The Rip Director Reveals Which Details Were True About The Real-Life Rip That Inspired The Movie [Exclusive]

Mild spoilers for "The Rip" ahead.

It's been a genuine pleasure watching Matt Damon and Ben Affleck working together onscreen again over the last five years. They were both terrific in Ridley Scott's hugely underrated "The Last Duel," and utterly delightful in the Nike shoe drama "Air" (which Affleck additionally directed). Now, they've reunited for "The Rip," a straight-up action thriller from writer/director Joe Carnahan.

Damon and Affleck star as, respectively, Miami cops Lieutenant Dane Dumars and Detective Sergeant JD Byrne, two members of a Tactical Narcotics Team who receive a tip about cash stashed in a local safe house. When they search the abode, they find $20 million in drug money. Dumars refuses to notify his superiors and confiscates his team's phones, which leaves Byrne wondering if Dumars plans to steal what would obviously be life-changing dough.

Carnahan has made some great movies about police corruption (most notably 2002's "Narc"), so he knows this dirty territory well. This time out, however, he was dealing with a story based on real events that the film's technical advisor, Chris Casiano, personally witnessed.

In an interview with /Film's Ben Pearson, Carnahan discussed how Casiano was able to add "a lot more color" regarding the real-life rip. One interesting element is that it took 42 hours to count the money. Other details that might've seemed too wild to be true also happened. Per Carnahan:

"[T]here's an actual DEA-held Wells Fargo, it's a real place, and there was a guy with a clipboard waiting for them, and six armed men, and they excused the other two officers, put them in Ubers? That's all true. And then they used a two-story counter, this giant electronic counter. So, that moment where the readout is $20 million, and the card [says the same number]? That actually happened."

Obviously, Joe Carnahan had to stray from the true story to ramp up the film's suspense, but a surprisingly significant portion of what you see in "The Rip" really did occur. It's hard to find more details about the real rip online, but there were, in fact, arrests made at the end of the investigation. Beyond that, though, the broader strokes of "The Rip" is a pure product of Carnahan's wild imagination. "[I]t's like, then you got to invent the rest of it, man," the filmmaker added. "You've got to invent all the little pinwheels, and the Rube Goldberg contraption that eventually drops a net over the mouse. But we did have a little more insight into that than somebody who's just reading about it."

"The Rip" is currently streaming on Netflix. And if you're in the mood to read a masterful Carnahan screenplay, hunt down his adaptation of James Ellroy's "White Jazz." It's written in the first person, and it's absolutely amazing.