Law enforcement never caught them but, when they profiled the gang, they figured they were all part of one military unit because of their expertise and their skillset.

It helped the film for these guys to be Marines. To pull off those kinds of heists, they would need a pretty extraordinary skillset. 

You seem to be a real scholar of heist movies.  Is that something you were into growing up?

A scholar of movies, in general.

 But I love heist movies, I always did.  We tried to get everything very, very accurate and had a lot of technical advisors. We cast a lot of the real guys, a lot of real cops and real gangsters.  We had some ex-military in the movie as well. We wanted to get everything as tactically and logistically accurate as possible.

You've been a screenwriter for most of your career and this is your first time as the director. Is that something you had always been aiming to do?

I went to UCLA film school to become a director and I actually never meant to be a writer. As I was graduating, I started directing music videos, which at the time was a way into the business.  

To graduate from UCLA, you have to write a script. I wrote a script with my old writing partner and we sold it to Oliver Stone, of all people, before we even graduated.

That completely changed the trajectory of my career. I became a screenwriter. It really wasn't by design.  It just kind of happened that way.

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