Jordan RiefeTwo pals from Boston who became Hollywood A-listers, that’s Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. They’ve appeared in roughly a dozen films together, though most people only remember their Oscar triumph, Good Will Hunting, and, more recently, Air, directed by Affleck. Their latest, The Rip, produced through their company, Artists Equity, is now streaming on Netflix. In it, they play members of a Tactical Narcotics Team whose captain has just been murdered. When the unit gets a tip about a stash house, they find themselves in for more than they bargained for — $20 million in ill-gotten cash.
“My friend told me this story,” director Joe Carnahan tells LA Weekly about the origins of The Rip, loosely based on a real-life occurrence in Miami. His friend, a former Miami cop, had just lost his son, and Carnahan saw an opportunity to help him through the grief. “With his blessing, I wrote the script and stayed as close to the factual nature of it as I could, with obvious dramatic license where it was required.”
Director Joe Carnahan (R) directing “The Rip” (Warrick Page/Netflix)
Carnahan is no stranger to the mean streets. They’ve inspired past films like his 2002 breakout, Narc, starring Ray Liotta, as well as the Vegas noir, Smokin’ Aces, and his work on shows like The Blacklist, for which he also served as executive producer.
For any director, it can be a mixed blessing having on his set a pair of producer-actors who happen to be Oscar-winning writers, one of whom directed an Oscar Best Picture winner (Argo). It might be great because, unlike most actors, they’ve experienced what Carnahan’s going through and are empathetic. Or it might be awful because they flex their producer muscles and second-guess every one of his creative decisions.
“They were very respectful. Part of the mission statement with Artists Equity is they really back up the idea of the boilerplate being, ‘we’re here for the artist, to support them, and give them the things they need to be great.’ And they certainly did that with me,” he says, grateful they didn’t mess with his script. “If they had suggestions, ten times out of ten they were really good. And there wasn’t this caprice about it. It was thoughtful, and I really appreciated that. They’re childhood friends who also became movie stars. Like a double unicorn situation. It’s like having Peyton Manning and Eli Manning, Super Bowl quarterbacks, from the same family.”
A still from “The Rip” (Claire Folger/Netflix)
A straight-up cop drama, The Rip gradually becomes a whodunnit. Stuck inside a suburban house in what appears to be a deserted neighborhood, the team is ordered by an anonymous caller to evacuate or face high-caliber hellfire. They could call for backup, but for some reason, Dumars (Damon) has neglected to notify his superiors of the massive cash stash, shrouding him in a suspicion that threatens to pull the team apart.
Joining Damon and Affleck are Steven Yuen as a detective, Kyle Chandler as their superior officer, Sasha Calle as the stash house’s sole occupant, who may or may not have known about the hidden money, and the red-hot Teyana Taylor, who’s coming off her recent Golden Globe win for One Battle After Another. Carnahan met her just as she was wrapping that film.
“I found her so bracingly honest,” he recalls about a conversation that ran the gamut from kids to divorce, love and loss. “She wasn’t trying to hide any part of who she was, and you instantly fell in love with that quality about her. There are people in this world who are designed to carry light and radiance, and Teyana is one of those messengers. I’ve been doing this long enough to know, when I get in front of somebody, you get a sense of them as a human being.”
(Claire Folger/Netflix)
Aesthetic influences on The Rip included post-war titles by legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, Stray Dog and High and Low, the latter of which was recently remade by Spike Lee. While both are film noir, they take place in broad daylight, unlike Carnahan’s film.
“We were looking at the blocking and how Kurosawa would move actors in the frame, and deep focus stuff. The post-war Japanese noir, that’s the vibe, oddly enough. But Serpico or Friedkin, To Live and Die in LA, a color noir,” says Carnahan, listing influences from the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Affleck and Damon’s Artists Equity, whose first film was 2022’s Air, has produced numerous documentaries and TV commercials, as well as titles like The Accountant 2, starring Affleck, Unstoppable, starring Affleck’s ex-wife, Jennifer Lopez, and Kiss of the Spider Woman, also starring Lopez. What sets Artists Equity apart from its peers is a business model that offers top talent a larger percentage of profits in exchange for lower salaries. It includes not just actors, writers and directors, but below-the-liners such as cinematographers, editors and costume designers.
(Claire Folger/Netflix)
“There’s been an evolution/contraction in this business, and things are very weird right now, and we don’t know what the profit-sharing structure is like,” offers Carnahan. “So, when you introduce something that’s kind of revolutionary, it’s amazing. A dual tip of the hat to Netflix for understanding the business is moving inexorably in this way. The great thing about this is I got the movie I wanted, Netflix got the movie they wanted, Artists Equity got the movie that they wanted.”
“The Rip” is streaming now on Netflix.