Koby Stevens and Australian Hollywood star Eric Bana had been working on the upcoming footy documentary for five years when Stevens’ car was broken into in St Kilda.

The “brazen” thieves stole camera gear and a hard drive containing hours of interviews for the project.

“It’s kind of sickening. You know, we never usually travel with that sort of gear,” Stevens told Today this morning.

“And it just happens to be that it was in my car for a bit and I was packing, unloading.”

Luckily for Stevens and Bana, the documentary footage was backed up and all is not lost.

But the ex-AFL great said he still didn’t want the hours of unaired footage to be in the wrong hands.

“It’s more about that there’s something out in the world that no one’s seen,” he continued.

“For me, as someone who’s been creating and running that project with a big team who have had my back the whole way, it’s about protecting that.”

Stevens said he hoped the offenders would realise the sentimentality of the hard drive’s contents.

He pleaded for the thieves to return it, even anonymously.

“If they have it, just drop it off. There’s not much you can do with it,” he added.

“People know now what it is. So that’s the message

“Look, you can have my camera equipment for stealing my stuff, but just drop the hard drive off.”

The film, Thrive, is due to enter post-production at the end of the year.

“The film’s pretty game-changing and on that hard drive was some pretty game-changing stuff,” Stevens said yesterday.

“It’s just the sensitive nature of it all, that’s now floating around in Melbourne somewhere.”