5 Screenwriting Takeaways: 'The Vault' sets its sights on the Bank of Spain for the next heist

How do you break into the most secure vault in the world? (A vault that hasn’t had a single break-in since it was built more than 80 years ago). That happens to be the hook for The Vault, an action-thriller/heist movie starring Freddie Highmore, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey and Liam Cunningham, and directed by Jaume Balagueró. It was written by Rafa Martínez, Andrés M. Koppel, Borja Glez. Santaolalla, Michel Gaztambide, and Rowan Athale.

The Vault opens with a salvage crew pulling up sunken treasure in the middle of the sea only to have it immediately confiscated by the Spanish government and stored in a vault that was built decades earlier with no means of breaking into it. 

Walter Moreland (Cunningham) is the treasure hunter who seeks to get back his rightful claim and he recruits a team of professionals to help him break into the secure vault. Thom (Highmore) is the genius engineer who shuns the corporate life his father tries to hand him in search of something more meaningful. Lorraine (Bergès-Frisbey) helps bring Thom on board the team.

Filled with tropes, twists, and the intrigue of how this team will break into the notorious safe, The Vault offers the expected suspense and thrills of a heist movie.

Here are five screenwriting takeaways from The Vault:

1. Breaking in

Heist movies are all about breaking into places that are impossible to get into. Granted, many of the rules are set up by the writer, the world understands that banks like to hold securely onto their money and their customers’ assets. It was true for Butch Cassidy and Sundance, and it’s true for the team in The Vault eager to crack the uncrackable code.

That’s the journey the writer has to take the audience on, which is why it’s important for the team to have a little knowledge that they can share with the newest member. In this case, Thom is the new member who learns through some exposition what needs to be done and the challenges they face.

Writers can see how they slowly add new layers of complexities as the story unfolds and observe how the team, usually with the help of the new guy, figures out how to solve problems.

Moreland even tells Thom, "I need your mind. Because I’m not just looking for a solution to a problem, I don’t know what the problem is."

2. Tropes part 1: Heist

There are two aspects to The Vault. The film is mainly a heist movie and it features many of the tropes that audiences expect. For writers, they can see these tropes play out and understand why they are critical to telling the story. Heist movies aren’t cookie-cutter, but like the hero’s journey, tropes and timing make the execution easier for both writer and viewer.

Some of the heist tropes in The Vault include:

• Breaking into an "impossible" place.
• The false alarm. This occurs when in the midst of scoping out the place, an alarm is triggered that indicates how fast the antagonist moves to thwart a problem. This shows the audience and our characters how much harder the job is to pull off and the ease of getting caught.
• At some point, there is often a montage that shows the team planning the heist and gathering the equipment necessary for success.
• The lead often has a "flash of genius" at some point. This often occurs when everyone feels the job is impossible and they truly can’t move forward, yet our hero will have a cue from some innocuous source. In The Vault, one of these flashes occurs to the hero as he observes the way a bartender is making a drink.

 3. Tropes part 2: Treasure hunts

What makes this film compelling is that it’s part heist movie and part treasure hunt movie. While it’s more of a heist movie, The Vault does offer several tropes that are indicative of movies involving treasure hunts, such as:

• How do you find treasure? With a map, of course. And treasure maps do make their appearance in this film, which also leads to...
• Hidden messages. National Treasure was filled with hidden messages and clues to help drive the story forward. In The Vault, a code is the main reason for trying to break into the safe.
• Treasure hunt films are shrouded in legendary tales. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl had it, as did futuristic treasure hunt film Ready Player One. Treasures are often dumped or hidden by legends who never were able to reclaim their booty.

4. Time as a conflict

Want to increase tension? Put a ticking clock in the story. The Vault uses the ticking clock quite well, and writers can see how they use it in myriad ways.

When they are scoping out the building, the team has only so much time to get in and out. At one point, the time they have to pull off the heist is reduced, and even deciding whether or not to go through with the plan is limited by time.

The film uses time as a point of suspense from the very beginning.

5. The antagonist’s antagonist

Whether the person is good or bad, heist films tend to have a human barrier to prevent the heroes from fulfilling their mission. One of the characters that sticks out in The Vault is Gustavo (Jose Coronado), who is the head of security. He is a stubborn and strong-willed individual who sees protecting the vault as his priority — and he’s the one thing that stands in the way of the mission’s success.

But he has his own antagonists coming from the bank executives and local officials. The timeline of The Vault takes place in 2010 during the middle of the World Cup. Spain is poised to win, a crowd of 500,000 is gathering near the bank and the government, and they don’t want to shut down streets.

Although the audience hopes the team thwarts Gustavo’s efforts to catch them, the writers put barriers in front of the antagonist.

The Vault is now streaming on Netflix.