Stay until the credits roll on How to Blow Up a Pipeline and you’ll notice that the “film by” credit bears more than the name of co-writer and director Daniel Goldhaber. Here, the credit is also shared by editor Daniel Garber, executive producer and co-writer Jordan Sjol, and producer, co-writer, and actress Ariela Barer. This shared attribution of authorship is fitting for a film about the collaboration and teamwork required to achieve a shared outcome.
The group’s adaptation of Andreas Malm’s political manifesto of the same name certainly proves that there’s truth in advertising. How to Blow Up a Pipeline creates a world in which leftists enact the text’s ideas, taking the next step in environmental activism by targeting the infrastructure behind the destruction of the planet. The film’s plot of targeting the demolition of a pipeline in Texas’s Permian Basin moves with the efficiency and economy of a heist film in the vein of Ocean’s Eleven, yet it never flattens their quest into mere task execution.
In its focus on character, both in the pipeline mission itself and flashbacks revealing the group’s formation, the film adds dimension and drama that illuminates the diversity required for the assembled coalition to function. Barer’s Xochitl might be their most ideologically rigorous hardliner, yet she’s hardly representative of the crew at large. The team cuts across race, class, and even political stripes. If it feels like a fanciful notion on screen, it’s because How to Blow Up a Pipeline dares its audience to rethink the possibilities of what might be achievable off screen.
I spoke with Goldhaber and Barer over Zoom prior to the film’s theatrical opening about the origins of adapting Malm’s manifesto, the challenges of making a political film, and their hopes for how audiences will respond to its radicalism.
How did your collaboration work, and when did you decide to formalize crediting Ariela among those in the “film by” in title?
Daniel Goldhaber: It was kind of a collaboration between all of us from the beginning. Jordan [Sjol] found the book, and we wrote the script together. We were always kind of in conversation with Daniel [Garber], I’ve been working with him for 15 years. There’s not a project that goes by that I’m not talking to him about from the conception stage, and this one was no different. We don’t decide on the “film by” credit until the movie’s done. It’s really a question of collectively being, “Where do we feel like the vision of this movie came from? And who do we feel shares it?” That’s a conversation that isn’t just happening among the four of us; it’s happening with the producers and some of the other collaborators as well. So it’s something that was a part of it, but it’s a more organic and fluid collaboration across the whole team.
Was it at all similar to working with Isa Mazzei on Cam when she also shared the “film by” credit? Did that collaboration inform this one?
DG: Yeah, 100% for me, at least. I think less so for Ariela, who wasn’t a part of Cam.
Ariela Barer: I wouldn’t say it didn’t [inform me]. As a director, you could have just taken everything. You had a lot of experience to share from having done it with Isa in Cam, and it was really nice to learn from.
DG: Yes, I was being a little cute…
AB: Don’t do that!
DG: …but I had actually cast Ariela as the lead of a movie that we were going to do right before the pandemic, and then that movie disappeared. And that was a film that I was doing with Isa, so, going into this, we had already started a process of talking. Ariela had a lot of familiarity with the way that I work, and that’s something that had grown across the pandemic. No big surprises.
From my understanding, it was Ariela who helped bat down the original idea of just making it a propaganda film. How did it then evolve towards the dramatic form in which we see it?
AB: It was purely that I read the book, and Danny was in a state of wanting to make a piece of propaganda…
DG: [laughs] I was just in a state, period.
AB: That was very scary to me, not just because of the implications of putting yourself out there as a filmmaker doing that. But also, there are real consequences to something like this. I’m very engaged in the conversation of property destruction and pushing the left to consider this type of resistance while also understanding that we don’t live in a perfect world where this would be a totally harmless act. So, it started with me pushing back on Danny in day-to-day conversations, and that slowly became a lot of the dramatic hook of the film. These conversations that we were having, we found to be much more interesting than a piece of propaganda.
DG: Also, something that came out was that if you’re adapting this manifesto into a drama and adding human dimension, it would become an extraordinarily boring film for that human dimension to not include conflict about these ideas. Among many of the persuasive arguments that Ariela made was that this becomes a movie when it becomes a drama between the characters. You cannot have that if everybody is in agreement from the beginning.
Did you all feel the need to reflect or model the ethos of the activism in how you made the film?
AB: Quite simply, from the beginning when we were coming up with characters, we knew that we wanted it to be us and our friends. But there was the conversation between Danny, Jordan, and I, it’s majority white guys…is this a story about whiteness and entitlement within a movement? And we just decided that the answer was no. I had been increasingly frustrated with how many times I’ve been left out of conversations like this because of the ways that opportunities are granted within the industry. We realized that the most interesting way to make this movie is to actually accurately reflect the dynamics in our lives and our actual friend group, and to properly credit and compensate people who are coming in to work on this movie and lend their stories. By broadening our scope and our perspective like that, I think it made the movie all the better. And we got to work with our friends and activists that we really admire, and we got to actually substantially include them in the process of making this movie.
We meet the activists in the film first through process and the work, and we get the more standard exposition and character development. How did you all come to this structure?
DG: When we actually started the process, the heist element of the movie was the first thing that we developed. We always thought that there was just going to be one big flashback, but when we were writing, that meant that there were all these ideas and stuff and character background that we were scrunching into the heist material. Very quickly, it became evident that wasn’t believable. These are all conversations that would have happened months earlier! We recognized a need to go back in time more, but there was a question of how we do that without having one giant flashback in the middle of the film that kills the momentum. And then we had this notion to go divide it up by character and have this Reservoir Dogs-esque riff on it that would enable us to cover a lot more ground. But then, it also became a hook for increasing the suspense and drama of particular moments.
I’m so struck by the way that social media is baked into both the plot and the aesthetic. Performative identity was a central theme you explored in Cam. Did any of that idea carry over into this and how we see a bit of frontstage and backstage with the characters?
DG: The social media aspect of it was a bit more just like frank about the nature of both how one must communicate their message in this day and age but also how we connect with each other and how we kind of find things that are outside of our own explicit sphere of life experience. The performative nature of it, obviously we had an understanding that the movie ends with a TikTok. There was awareness that’s like a complicated thing, but we hope the movie is aware of that. Yes, the message of this film is going out [through] a TikTok, but we also made a movie about this. I think that there was a tremendous amount of self-reflection in the process itself that I think we tried to materially bake into the story and into the image.
One of the moments that struck me the most in the film was Xochitl having to apologize for being “harsh” to Alisha (Jayme Lawson) after berating her upon receiving criticism. I read that moment through the lens of someone who speaks a very strident, hardline online activist way and is forced to confront how her words can hurt a real human in front of her.
AB: I love that takeaway. Personally, I think Xochitl is wy too online! [laughs]
DG: I will also say that Ariela wasn’t necessarily originally going to be in the film, it was an open question. And I kind of had to drag her kicking and screaming into it a little bit. Because, from my standpoint, I had wanted to work with her as an actor from the get-go. You don’t work with somebody as talented as she is writing and producing a movie and then not cast her in the movie. But that was something that we were very aware of, wanting to kind of have this character who is the one putting this thing together. [She would] be a reflection of the filmmaking team but also the complicated nature of ego that both goes into activism…and also the kind of ego that goes into thinking that you can make a movie about activism. None of this stuff is clear-cut or straightforward. Ultimately, that was something I know that Ariela was excited to dig into. And to dig into the nature of that Alisha-Xochitl final sequence, she was playing against herself in that debate in a way that I think was very rich.
Are you prepared for the film becoming fodder for people with a different political agenda? A lot of the bad faith arguments are confronted in the film, if anyone cares to engage, but the movie takes on a life of its own once you release it.
AB: We had to make peace with that in the process. It was something that I was a lot more fearful of as we did it. And as you’ve pinpointed in the script, we’re anticipating a lot of it. But also, you have to release that at a certain point and hope that people engage. I hope that people who think this movie isn’t for them find that in many ways, it is. This ensemble was built to try to welcome as many perspectives instead of alienating people who might just hear the language and be like, “I hate this. I’m angry now.” I hope that we’ve done some degree of work to actually invite more people to the conversation and make them feel heard and legitimate within it.
Jordan Sjol had mentioned he pushed for a bibliography in the credits. This isn’t a documentary with a call-to-action to learn more, but where else would you have guided people in the theory behind this film?
DG: To be clear, part of Jordan’s joke there was to list all of the bomb-making resources that went into the making of the movie. But ultimately, what we really felt was that the bibliography of the movie that matters the most is the book that the movie is based on. We hope that if people feel like continuing to engage in this, that’s a great place to start. It’s also a book that suggests a lot of other places to go. Something that we really believe is that there has been this kind of cultural trend in movies about this kind of material where there’s like a one-stop shop, one-size-fits-all approach, where you watch the movie, go do this thing, and now you’re good. I think that that can be very reductive from a piece of art. We hope that this film is something that, as Ariela said, people can come to from wherever they are. It can move them in whatever way they’re moved. We hope we’ve made an interesting, exciting, and provocative film. In whatever way it changes people and culture writ large will be, at the very least, interesting.
As someone from Texas—albeit Houston, far from the Permian Basin—I do have to ask what kind of color commentary your “Texas consultant” added to the film.
AB: Our Texas consultant was in the movie!
Right, I didn’t think you hired McKinsey to give you Texas advice!
AB: No, it was Olive [Jane Lorraine], a really good and talented friend of mine. We knew we were writing Katie for them from the start, and Olive and I had just talked for years about their experiences growing up in Texas, their hometown, and being affected by the oil industry while also depending on it for a livelihood within their family. It’s just such an endless, rich story that Olive had to share. I’m grateful for their contributions and their involvement in the movie.
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