A Director’s Commentary
In 1995, I saw a photograph in the Los Angeles Times of a plexiglass box on wheels that was about 3' x 3' with the letters FRB emblazoned on it. Inside, the copy beneath explained, was $30 million in U.S. $100 notes…$30 million in one plexiglass box. The article explained that the money was actually going to be destroyed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Los Angeles because the bills were deemed “unfit.” The image so fascinated me that it led me on a decades-long journey that’s resulted in our Den of Thieves motion picture franchise.
Along the way, I have met and befriended countless gangsters, legendary undercover cops, world-renowned thieves, sheriffs, diamond police, getaway drivers, criminal receivers (or “fences”), security experts, black market hawaladars…I’ve been inside places sealed off to the outside world by the heaviest, most advanced security systems on earth ― the Federal Reserve Bank, Supermax prisons, the World Diamond Center vault ― and it has been a career-defining experience.
I have long admired cinema’s great crime dramas, and the filmmakers that made them. I wanted to start off by telling a story about the real world of crime in Los Angeles, a world I knew intimately as a native Angeleno (having had so many friends on both sides of the game) and one I had never seen captured accurately in a film. Then, I wanted to expand our story into the criminal underworld of Europe, a world that looks and feels so different from the one in California ― and, in doing so, explore and dissect other brilliant heists that have become the stuff of street legend.
I, like all of us, am a lover of movies. To be able to fully immerse an audience in a hyper-authentic way, where no detail is too small, and guide them into these closed, secret, hidden-and-illicit yet endlessly fascinating cinematic worlds, is why I do what I do. Movies were my first love, and I hope that is evident to all of you in every frame.
To all you cinephiles out there, nothing but love and respect.
Christian Gudegast