the premise of The Hurricane Heist ( right), the latest release from veteran director Rob Cohen, the creator of the megabucks Fast and Furious franchise.

“A shootout is no longer just a shootout, a chase is no longer just a chase,” the 68-year-old told AFP. “Any of the tropes of action films suddenly have to reinterpreted by taking place in 225kph winds and driving rain.

“It just seemed like, what a delicious challenge to be able to create a hurricane itself, but to create an action film within it.”

The Hurricane Heist stars Toby Kebbell as Will Rutledge, a government meteorologist tracking Hurricane Tammy – the fiercest storm in US history – as it heads for coastal Alabama.

As the locals evacuate, the US mint in the fictional town of Gulfport race against time to shred US$600 million (RM2.3 billion) in old bills before Tammy hits – but a gang of tech-savvy robbers have other ideas.

Cohen ( far right), who got his break in Hollywood as a reader for agent Mike Medavoy after graduating from Harvard, is known as “the kid who found The Sting”.

This intuition has fuelled much of his work, balanced with an aptitude for innovative special effects that has seen him firing cars out of moving trains, and placing his cameramen on go-karts.

Creating the storm of the century on camera is the kind of challenge the director of high-octane blockbusters such as xXx and Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story relishes.

An early pioneer with computeraided animation, Cohen abandoned CGI in favour of practical effects to show farmhouses destroyed, trucks whipped into the air and a 20-foot tsunami crash into a garden centre.

Meanwhile, he used LED plates on the windows of cars to transform the red tower roofs and stucco buildings of Sofia, Bulgaria – where the shoot took place in the summer of 2016 – into the bucolic Deep South, with its checkered drapes and picturesque coastline.

“I find that an audience has a real sense of when you dump 44,000 gallons of water on a team of stuntmen, and when you pull them on wires and add the fake water later,” Cohen said.

“There are just a million tells that tell you this isn’t real. Computers don’t handle chaos well.” – AFP-Relaxnews