Yahoo! News

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro - A group of Serbian actors filming a bank robbery scene played their parts so well that police mistook them for the real thing and hauled them off to a police station, a newspaper reported Wednesday.

The crew was filming the robbery scene Tuesday on a street in Novi Sad, 30 miles north of Belgrade, as part of a project to be shown in a multimedia performance at the nearby Serbian National Theater.

"We had just put black stockings on our heads and were carrying plastic handguns needed for the scene, when about 30 policemen surrounded us with pistols pointed at us," actor Aleksandar Gajin told the Vecernje Novosti newspaper.

No amount of explaining could immediately persuade the officers that it was not an actual heist.

Police confiscated the actors' toy weapons and the purported loot — black plastic bags stuffed with newspapers — and briefly interrogated the actors at a nearby police station, Gajin said.

Police released the crew shortly thereafter, Gajin said, adding that the "police used no brutality ... they just warned us that we should have informed them in advance."