As Fast X, the tenth (but not last!) installment in the Fast and the Furious series hits this week, we've been looking back at how the franchise has upped the stakes on how car chases and Hollywood action of the 21st century is created. So what's the secret sauce for the Fast movies? In a nutshell, so much of what they do is done practically, which is to say without leaning too heavily on CGI.
That doesn't mean that they don't use CGI. Of course they do, but the series has historically understood that audiences can tell the difference between a computer-generated car getting destroyed and the genuine article getting destroyed. And, well... look at the box office on these movies if you're wondering how much that matters.
Today we're revisiting the fifth and sixth films in the series: Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6.
And when you're done reading, watch our epic look back at the car chases of the entire Fast series at the top of this page!
Fast Five (2011)
Instead of being centered around illegal street racing, the creatively titled Fast Five would now take the franchise into more of an action movie place. Director Justin Lin and writer Chris Morgan would add a few fight scenes and shootouts to their heist movie that, of course, provided copious amounts of car carnage as well.
Fast & Furious paid homage to the first film by recreating the original’s heist, just on a bigger budget. Well, I guess one good turn deserves another, so Fast Five was also going to open on a genre callback, but one almost as old as cinema itself.
“The train heist for us was to one-up the classic stage coach train robbery,” said Vin Diesel on the Blu-ray extras for the film. “We wanted to do our Fast and Furious version of it, without horses but a whole lot of horsepower.”
The Fast Five train heist wouldn't have the charm of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or be as hauntingly cinematic as the Roger Deakins-photographed heist from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but it would be expensive. The production was going to pony up $25M for it. That’s because the production had to, according to Lin on those same Blu-ray extras, “get permission to basically own a piece of railroad. Then we had to buy trains and build these trucks that were able to go up against the trains.”
The rugged, off-road type vehicles used to execute the heist were all custom-built from the ground up. And the heist also needed some cars to steal, preferably expensive ones. They wouldn’t be going through all this effort for a couple of Fords. Well, one Ford, I guess. But those classic Ferrari-beating GT40s aren’t cheap, and neither was the De Tomaso Pantera.
As for the car Dom was going to jump out of the train with, they needed something a little cheaper. That’s why Dom’s driving a 1963 Corvette… which isn’t even real. The production spent $500k on a dozen of these cars from Mongoose Motorsports, a company that specializes in producing replicas.
Once the team had acquired all the vehicles they needed for the sequence, they still had to figure out exactly how they were going to do it all. And as always with the Fast movies, a big part of that was the question of how much they could do practical vs. green screen or CGI.
In the end, the train heist actually did utilize a ton of CGI. And while some of it is pretty obvious, the stunt team did an incredible job ensuring that at least some elements of every stunt were grounded in reality. All of the shots of the heist trucks driving next to the train were actually shot, for example. Even the shots of the trucks pulling the vehicles out of the train were practically done, just at slower speeds than the scene would lead you to believe.
The CGI basically comes in any time the main actors are used. But even then, it’s mostly just background replacements. Yes, the close-ups of Paul Walker fighting to regain control of the truck are also computer-generated, but the wide shots which establish the action were all shot with real stunt men using safety wires.
However, the production did hit one major snag because of its commitment to practical effects. The shot where the truck drives into the side of the train wasn’t actually supposed to happen! It was supposed to just bump the train. but the Fast and Furious team – taking a lesson from Bob Ross – just rewrote the script to accommodate the “happy accident.”
Even after the flubbed jump, there was still one car left to steal, which in typical FF fashion was completely real. The stunt team used an air canon to shoot the Corvette out of the train. And when it hit the ground, it became very obvious why the production went with the cheap option, choosing to buy a dozen replicas. Hell, that wasn't even the only time in this scene they were going to treat those Vettes like one of those Nerf bows and arrows from the '90s. They'd use the same trick moments later to launch the Dom’s Corvette into the river.
Ultimately, that final leap into the river is probably more real than it is fake. Even though the close-up shots of Dom and Brian were done with some wirework and green screen, the wide shots were the real deal.
This scene clearly leveled up what a Fast and Furious action scene could be, and it did so by building on lessons learned from the previous film. The heist featured significantly more CGI than the tanker heist of the fourth movie, but it feels way less noticeable because Lin and the stunt team did a way better job of sandwiching slivers of CGI in between the practically photographed elements of the stunts.
For Fast Five's climax, Lin knew he needed something audiences have never seen before. The vault chase started a new era of FF action sequences, ones which aren't bound by what's physically possible. Instead, Lin leans into the creativity of his stunt, special effects, and CGI teams to make the impossible seem possible, if only for a few frames. The vault chase set a new standard of what an absurd – which I say with complete love and admiration – Fast and Furious car chase could be.
“At one point we were going to start the movie off with the vault heist. And of course there's the discussion about, 'How are you going to do it?'” recalled Lin. “‘We should just do it CG.’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no. Let's just build what a vault would look like and then just go out and tow it around and see what happens.’”
They did that, only to quickly realize that whipping chargers around corners with a fake vault in tow was impossible to control and would level anything that got in its way. There was really only one solution to this: They had to make the vault steerable.
This involved sawing the back part of a heavy-duty pickup truck off, putting a vault over the top of it, and then adding tiny viewing holes in front and on the side. That way they could drive the vault and steer it.
To accomplish the shot where Dom and Brian pull the vault through a bank, the special effects team built a vault that had an axel through the middle of it so it would roll. The vault needed some room to get up to speed, so a lead-up track was built and it would start tumbling once it crashed through the windows. To make things even more complicated, stunt people were used to act as bank customers in front of the camera in order to emphasize the danger.
And then there was still one section of the bank chase left to shoot: Lin and company really upped the car carnage factor once the vault and Chargers got to the bridge.
“There was so much going on with this bridge,” said Spiro Razatos, who severed as second unit director and stunt coordinator. “We had 14 cars, I think, head on with this vault. Things were being crushed, destroyed, flipped, knocked in the air, knocked off the bridge, falling 30 feet into the water. I mean, cars being decapitated.”
To execute the mayhem needed on the bridge, yet more vault types were needed. For shots like the one where the vault had to absolutely obliterate a car in a head-on collision, the stunt team attached part of the vault to a semi-truck. And to knock the cars into the drink, they used a crane to turn one of the vaults into a pendulum.
That's not all, folks. They also decided it'd be cool to decapitate a car too. This didn't require a vault, but it did require their shortest stuntman. And it didn't require a ton of movie magic either. Yes, they had a pull wire to yank the roof for dramatic effect. But a cable did decapitate the car, and it would have decapitated the driver too had he not ducked right before the cable hit. And they couldn't do it in just one take; he did it three times!
In Fast Five, Justin Lin made the biggest Fast and Furious movie in every sense of the word: It had the biggest budget; at $630M, it brought in the most money; it created the family vibe of the big ensemble cast; and it became a franchise that was about more than just illegal street racing. In short, Lin created what many believe to be the best film of the franchise, so of course he'd have to try and outdo himself in Fast & Furious 6.
Fast & Furious 6 (2013)
For a long time, Lin always espoused how important cars were to the characters that drove them. And with Fast & Furious 6, he had the ability to create and acquire some truly unique vehicles, using their distinct prosperities to push the action further than it had ever gone before.
Take, for example, the flip car.
“Justin called me early on and said, ‘I want something that's going to run head-on into vehicles and launch them into the air,” recalled picture vehicle coordinator Dennis McCarthy on the Blu-ray features.
The design came from the character of Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), who was “someone that will go right into the middle of a storm and demolish everything in its way,” according to Lin.
Building custom cars from scratch was nothing new for McCarthy and his team, but they really went above and beyond with Shaw's flip car. It can drive in ways regular cars can't thanks to its front and rear steering, which allow it to crab around and drive sideways.
The initial plan was to just shoot the car flips the old-fashioned way – with a pipe ramp – just like they did when Dom charged headlong into a semi all those films ago. But that all quickly changed once they realized the flip car actually worked. At that point, Lin decided he wanted to add more cars to flip.
On screen, the flip car definitely caused a ruckus, but it wasn't the only tool the filmmakers used to create mayhem on the streets of London. Take the super canon, for instance: The thing is able to launch a car 45 feet before it hits the ground and starts tumbling.
These stunts are expensive to run, even for just one take, which is why some stunts could have up to 12 cameras covering it. And in typical Fast fashion, they were also trying the latest and greatest in camera tech to get that perfect shot, like the Omni-copter which allowed for shooting over the top of buildings and swooping down into the cars for some nice shots.
Despite Hobbs’ (The Rock) vain attempt to stop Shaw in London, the bad guy still got away, which meant the entire company had to move to the Canary Islands to try and stop Shaw once again on the island's brand new highways… which conveniently weren't open to the public.
“Everything we do is going to be practical and to have a government that was that open to say, ‘Hey, yeah, come over and we have these brand new highways you can wreck,’” recalls Lin. “And it made all the difference.”
Lin chose to shoot in the Canary Islands instead of building a set because it meant he could put more of the budget in front of the camera. So of course they spent that money on some real tanks. And indeed, they ended up using a real tank 90% of the time. Shots like the tank smashing through the cargo truck and other cars are real, and that includes Roman's jump from his Mustang to Brian's Ford Escort, and also Brian's Escort jump too.
And these were not like the "real" jumps from Fast Five or 2 Fast 2 Furious, which were gutted cars with dummies in them. In the case of the Brian jump, it was a real stunt driver who had to do a real jump… twice (because he flipped it on the first try).
And then there’s F6's pièce de résistance: Shaw's escape attempt in the Antonov cargo plane, which was easily Lin's most ambitious action sequence during his first stint on the franchise.
“I'd never done anything close to that scale,” said Lin. “That was the ultimate challenge. Basically designed seven action sequences. That's happening all at once.”
This was a complex sequence to pull off not only because there was a bunch going on plot-wise, but also because they couldn't acquire a plane. So of course they just build their own. Three of them, actually.
For shots like where the cars were driving next to the landing gear, a 75x50-foot section of the fuselage was built that was completely finished up to 30 feet high. And since the Antonov was supposed to be taking off, the hulking plane sections actually needed to move.
A 100-foot section of the cargo bay, with its doors, was also built so the cars would be able to drive on and off the set piece while it was in motion. And for the climax, they built a 1:1 scale section of the fuselage and wings that also needed to be set on fire. We'll get to that one in a bit.
But first, we need to talk about the small army it took to get this sequence in the can: 200 people working three weeks of night shoots to get it all done. And since it was a night shoot, one of the things that they needed to accommodate for was lighting, which significantly added to the complexity of the shoot.
“We could light the runway, but you couldn't right from the airplane because we didn't have an airplane,” said second unit stunt coordinator Andy Gill. “So they built these lighting rigs on trucks that would move with us for the sequence as the lighting grid. And so the runway became very busy with this massive Antonov going down the center of the red light with lighting trucks following you at speed.”
It was coordinated commotion getting all the stunt drivers to hit their marks, but that's old hat for the 6th movie of this franchise. Nevertheless, Lin had a huge cargo plane to play with and relied on some classic Fast and Furious tricks to produce some stunts the FF audience had never seen before.
Take the sequence where the plane is trying to lift off, pulling the cars into the air with it. Think of it like cooking in Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but instead of Link, Justin Lin was cooking something new with familiar ingredients. It's made of one part the car harpoon from the first heist chase. Another ingredient was the motion base tech they used to shoot the CGI sections of Fast Five’s train leap. And the final ingredient was tying two cars together and hoisting them up to get the practically photographed visual. And all of this was done to provide the dramatic tension for what is one of the coolest shots in any Fast and Furious film: Dom's firey escape from the hull of the Antonov.
To pull the shot off, they had to do it in two separate segments. First, they had to build a huge 1:1 skeleton of the plane that they could light on fire and drag down the runway at scale. And then, separately, they shot Dom's car jump, which required its own rig which had its own nose that exploded before the charger was launched through it.
What makes this scene so impressive is all the ingenuity it took to shoot as much practically as they did. It takes a deep understanding of many filmmaking disciplines to understand where the line is on what absolutely needs to be shot practically and what can be faked with CGI.
Sure, most of the plane was digitally replaced in post, but I dare you took look away from all the practically shot action to notice. The absolute necessity for practical action to sell CGI set dressing was a lesson Justin Lin pushed to the absolute limit on every Fast and Furious set. And for his penultimate entry into the franchise, the action might be his greatest accomplishment.
After defeating Shaw, the Fast family finally earned their amnesty. For the first time since the original Fast and the Furious, they were able to sit down for a family meal, say goodbye to their beloved director who reinvented the franchise, and give thanks for the first billion-dollar take at the box office.
Obviously, the franchise would continue. But now it would be horror director James Wan's turn to dive into his first action movie.
Check back tomorrow for our exploration of Furious 7, The Fate of the Furious, and F9!
source https://www.ign.com/articles/how-fast-five-set-a-new-standard-of-absurd-with-the-vault-heist-evolution