Nothing makes our heart race like a race against death, even when the premise borders on the absurd. Which it does in 30 Minutes or Less. The film, directed by Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer, is about a pizza delivery guy (Jesse Eisenberg, below left) who’s forced to rob a bank after a bomb is strapped to his chest by two thugs in ape masks. Danny McBride of Pineapple Express stars as one of the half-wit criminals; stand-up Aziz Ansari (above right) plays Eisenberg’s best friend and ski-masked accomplice. Silly or no, when you make a countdown to detonation the premise of your entire movie, the incendiary device had better look credible.

That means getting the timing right: The bomb’s timer ticks down 10 hours over the course of the film, and continuity errors would quash the tension. So the script supervisor had to maintain laser focus, resetting the clock for each take. “We were almost perfect,” Fleischer says. “We only had to fix the clock in postproduction once.”

The device also had to look like it was built in a scrap yard, so prop master Erick Garibay used the kinds of parts an amateur bombmaker would use, from the trigger to the display, to rig up a meticulous-yet-messy menagerie of wires and batteries. “Prop teams can create anything. If you’re like, ‘I need a Swiss cheese hat,’ they’ll give you a Swiss cheese hat … Hopefully, the vest is accurate,” Fleischer says. “The nerds can tell us if we succeeded or not.”