Hi, I'm Rob Cohen. I'm the director of
and as Vin Diesel says later on in the movie, "Let's go for a little ride."
The Fast and the Furious started in January 2000
when Executive VP, Scott Stuber, gave me an article from Vibe magazine
about illegal street-racing in Queens, NY.
I read the article and didn't see the movie in it.
Later that week, I went out to my first illegal street race.
The amazing scene I saw out there on San Fernando Road
at 2:00 in the morning on a Saturday night
made me think otherwise, and put me to work with producer Neal Moritz
and screenwriters Erik Bergquist, John Pogue,
David Ayer and the uncredited Kario Salem,
to put together a story which would capture this amazing world
and let it ride on the rails of a hijacking crime plot,
which is being set up here in the first scene.
At any rate, in the summer of the year 2000, we began to shoot.
This sequence was an interesting challenge because in a sense it's a Western.
This is stolen from John Ford's Stagecoach.
How is it stolen from John Ford's Stagecoach?
Basically, you think of the 18-wheeler as a stagecoach
and you think of the Honda Civics as the horses.
The bad guys, dressed in black appropriately, surround the stagecoach.
They get aboard the stagecoach
and get to the stage driver.
Interesting stunt
done with a little digital magic to remove the safety ramp for the stuntman.
They take the stagecoach driver
who valiantly fights with the butt of his shotgun, a Louisville slugger.
And they take him down, usually throwing him off the stagecoach.
But we didn't want our villains to kill anybody
because ultimately, this movie is leading
to a very important and somewhat controversial conclusion
about the fate of the cop and the criminal in the final scenes of the movie,
which we will get to in about an hour and 50 minutes.
Anyway, once they take the stagecoach, there is usually a cliff
or some other thing looming with runaway horses.
Here was our solution. The construction of
a highway that narrows down to one lane
and the car that has to slip in under the truck.
A stunt that probably added$50 million to the gross of the picture.
Here in the transition from night LA to day LA.
was our first declaration of a stylistic conceit.
That this movie, although based on the streets
was going to have an operatic and highly intensely visual nature.
So the transitions were not standard dissolves.
They were visual effects that eliminated traffic,
cars, and people that moved.
So that we could go from night to day or day to night seamlessly.
Here's the introduction of the first star in the film, Paul Walker.
This was shot at Dodger Stadium
on the first day of shooting, and was one of the defining shots of speed.
It's held for about 17 seconds and it shows how fast
these rice rockets, in this case an Eclipse, can actually go
and what it feels like to drive 140, 150 miles an hour
on a city street, or in this case, a baseball stadium parking lot.
Here we are in Echo Park. Part of the production design concept
worked out with Waldemar Kalinowski, the production designer,
was to show a new LA.
An LA of neighborhoods, individual houses and small stores.
Old architecture, not the stucco, anonymous LA.
of endless television series' episodes.
And to try to show the hills,
an aspect of LA often overlooked, since LA is usually thought of as flat.
But it has a beautiful spine of the Hollywood hills running through the city.
This feature is used throughout the picture.
Here is Jordana Brewster, one of the most beautiful women
working in cinema today, and a very talented actress.
And the introduction of the great Vin Diesel.
His signature bald head,
his strength, his bear-like presence,
contrasting with Paul's classic, American male beauty.
And we're beginning to set up the two poles of this film
that will
be the source of most of the conflict, both physical and emotional.
And the fulcrum between the two poles, Jordan a Brewster's character
as the sister of one, and the lover of the other to come.
Here is an introduction for more beautiful cars.
Obviously, this film would revolve greatly around
the most idealized, off the hook, dope-ass, rice rockets
that could be achieved in all of the world of illegal street-racing.
And here, speaking of dope-ass, is the introduction of Michelle Rodriguez,
one of the most interesting actresses to come along in a very long time.
And someone who made quite a mark for herself in this film.
It's your fuel map. It's got a nasty hole.
-That's why you're unloading in third. - Told you.
I lengthen the injector pulse...
Here, along with the beautiful cars, is the co-starring cast:
Chad Lindberg as Jesse,
Matt Schulze as Vince, Johnny Strong as Leon.
Three very interesting colorful textures
that the film needed to balance out the male cast.
And, of course, the three guys are hardly the equal of one Michelle Rodriguez.
Here we are in the Toretto market.
We're beginning to see the dynamics of this dysfunctional family
and the love story between Michelle Rodriguez and Vin Diesel.
It was not in the script. We invented it in the first week of shooting
to create a presence for her in the film.
Here, I had Chad Lindberg
very often comment on Paul Walker's good looks.
Because it was important to me that his role as an undercover cop,
that we just don't assume that the audience will accept
that Walker is just your average LAPD kind of guy.
We are telling the audience that we know he's, in fact, a special,
very handsome, almost beautiful, charismatic presence.
And those little interchanges were to set that up.
This fight had been choreographed by stunt coordinator Mic Rodgers.
When the actors saw the choreography, they felt that it was too choreographed
and they wanted to mix it up for real between the two of them.
And really throw some punches
and make it like a real street scuffle, which I applauded.
What did you put in that sandwich?
So, always willing to let actors smash each other
less they have energy to fight with me.
I decided to shoot this scene with three handheld cameras
all at the same time but from different angles.
So that the matching and the kinetics would be very possible in the editing.
This was part of setting a standard of how to create
a lot of editing possibilities in this film, to do things that were kind of unorthodox.
You are going to begin to see here, cuts that come from handheld
to angles that are quite similar
to angles that are quite radical
that will create much more of a dynamic feeling
than your standard shooting of a scene like this.
The purpose being that I felt that every scene had to race.
This was a film about speed.
Speed was the essence, heartbeat and soul of this movie.
How do we capture speed in a new way?
Not just speed in the race scenes or the hijacking scenes
but the entire narrative should be fast and furious.
If we fell short of that, the film would cleave into two parts.
The racing and action scenes would be one and the blab scenes the other part.
So I decided to shoot
even the most expository blab scene as if it were a race.
So if you watch the scenes, you'll see that the camera is in constant motion.
The editorial style is to constantly change the perspective
even if it's just a slight change of perspective
to create a feeling of energy.
But not the kind of crazy energy of a rock video where you can't tell where you are.
I wanted the audience to always know where they were,
but to feel the dynamism of shots like these.
This kind of tracking shot. All kinds of things blitzing through the frame.
All kinds of verticals to break it up
so that you would feel the dynamism.
Out to show the ideal performance parts auto shop.
Back in, the NOS tank, a very important element.
Nitrous Oxide, the gas that is going to double the horsepower of these engines.
It will make these cars go as fast as 180 miles an hour.
Here is another one of my favorite transition shots.
This is actually the LA vegetable market, the produce market.
We took it over at night and staged a kind of operatic scene
with our homages to West Side Story
and to other street opera movies that have been classic films
or the Corman AlP films, where we got our title, The Fast and the Furious.
We actually traded Roger Corman stock footage for the rights to use
the title from his film, called The Fast and the Furious,
made in 1958, I believe.
Here is the first view of "the scene."
When I went out that night on San Fernando Road, this is what I saw.
This is what made me fall in love. This is exactly my experience that night.
This multi-ethnic, multiculti as I call it, multicultural world
of Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Afro-Americans, and white Americans.
All these inner-city guys and girls hanging out
without racial tension, speaking the common language of the car.
And more interested in racing than in any kind of racism.
And that knocked me over
because years ago, if it were Boyz N the Hood
these people would be shooting each other
and here, they were really just interested in who had the best car,
who had the best paint job, who was the best driver,
the best designer, or who had the prettiest girlfriend
or the coolest navel ring.
-Heard about that? - Hell, yeah.
Anyway, here we have Ja Rule, the hip-hop star,
who, again, came on the set that night with not much of a part
and he and I started to improvise a new role, a new part
of a guy who is part of this race
but who's racing for a ménage à trois that he's going to be promised.
A small little arc of a character, but one I'm very fond of.
And of course, through Ja we got the song, Do It Fast, Do It Furious
and ultimately our soundtrack album deal with Def Jam and Murder, Inc.,
his label with the Gotti brothers,
which gave us our platinum soundtrack album.
Putting Ja in the movie, which was really producer Neal Moritz's idea
turned out to be the key to our enormous musical success with the film.
The soundtrack, by the way, was done by rave DJ artist BT.
It was my thought that rave music was the kind of pulsing electronica,
which could hold all of this together
and would make a very beautiful, energetic bed
for the action, the characters, and the songs and would be not typical
of 100 violins sawing away with the London Symphony Orchestra.
At any rate, all of this is true.
This is how it's done. Bets are laid
and they wait until they have an opportunity
to go to one of several tracks to race on, streets to race on
when they know that the police are occupied elsewhere
with a murder, robbery, whatever.
They have police scanners, radios, that let them know what's going on
and the scene is highly organized,
although there never seems to be the appearance of any organization.
What you're going to see in the next sequence
in the next number of scenes of the race world, is actually how it's done.
It could be a documentary.
A glamorous documentary, but documentary truth, nonetheless.
As Chad Lindberg calls out the qualities of these engines.
This is the language of the rice rocket. This is the complexity
of these computer-controlled, fuel-injection, front-wheel drive engines
that can be re-jiggered in a thousand different configurations
left only to the automotive cleverness of the designers or racers.
And believe me, these young guys and gals
know their cars better than Detroit.
If Detroit knew what these kids know,
we wouldn't have a flagging auto industry today.
Anyway, like that night on San Fernando Road again,
I saw them suddenly drive out, and went to the street
and lined up under a bridge to race two at a time.
The fact here that they're going to race four at a time is the only falsehood.
I just felt it would be more interesting
to see four cars blitzing down the street
than two, which is normal, or three, which they do sometimes.
Again, here come the wet dreams
of the rice rockets of the racing world.
The absolute best cars
and some of the best women, in Los Angeles.
And also, again, true to the ethnicity, a lot of Asian-Americans.
The sport, I think, started by and large on the West Coast with Asian-American kids
and I wanted to keep that clear.
Now this pizza man is somebody I should have fired, because he's a terrible actor
and I guess it's me, doing my Hitchcockian cameo.
All right, here come the four cars, the music's wailing,
the gals are spray-painting the start mark,
all our characters are on-scene.
It's one of the interesting challenges in this film.
A lot of films, you have two people talking, then another few people talking
and then another scene of a few people talking.
In this film, almost all the characters were in every scene.
That may not sound remarkable if you're just watching the movie,
but if all these people
have to go through hair and make-up and have to be directed
and they all have to be choreographed and photographed and covered,
it becomes quite complicated.
Here we see the next thing I had invented, which is the bet that Ja Rule gets.
Now this girl was not an actress. She actually was just in Ja's trailer.
And hiked her, and! asked her if she wanted to try it
and she gave it a whir!. Since she knew Ja quite we!!, anyway,
it all kind of worked out. Ja has a good life.
Anyway, here Paul Walker, the character Brian O'Conner,
deciding that even though we know from Dodger Stadium
that he can't even control his car at 140 miles an hour
he's bet the farm, he's bet the pink slip
that he can beat Vin Diesel, the king of the streets.
And he's betting his car on that.
Here you see the computerization that controls the NOS, the inner coolers,
the amount of NOS gas that will be injected at any given time
and the manifold controls. Here is the answer.
Vin Diesel has his own NOS system, because he is the king of the streets.
This is R.J. DeVera, one of our technical advisers.
He actually was a champion racer in the illegal street-racing scene.
Don't tell the police that he was in the movie,
'cause they're still looking for him.
Anyway, Johnny Strong now on the police scanners,
hearing that there is a 187, which is the code for a murder
at a liquor store somewhere close by, that the police will be preoccupied.
Time for them to go race.
Go!
And here's the shot that defined for me what I was trying to do with this film.
Flying through the engine in the RX-7, the Wankel engine, the rotary engine,
trying to show that these drivers were at one with their car
that their car was an extension of them.
And here is a two-minute sequence done almost entirely with visual effects
that represents a ten-second race.
I took ten seconds and expanded it to two minutes.
And with the brilliant sound design of Bruce Stambler,
Academy Award-winning sound designer, and SoundStorm, his company,
we began to dig into how to do speed in a new way,
a way not seen in previous racing films, in a way that we go in the cars,
through the cars, around the cars, from car to car.
I realized one morning while shaving that the only way to get speed
was to not treat the racing as it lived in the real world,
but treat it like it's a science-fiction film,
just like we're going in Star Wars into hyperspace.
That these are spaceships, not cars.
And to be as free with the camera
as I would be if this scene were done on a planet far, far away.
At any rate, most of the cars you're seeing, like this car, here,
they don't exist.
These cars are created in the computer, and we put the actors in them.
Illusion Arts, Digiscope, and Hammerhead,
three very, very creative visual effects companies,
all worked together on this sequence
to create each of these moments with me
to take you aboard the street race.
And let you know what it felt like to go 140 to 180 miles an hour
on a city street in the middle of the night.
I'm very proud of this sequence.
Every time it played in movie theaters across the county where I was,
the audience would break out into applause.
And that let me know that this film was well on track
some 20 minutes into its unspooling.
This was an important thing I realized on the night of shooting.
I had to show that Paul Walker's life
was forever changed by this experience.
Even though he had lost
something about this race had changed him.
That he was no longer the same person ten seconds later, or two minutes later,
that he was when the arms went down to start the race.
When Noel Guglielmi, who plays Hector, a very fine actor,
when he flagged the race, Paul Walker's one person,
ten seconds later, he's another.
He's addicted to speed, he loves this world.
and this love is going to come into strong conflict for him as a character.
You didn't win!
Of course, here's the end of Ja Rule, not getting his ménage à trois
and not feeling too good about it.
But Ja, platinum albums loom for you
and you'll have all the ménage à trois you'll ever need.
And we all know we need a couple in life.
Here we come to one of my favorite scenes
because of the good-natured quality Vin and Paul brought
to the moments of losing a car
and, in a funny way, gaining respect for each other.
And this was a wonderful, theatrical setting
for Vin Diesel to strut his stuff.
Every kid you see in the background there, these aren't extras.
These are the real, illegal street-racing crème de Ia crème of LA.
and it's part of why I think the film has such a real feeling.
We didn't just go to SAG and pull a bunch of people who were pretending.
These are the real people, and David Ayer, who has such a talented ear for dialog
as he absorbed the street-racing world as a writer,
he was able to create the language that Vin is talking now.
These kids knew that we knew what we were talking about
and they fell right in step with every scene.
And so all of the crowd scenes you see, these are not actors,
these are real street racers, and these are their cars.
And scenes like this, again, were choreographed
I'm up in a helicopter, down on the cranes, I'm everywhere,
trying to give you many dynamic angles of this mass, crazy exodus.
Because this is what happens. As they scream. "Po, po, po,"
the police are coming, and their cars will either be impounded.
or they'll be given$1,000 tickets,
at least in LA, for illegal street-racing.
So they want to get the hell out of there, and get the hell out of there they did.
When I proposed that all 200 of these cars
be driven by their original owners, the street racers,
Mic Rodgers, our stunt coordinator, got very nervous.
But with a little choreography, we did this, I don't know, 10 times
and not even a fender bender.
These guys and girls know how to drive.
At any rate, the next sequence takes place
about 20 miles from where that sequence was shot, down in downtown LA.
Vin Diesel being known as the king of the streets,
they're looking for that RX-7,
and him just barely getting away from the cops, for the moment.
Again, Vin is a new kind of leading man,
a multi-ethnic, very unusual guy.
a cross between a young Brando and Yul Biynner and a lot of himself.
Something new, and, I believe
the fastest-rising young star in our business today.
In fact, my next film, XXX , which someday I'll be doing the DVD of,
will star Vin Diesel, and we will start shooting about 10 weeks from now.
It will be out July 26 at a theater near you in the summer of 2002.
Anyway, here is the next plot development, that Vin is in trouble,
Dominic Toretto is in trouble.
And who comes to his aid but Brian O'Conner,
the very guy who lost his car.
And here he is, coming to the rescue
and a different kind of driving,
very different style than driving a quarter of a mile in a straight line.
Kind of a pursuit driving, or evasion driving,
which is a very different skill.
And rightfully so, Dominic is a little nervous
because it isn't going fast in a straight line.
It's going fast in every kind of curve possible.
What made that car jump, I don't know. I just wanted it to jump,
so we put down a few little jump-ramps, and made a nice ending to the scene.
What made that car jump, I don't know. I just wanted it to jump,
so we put down a few little jump-ramps, and made a nice ending to the scene.
and not only are we finding out
certain things about each one in an exposition way,
we're also finding out that
when Vin Diesel took the wallet from Brian Earl Spilner
he and Jesse did a background check
and found out Brian's real back story, or so they think.
Of course, this is going to be reversed a few scenes from now in the film
when we find out Brian's real back story.
But at this moment, it's a twist on a twist, just a little one,
nothing to make film history.
It's these little dynamics throughout this picture that, I think
makes the film more than just a race picture
or a street-racing film, or a car film.
I think it's a film that hooks you, and begins to say to the audience,
"These are relatable characters. They're kind of like you and me."
And here comes an introduction of Reggie Lee and Rick Yune
with the South Vietnamese-American gang.
A very interesting character, Rick Yune.
Very handsome, 6'2", very strong,
actually Korean-American.
A choice that I made which I thought might be controversial
in using an Asian-American actor to play the villain.
But having done Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,
and written that, I felt that l could
free Asian-American actors up to play anything,
villains, heroes, lovers, whatever.
So once I met Rick, I saw no reason to take such an incredible talent
and not use him for some thought of being politically correct.
I think that actors should be free to play anything they want to play
based on their talent, as opposed to their racial origins, or whatever.
So we have a movie which has a hero in Paul Walker,
an anti-hero in Vin Diesel, and a villain in Rick Yune.
All three sort of slots in the traditional archetype scale
taken in this film.
Films usually have a hero and an anti-hero, or a hero and a villain.
In this one, we've got the full spectrum.
Let's go.
Rick was in Snow Falling on Cedars, has a tremendous presence
and a different texture, different tone, different color on the palate
to Paul's all-American-ness, Vin's complex multi-ethnicity.
Again, the operatic street opera of West Side Story
told in the year 2001
with the coolest bikes, the coolest cars
and sometimes the coolest death of the coolest cars.
And here we go.
Literally, in theaters when this was screened, people groaned.
Kids were banging their heads against the seat in front of them.
No one wanted to see this Eclipse go this way, including me.
And my 14-year-old son Kyle will still not talk to me
for doing this to such a beautiful car.
And that, too. And that, too.
These are the wonderful pyrotechnic effects of Matt Sweeney.
He and his company did all the mechanical effects,
all the stuff you see, the explosions and rigging and shootings and so on.
A very talented group.
At any rate, here we are. We leave Little Saigon
and magically we're back in Echo Park, some 30 miles away.
A very expensive cab ride.
I always thought it was funny
these two racers having to go home from the great street race in a taxi.
But, at any rate, here come a couple of my favorite shots of Jordana.
We realize that even though she has a cool exterior towards Paul Walker,
it's not that cool.
She has quite the interest in him,
as shown when her brother invites Paul in
and she realizes she's not looking her best,
studying, as she is, at home at night.
If everybody could look like her at home when they're studying,
we'd have all stayed in college.
Matt Schulze is a guitarist. He's really playing this riff
He has a band. He and Johnny Strong have both
got bands and come from music before they went into acting
and so we wanted to let him show off what he could do.
Johnny's a very funny guy, who you'll see in the upcoming Ridley Scott film,
from Revolution Studios, Black Hawk Down.
A very interesting actor with a wonderful sense of humor
and a way of investing a part which really didn't exist on the page.
He made a great deal out of very little that was scripted for him.
In this scene, some things also begin to emerge.
yin's anger, and his paternal presence among this group of people
is established through feeling let down by his posse, by his team.
That they didn't come to help him when he needed it.
And the person who did help him was the outsider.
Being Machiavellian, and Vin and I talked about this,
he uses the outsider
to re-establish his supreme position
in this family unit.
To let them know that he is capable
of turning his attentions to new energy
if people do not toe the line and if they let him down.
By bringing Paul Walker's character into the party, and giving him the beer,
a good laugh, but also shows his second-in-command,
his old friend, Vince,
that he really cannot neglect taking care of business.
And in this thing, this was one of my favorite little one-liners, here,
where he says, "There was a time I didn't know you."
Then Vince says, "Yeah, that was in the third grade."
And right in that little interchange, it tells a whole story.
These guys have been buddies since elementary school.
They've grown up in the same neighborhoods.
They know everything about each other.
And they've got each other's backs, and have had each other's backs.
for a long time. These are very deep,
very powerful relationships
and the complexity of that, I think, was part of the film's appeal.
That people saw themselves, or their ideal self
in this group of actors and in this world.
In the first sneak preview, in our focus group,
when all the kids said how much they liked the film,
the group leader said, "What did you like about it?"
And the first reply was,
"I liked the movie because it showed honor among friends."
And l got a lump in my throat,
because these were some of the quiet ideas I was trying to work with
and to see that the audience would get something out of this film besides thrills
was thrilling to me.
Here, Jordana and Paul get to know each other.
It was a very interesting editing challenge
because these are two of the best-looking human beings ever birthed
and somehow when they're together, apart from the rest of the cast,
there were times when, in a way,
I thought they were too pretty for the movie.
And Peter Honess, the editor, and I,
kind of looked for the takes, not where they were less good-looking,
but where their acting was earthier and less glossy,
to keep them integrated, and keep their story integrated
into what is otherwise a colorful but earthy street opera.
Here we have the plot about to turn.
We're some 35 to 37 minutes into the picture.
And up to now we've pretty much accepted Paul Walker
as what he's presented himself as,
a hopeful, a wannabe in the street-racing world.
In this scene, busted by the police,
we're still assuming it has to do with the night before
until here.
And we begin to see that, in fact,
he's not all up front.
And there were literal groans in the theater when they realized he was a narc,
an undercover cop, and it was a good moment,
because the film needed to twist right at this time.
Nice crib, Sergeant. It's a lot nicer than the last place you confiscated.
Many people have said, "Why did we need to do this?"
I felt we needed to do this because you just can't sustain two hours
of the street-racing world. At least, I didn't think we could.
Maybe some other directors could. But to me, it was a lifestyle movie,
not a race movie, not a sports movie, not a crime movie.
But it had to be hung together on some plot vectors.
So, this was the plot we chose right from the beginning
and yes, it does have references to Point Break,
and yes, it does have references to Donnie Brasco.
These are two very fine films
and if you're going to refer to other movies, refer to the best.
"Refer" maybe being a euphemism for "steal," but whatever.
The movie's made $143 million this summer to date
and I'm pleased with that.
And I suppose that's a validation of the choices we made,
no matter what one would think.
What does the truck driver say?
Here, we begin the police procedural,
which personally, in spite of the heroic efforts of Ted Levine
playing Tanner, the rabbi or guide of Paul Walker in the Police Department.
...the truckers will take matters into their own hands.
Or Thom Barry, playing a bit of the asshole as Bilkins.
These police procedural scenes are my least favorite in the film.
I directed a lot of Hooperman, Miami Vice, Private Eye
and so on, in my television directing career.
Some of that police material is beautifully written
and very insightful about law enforcement.
These scenes keep the plot moving, but don't bring us into the depth of that.
What kind of vibe is he getting from Toretto?
He's scared of him...
Again, they serve the purpose that we need them to serve
but they are just not up to the rest of the film.
So it's a great relief
when we get back to the world of cars,
Vin Diesel, beautiful girls
and the racing scene.
At any rate, there's Michelle, who got into this so deeply
and wants always to show that women can do anything that men can do,
be it boxing, mechanic work, driving, or lovemaking, whatever,
that she wants to go beyond the limits
that have been imposed on women in the film-world,
or in the world-world, and I support her in that totally.
Interesting to note that the scenes of Paul Walker were shot at night.
Ericson Core, our cinematographer, everybody else was shot during the day
but we ran out of light, and he managed to light Paul to look like day.
This will decimate all...
We tried to create a new look
by doing many photographic things besides angles and coverage.
We used a tobacco filter over all the day exteriors
and another warming filter over the night exteriors.
It's very traditional now to light night as blue.
We lit night warmly, because my feeling is, in LA in the summertime,
really, it isn't cobalt blue
like in so many Tony Scott, Ridley Scott films or commercials.
So we took a very warm palette to this film
and part of the idea was the cars. These were the things that had color.
If you look in the background, all the background colors are extremely muted.
We chose locations without bright colors.
If there was a house or something that was brightly painted
we asked the people permission to repaint their houses
to white, or gray, or light brown,
so that we could keep the world visually muted
except for the cars, which would be so vibrant as to burn up the screen.
And that's part of the visual design, and part of the thought process
that goes in to any movie, where you're trying to say,
"How can I bring the audience into a world, even when they're not aware of it?"
Even when I'm doing things that are subtle
and not screaming,
but help them feel what it's like to be these characters,
empathize with these characters.
Because in the end, hardware is great, action scenes are great,
but the degree to which I can create empathy
between the viewer and these characters
is the degree to which the film will be successful
and I will have done my best job.
Again, take a look at the street.
All muted colors. We repainted these houses.
And here come these vibrant colors in the cars.
Sanja Milkovic Hays, our wardrobe designer
did a very interesting job,
in that she kept the main cast,
having very realistic wardrobe
and let the flashy, wild stuff be either on Rick Yune
or the race scene itself.
So, we carefully chose these clothes for each and every person
as you do in every film.
But we didn't want to over-stylize our heroes,
our main protagonists.
So when we get to the group scenes,
that's where you'll see the flashy street clothes, the piercings,
the mega-tats, the wild haircuts.
Just because sometimes when you put a real thing in the foreground of a film
it seems forced.
So I felt, and Sanja executed beautifully this sort of frame.
This wild and really off-the-hook looking group of people and characters
in the background around our foreground leads,
to give the feeling of that good texture,
but not make it feel forced.
This scene was almost all improvised
and covered with many cameras.
It went through 10 or 20 different cuts.
Originally, Paul Walker tried to make peace with Vince in this scene.
We felt it wasn't good for his character. It was Peter Honess the editor's instinct
that we should keep Brian a tougher character.
So right here, he actually handed Vince that beer
and was sort of trying to make peace
but it failed.
So it didn't make our hero look good. So we took that out
and luckily, you don't realize who gave the beer to Vince,
and I put a line in from Johnny Strong,
so yo psychologically believe that Leon handed it to him.
Here, I was stealing from Edward Hopper, the great American painter
who liked to look through windows
and paint scenes which had a mysterious objectivity.
I'm very fond of using this real location up in Echo Park in a way like this,
a very unconventional framing, not really seeing the two people clearly,
kind of obscured, but looking through the window on a life,
on an ordinary life in a city on a summer night
and then jumping back in for one of my favorite moments.
This scene is actually a biblical story, the story of Haman,
where the Bible, I remembered, said something about,
"What should the king do for the man he most wants to reward?"
And the villain says, "Give him this, give him that."
And he winds up giving the Jewish hero the reward
and punishing Haman, the persecutor being hoisted on his own petard.
So I took that structure, and David Ayer wrote this beautiful scene
where Jordan a basically asks Vince what he wants.
He wants to take her to Cha Cha Cha, a real restaurant in Los Angeles,
a very good, Brazilian kind of restaurant
and she gives the reward of her date to Paul Walker.
One very good audience-pleasing moment
and a wonderful moment for the comeuppance of Vince
who's been a real dick to Paul, to our hero,
but who is the one character who knows the truth,
who knows he's not what he seems, and is convinced that he's a cop
and has always been right. So it's a nice twist on a twist, again,
that this is to be so, and of course, it twists again in the third act,
when Vince is hurt in the hijacking gone wrong,
and it's the actual mechanism by which Brian O'Conner, Paul Walker's character
has to confess that he really is a cop to Vin Diesel.
A twist on a twist on a twist.
-When do you need this stuff by? - Tomorrow, today, now.
-Right. - White boys work fast, don't they?
That's right.
Anyway, here we have Noel back, and we lead the viewer to believe
that the three Honda Civics they've been looking for are actually Hector's.
So we're at El Gato Negro, a club we actually built on an empty location
right across from a garage we found in El Segundo.
A gain, here is what I mean by the clothes.
These clothes are much more extreme than the clothes our characters wear.
We're in the Hispanic-American LA scene.
There's a refinery in the background, here's a real, functioning garage,
and the back alley where we were shooting.
And you see that the clothes on the kids here
are much more high-styled than our cast.
I remember this night particularly, because my son Kyle came
to visit, and he had blue hair, suddenly.
That was interesting, and being the hip dad I am, I said he looked good.
At any rate, we are in this place now
where the police procedural
starts to kick in, in a big way,
as Brian has to figure out who to believe
is the hijacking team
that's been preying on these 18-wheelers for some months.
He's very intent to go from patrolman to detective.
One of the ways in the police department to make this move quickly,
to be promoted quickly to plainclothes, to get your gold shield as a detective
is to go undercover, and that's why so many young cops do go undercover,
which is a very tricky business,
because in going undercover, as we know from Miami Vice and Donnie Brasco
sometimes you get more in love with the world,
that you're supposed to be breaking up,
than the job you originally had, of being a policeman,
because you have to act so convincingly that you are what you're supposed to be
in a false world, as opposed to the truth of you.
And the truth and the falseness get confused.
That was very important in this scene.
Because Vince, who hates Paul Walker's character,
for the girl, for being a cop,
would just as soon blow him away and leave him in a dumpster there.
He has Vin Diesel somewhat convinced that he is in fact a narc
and it's at this moment that Brian must reach into himself
and pull out a convincing truth
that will overlay all the facts of this situation
and make Vin believe that he's still just a racer.
That he's down here breaking into garages not as a cop for evidence
but as a street racer, and Paul did a convincing job of convincing yin...
And you can watch as Vince realizes that his friend Dominic
is buying the entire story. And he's none too happy about it.
So what are you saying?
Again, a little movie magic. We ran out of night.
It was summer, the nights were short.
We'd covered the masters,
and Paul, and Matt Schulze here, had done all this work
and every time you see yin Diesel, we're inside the garage,
we created an instant set, lit it to match the exterior
but we're in the back of the garage, we're inside the garage
and it's bright daylight out.
B right, bright daylight now, it's about 8:00 am.
It's 4:00 am., it's 8:00 am.
"Let's go for a little ride."
It's 4:00 am.
Movable pieces of time,
the flexibility of film,
when you have the talent of an Ericson Core as the DP,
the quick-thinking set dressers,
and my own decision to not come back another night
but to hold Vin's coverage back, to do it inside, and a fine actor like Vin,
who can keep the mood even though the circumstances have totally changed.
Not every actor can do it or is willing to do it.
Again, here we are in another garage,
each garage trying to be a different environment,
where we're trying
to shoot each scene like this in a slightly different style.
Here, a nice cut from a Zen on flashlight, flare out and make the cut in the flare,
to jump locations and save the shoe-leather,
the time spent just walking around.
Brian catching here another set of clues, of course,
something that's going to lead him down a very false path.
All of these sculptures in Little Saigon, Confucius and his disciples,
are all carved in Vietnam out of Carrara marble.
You saw them earlier, in the introduction to Rick Yune.
Very interesting feature of a little-known place called Westminster
where a great deal of the South Vietnamese immigrants migrated
after the war in Vietnam, here in the Los Angeles area.
Here comes Rick Yune in his Honda 2000.
The roll-call showing all the great parts and body-part companies
that have been used in building the car.
This is very common in all the racing cars
to promote the elements that made the car come together.
-We got no engines, do we? - No.
-Do we? - No.
Here, where Ted the fence
is cornered
for holding back these complex engines
that, a week before the big conclave in the desert called Race Wars,
would, in fact, start to become even more valuable
than they were when Rick Yune's character made the deal for them.
So when you've got a sticky situation, you need to apply a little lubricant.
This is a fairly gruesome scene.
This is one of the few scenes that the MPAA made us cut back
to get the PG-13, which was very important to me
because I really wanted 13-year-olds to be able to see it.
I did not want an R rating.
And this scene was so intense, and still is, but it was even more intense before
and they asked us, rightfully so, to kind of make it less intense.
They never tell you what to do.
They tell you the problem areas, and we cut it back a bit
to try to get the idea across
without having it become excessive.
That, overall, was a difficulty of this film.
I shot it like an R-rated film.
It has an R-rated attitude.
It's in tense, and I hope unrelentingly intense.
But we couldn't get the R-rating. It had to have a PG-13,
because, you know, who loves cars more
than someone who can't yet drive, or doesn't own a car yet?
And I think
there was no way I was going to let the film
be limited by the ratings of it, like an R-rating.
On the other hand, it had to have the toughness of an R-rated film.
It was a lot of straddling issues
and a lot of threading needles, to use those phrases.
There is no bad language, and yet the language is rough.
There is violence, but it is not excessive, by the code.
It is a film whose attitude is very adult
but does not have
the excessiveness of blood packs blowing up,
and heads exploding, and people being run over,
and the kind of harsh things that an R-rated movie can portray.
So, this picture of the guy
that Vin Diesel beat up is as gruesome as we get in the movie.
You've seen Ted Levine before as Buffalo Bill
in Demme's Silence of the Lambs.
A very scary character, a man skinning women
to make himself a woman suit. Remember "my precious" and all that.
That's Ted Levine you're watching here.
He's an amazing actor with a very supple method,
very truthful and versatile.
You got big plans tonight?
Yeah. We're going out to dinner.
You break her heart, I'll break your neck.
That's not gonna happen.
I want to show you something.
This scene coming up is probably the pivotal scene in the film
in terms of the empathy that I was talking about earlier.
We're introducing a new character.
Because the cars are characters themselves.
This is the 900-horsepower Charger.
It is, in fact, another one of the dream-fantasy cars in the film.
But more importantly, it is the scene in which
we come to understand Dominic Toretto.
Why a man of his age, his abilities,
is seemingly trapped in a dead-end life.
Remember, I talked about the Western earlier on, about the hijackings.
But there's also a Western plot in here.
For me, it was the old gunslinger
who is trapped in the life of being the fastest gun in the West.
Every young gun that wants to make a rep has to take a shot at him.
Here, Dominic explains
the supposed violence of his past
had what we call extenuating circumstances.
The death of his father, a man he adored and even worshipped,
pushed him to the edge of violence.
And that act of violence, that few minutes of loss of control,
pretty much determined the course of the rest of his life.
It also reverses another perception.
Paul Walker is a cop. He's been told this is a dangerous man.
"Look what this dangerous man did with a socket wrench.
"Look how violent he is."
Now, the cop listening to his new friend explain
not only why he did it, but his enormous remorse at what he did.
Not excusing it, but taking it like a man,
something he greatly regrets,
implying that he's kept tabs on the race driver he beat up,
who pushed his father into the wall.
We get to a rather florid but classic line.
"I live my life a quarter of a mile at a time.
"Nothing else matters. For those 10 seconds, I'm free."
The scene, pure David Ayer, and just one of my favorites in the film.
Here's the beast, laying in wait
for its third act re-entry into the film.
Another of our beautiful time transitions in a junkyard.
The end place of so many cars.
Here we are in Cha Cha Cha, a real restaurant in Hollywood.
A wonderful breezy place, very colorful.
This is probably the only set I allowed to be highly collared,
because suddenly, there's more than the cars
that are interesting in life for these young people.
These two people are falling in love.
While this is going on, Jordan a Brewster is filling us in
On a little more of the history of the team,
how they came together and implying again.
why Vin Diesel
carries a supreme position in their lives.
why Vin Diesel
carries a supreme position in their lives.
And if I could have dinner with Jordan a Brewster,
I wouldn't be thinking about Vin Diesel, either.
He's like gravity.
The interesting thing about this scene is I wrote it on the day we shot it.
Because when we tried out the scene that had been originally written
it just didn't work with the way the film grew.
I had to sit down in my trailer
and rewrite a new scene entirely very quickly.
I'm proud of this. It's the only bit of writing I did in the film.
It just filled the gap,
kept the picture going, kept the production moving.
Sometimes that happens in movies.
Sometimes scenes evolve from improvisation
and sometimes they evolve from other inspiration.
As long as the picture lives and you listen to it,
and you allow it to grow, it will very often tell you
what it wants as opposed to you forcing your vision upon it.
We were able to do a lot of these stunts
because Mic Rodgers, our stunt coordinator
designed a useful piece of equipment we called the "Mic Rig."
It towed car bodies behind a high-powered truck front
that allowed a stunt driver to drive up front
while it looked like our actors were driving the cars.
It could go up to 80 miles per hour, considerably faster than an insert car.
Much more flexible. We were able to throw donuts, brodies.
All sorts of stunts that aren't capable on classic insert car equipment.
We'll talk more about that in the hijacking gone wrong
in the beginning of the third act.
Here, we have a little sucky-face, which every movie needs.
Being PG-13
we couldn't get as far into it as Paul and Jordana wanted...
I mean, as I wanted them to.
Here's a nice 14-millimeter shot of downtown Los Angeles.
These are real SWAT guys. These are not actors.
These are true SWAT men.
This is one reason I don't have many enemies
because I have some powerful friends.
We had originally planned on a montage of building a Supra as one scene.
This is a good example of editing where many different scenes,
which were conceived of as scenes unto themselves,
are edited to a strong piece of music,
to collapse time, save time, add energy...
I like this shot.
Absolutely.
All these scenes were conceived as individual scenes
and then reconceived as a montage
to cross-cut and tell us what's going on.
But the different energies brought together here
as the raids on Johnny Tran's people go down,
as Vin Diesel and Michelle
have their own type of love scene in the garage,
and the violence of a police take down, the efficiency, the surgical precision.
Here's a little insight into the wealth of Rick Yune's family.
This is not the old idea of immigrants as in The Godfather,
that these people have come to America and made a lot of money,
whether it's import-export or real estate,
some ways that the Asian-American community in LA have become wealthy.
Rick Yune is not of the same socioeconomic group
as the Vin Diesel clan.
And here, this actor is an extra, really.
He was asked to pull off that very big emotional moment.
And he did it very well.
That was probably not fair for me to make that up and ask him to do it.
But he did it.
Another nice day-to-night transition around the pool,
a little Hockneyesque imagery in this house,
which is a 360-degree structure built like a donut around the pool.
Everything's curved. The glass and walls curved, as you can see.
It's a very interesting kind of architectural masterpiece.
It was the home that Eddie Fisher built for Elizabeth Taylor
during their much press-covered affair
back in I guess it was the 1950s.
Here again, we're back in the police procedural world.
I can put it on whoever I want to.
But once we got past this Dirty Harry, "I'm going to bust you" scene
we got to a very good moment between Ted and Paul,
where the choice of families, the police family,
which of course is a clan, is truly a family,
or the street-racing family of Vin Diesel
is now the choice that this young cop is facing.
I'm always touched by the paternal care
and restraint that Ted is able to show here as an actor
and the confusion that Paul plays but doesn't overplay.
His concern for Dominic,
that he won't go back to prison and might have to be forcefully taken,
perhaps, with fatal violence
is deeply eating him, and here, Tanner, Ted Levine
is looking at his young protégé and saying, "Look, there's a choice."
He does it without sentimentality, and yet with a great deal of feeling.
It's the finest of the police scene.
Here we have the finished Supra, another orgasmic dream car,
one I never got tired of shooting, driving, or looking at.
It just had that magic.
Waldemar showing me this orange that it could be painted.
One of the things I noticed that first night in the Valley when I saw my first race
was the beautiful colors of the cars. They were not traditional
black, red, or silver.
Not like this Ferrari here, driven by this..
Actually, he looks a lot of like our producer, Neal Moritz.
In fact, it is our producer, Neal Moritz.
playing a real jerk, which is not Neal's real character.
It goes to show you that, even in cameos, everyone is an actor.
Neal decided this day that he really didn't need a Ferrari.
We're shooting on the Pacific Coast Highway,
a very complicated place to shoot because a lot of movie people live there.
If you want trouble shooting a film
just try to shoot near movie people's houses
because they really hate it.
We shot this scene under great difficulty. The fact is,
here you have a nice merger, a first and second unit,
me shooting most of the stuff with the actors,
Mic Rodgers shooting most of the stuff with the cars and stunt drivers.
Here's one of my favorite hangouts, Neptune's Net.
Don't move to LA thinking that this number of really beautiful girls
hang out at Neptune's Net. They don't.
But it is a fun seafood place out in Trancas.
One interesting thing is if you've seen the movie before
you've seen this scene, and you look at this beautiful situation,
real So Cal, classic surfing situation,
the ocean, the seafood hut right on the highway and so on.
Now, as you watch the scene,
watch the background, because again, this picture cost$38 million.
Its schedule was so tight
that nothing got the amount of time that it should have.
We were always fighting the clock, fighting the sun.
As I shot this scene
and tried to get the emotional pitch right, get the scene right,
the sun was setting over the Pacific Ocean.
As you watch the time and the scene progress
you'll watch the background get darker and darker
as the night set in.
Ericson and the camera team, the lighting team,
Carl Boles, our great gaffer, all trying mightily to keep the scene alive.
Even though the background was shifting to night
and foreground in the day.
It's just another struggle.
You see that background. That hill had bright sunlight on it,
the beginning of the scene, a minute ago, and now it's quite dark.
That's just filmmaking reality
at $100,000 a day, for shooting.
Here we're out in San Bernardino.
This is an airport used mostly for firefighting.
We used image multiplication to create more cars.
We had up to 1,500 of these cars and we threw a big party.
A lot of the street-racing world in LA came.
We had a really good time
especially during that scene.
Anyway, it was 120 degrees here the day we shot all this.
And it was burning up on that pavement.
But it gave everybody a kind of interesting feeling
of this kind of illicit event.
And we had a lot of fun shooting the races
and creating the big party atmosphere.
Again, no fender benders, no alcohol, no drugs.
This was part of the perfect record of making this film.
This is one of my favorite scenes with Michelle Rodriguez.
Her disdain for this guy.
David Douglas, his name is. A fine actor.
Playing the Rasta man, a real jerk.
And if you watch the way Michelle picks up the money
you can see she's giving him the finger.
A little thing she threw in.
That is why you love inventive actors,
not because they can think of giving someone the finger, but to do it so subtly
that you hardly realize it,
unless you've got the DVD and some director's pointing it out.
That guy flagging the race is Craig Lieberman,
our other wonderful tech advisor, who is very into the entire world.
He and R.J. DeVera, keeping us honest and straight, clear and truthful
from beginning to end.
And getting us wonderful coverage in the magazines at the end,
Street Legal and Turbo and so on,
to give us the legitimacy that a movie like this really needs.
You can't get the legitimacy for money.
You can only get the legitimacy by being factual and getting it right.
And that was really important to me because this is a world I clearly adore.
At any rate, here's a nice techno-crane shot.
Very versatile piece of equipment with a contracting arm.
We did a Western switch. There were actually two Supras.
One drove in and we could follow that.
And then Paul Walker waited right outside of the camera to pull in
so that the shot looks like it's perfectly timed.
It would've been difficult to do any other way.
Here I'm using two cameras on tracks that are perpendicular to each other,
at right angles to each other, shooting the scene, racing the sun,
in this very long, extended day, in the 120 degree heat,
trying to capture all of the activity,
when we had the 1,500 cars,
then going into pieces like this on subsequent days with less extras
and less heat.
Again this is the turning point for the third act.
Jesse racing the villain for pink slips,
the ownership of his father's Jetta.
This Jetta, a very famous car in the street-racing world.
This is one of the first times a German car had been given this treatment,
this rice rocket treatment, so successfully.
Anyway, Chad Lindberg, a very talented actor,
playing Jesse, an ADD kid that almost every kid in America can relate to.
And doing it with idiosyncrasy and a kind of unique flavor
and yet tremendous relatability.
Wonderful. Wonderful character
and a wonderful young actor.
This next scene was a very difficult scene for Vin and Rick.
They are two very strong men.
The scene really called for Rick's character to take a beating.
And it was sometimes very difficult for actors to
fall in with the needs of the plot.
The humiliation of Johnny Tran's character here complete.
His house was raided by SWAT.
He is innocent of what the police thought he had done
yet his parents were humiliated.
Losing face in the Asian culture is a tremendous disgrace.
Tremendous problem. Sensitivity to it is high.
And he is very angry, believes that Dominic set him up from their old rivalry.
And my feeling was that once you get hit by Vin Diesel with that kind of force
you would not be getting up, Rick wanted to make it a stronger fight.
And here's Michelle doing a little echo of Girifight.
Something we threw in at the last minute.
Another good moment for her.
Right here we had one of the only accidents in the film.
If you watch the Samoan guard grabbing Vin,
yin was so into the moment, he elbowed the guy and broke his nose.
He was a stuntman.
That part of what he had to do.
But Vin is a very strong person
both as a man and a character, and as a physical entity.
Here, I had a rave sequence written in the script.
The studio, Universal, when trimming the budget, we had to cut it,
but I thought, instead of having the rave in those hangars, like we planned
why not throw it out in the parking lot?
So l got the rave in, and BT got to write a good rave song for it.
Here is the first of the confessional moments.
And this pretty much leads to the climax of the second act
where Brian confesses to his lover, Mia,
that he is, in fact, a cop and that his entire undercover life,
including under her covers, has been a lie
in terms of its facade, but not in terms of his heart
and that he needs her help.
It's a good moment because of the dramatic tension that is implied.
Because to tell someone, "I lied to you, but I love you,
"and even though that's a big problem for you and me,
"we have to go do something together that's larger than the two of us right now
"cause you're the only one who knows where your brother's headed",
was a good compression on actors.
This night I had the flu and l had a 102 fever
but we hung in there with Paul and Jordana
and kept pushing and exploring the limits of the scene
and trying to get a genuine sense of shock, surprise and hurt,
guilt, sorrow and urgency.
All of which are delicate and complicated.
And good moments very well executed by these two fine young actors.
Mia! Listen to me!
Everything I ever said I felt about you was real.
I swear to God. You have to believe me, Mia.
But this isn't about you and me. Your brother's out there to pull a job.
We're running out of time. Those truckers aren't laying down anymore.
Maybe they'll make it through tonight, but every law enforcement agency
is coming down on them.
If you don't want anything to happen to them...
The whole structure of this leads us to this next scene.
I'm going to start talking about it before they go because it's so complicated.
The Hemet hijacking shot in the Hemet Valley on a three-mile strip of highway,
that they rerouted traffic around to give us use of,
took two to three weeks with first and second unit shooting.
The complexity of it
was that I wanted to utilize the real cast
in a complicated, dangerous stunt sequence to a degree not normally done.
And Mic Rodgers and I worked it through,
which was the development of the "Mic Rig."
Here, we're doing visual effects. We actually are doing green screen.
They're not speeding through the desert, they're actually in Hollywood on a stage.
But as has been done since the beginning of time, in movies
we're matting in the whizzing backgrounds.
But thanks to the new Kodak matte stock,
and through the diligent work of Illusion Arts,
we are now able to do it at a more believable level than the old days.
If you look at the James Bond movies,
and Sean Connery driving the Aston Martin in any dialog scene,
you'll see how far we've come in making you believe that green screen can work.
We designed the "Mic Rig," which is a long-chassis car or truck
in which we can put the entire car body of any car.
Of the Supra, of the Civics, of the RX-7.
Whatever we needed to tow with the actors.
And I'm going to point some of these things out in the coming scene
because it's one that I'm most proud of.
It's seven minutes of non-stop movement, like an homage to Road Warrior,
utilizing not stunt people, but our cast.
And part of the success of that is that the equipment we designed
kept the actors completely safe.
No matter how dangerous what they did looks
they were never in any danger.
And that is the art
of making action films in a responsible way.
To give the audience all the reality and all the intensity,
that you want them to experience,
but not to risk lives to bring that result about.
Okay, we traced the number to the northbound 86.
Again here, we're still on a stage with green screen
but soon we will be in Hemet, in the Valley,
moving between 50 and 70 miles an hour.
And jumping from trucks and cars and doing everything
to make this what I think is a very effective sequence.
This is, in a funny way, karma.
This is the debt that Dominic must pay
for his preying on these trucks,
for the heartache and terror that he's brought to other drivers,
to the illegal activity that he's been involved in
and involved his team in.
This when it comes back.
I am a student of Buddhism
and believe that this is the truth of life.
That there are karmic debts to be paid. Possibly not as one-to-one as this is,
you know, you prey on trucks, you get punished by trucks,
but, there is a debt to be paid for one's actions.
And this is the debt for these anti-heroes in the picture.
It's one of the reasons I never made the truck driver
played by Kevin Smith, a stuntman,
I never made him a character.
Because he is not a character. He is an idea.
This truck is a monster menace
here to even the karmic scales of justice.
Because for Dominic,
the scales of justice between him and Paul Walker,
ultimately don't have to apply in the traditional way.
The karma is paid for here.
Now, if you look, you'll see that Vin Diesel is driving the car,
and Vince is on the front of the truck.
And the camera is moving back and forth between these actors,
really moving at these speeds.
And there's the truck in the background,
here's Michelle coming around.
It's a great combination of first and second unit work
but whenever you see these actors, they are being driven, they are not driving.
Part of the choreography here that I'm proud of is that it's seamless.
If the truck is behind Michelle Rodriguez in one place,
it's in the right place when we cut to the second unit team.
It's a wonderful coordination between Mic Rodgers and myself.
But here, Matt Schulze is really on the front of that truck
and it really is going 60 miles an hour.
Now he's wired. That was a very dangerous stunt pulled off
by, I believe, Mike Justus, I think his name was,
a wonderful stuntman, and intercut with pieces of Matt Schulze.
But he is 18 inches off that highway, going 60 miles an hour,
and there's Vin being towed by Mic Rodgers in the "Mic Rig."
So there, we get stuff like this,
which would have been almost impossible to do any other way.
Here, karma taking the revenge, ratcheting up the tension
as Dominic's situation goes from bad to worse.
I don't know how many hundreds of cuts are in this sequence.
I've never counted them.
Maybe some of you cinema buffs
will someday goon your DVD and count them.
But I know how many hundreds and hundreds of setups,
and how many hundreds of times we drove up and down that highway
to create this scene.
And I'm, again, very happy
with the result, and where all the characters are,
and how each actor is staying completely committed to the scene.
Whether they are acting like Johnny Strong here,
or whether they are asked to do something as dangerous as Matt Schulze,
who after this scene was done
was given an honorary membership in Stunts Unlimited by the stuntmen
for his courage to hang on that truck day after day, after day, after day.
Wired, completely safe tied,
but, nonetheless, it's not something everyone would do.
That Supra just blasting by, that was CG.
We needed to add that later, to tie Letty and Leon into the scene.
Again, there's Matt Schulz truly on the truck.
Vin Diesel truly looking like he's driving.
Here comes Paul Walker to the rescue with Jordan a Brewster.
And again, wanting to keep the women involved in the action scenes.
Letty turns out to be the one who goes under the truck
and Jordana has to drive the Supra.
We proved she could drive in the Cha Cha Cha scene
so it doesn't come out of nowhere. And now,
Paul Walker, again, looking like he's driving,
but being towed at 70, 80 miles an hour.
And actually climbing out of the truck, again wired through his pants to the car.
A stuntman in a box below the car, which has been removed digitally,
in case the wire should break or anything unforeseen should happen
there was someone there and a place for him to land.
Then into our stunt, Chris Tuck doing Paul Walker's doubling.
And now, Paul on the front of the speeding truck, Jordana driving,
Vince, Matt Schulze, on the step.
And you see all three actors
in high speed movement, hanging on for dear life,
and yet everybody was completely safe.
It's part of the illusion.
Camera, Ericson Core, operating as well as DP-ing,
panning from one bit of action to the next.
Just to say, "Look, they're all here in the one shot."
And finally, we're out of that
and into the next dramatic moment
with the confession.
And, like I said before, in a story-content way,
Vince, who has distrusted Paul Walker's character from the beginning,
has known he's a cop from the beginning, has hated him from the beginning,
has been willing to kill him at one point in the movie,
now his life is in the hands of this cop.
And it's because of Vince that Brian has to confess who he is,
because he has to call in the medevac to save the man that hates him.
To do his duty, he has to take a chance and show Vin Diesel who he is.
Yeah. Yeah, this is Officer Brian O'Conner.
B T score here. Completely effective.
Huge thunderous crashes, in the bass line.
Subwoofers shaking,
reflecting and enhancing the power of the shock
and the anger in Vin Diesel,
in his character as he looks to his sister.
Did she know? She didn't know.
Paul, trying to do his duty,
expecting any minute to have the life choked out of him by his
irate and very strong friend.
The lifeline roll-out coming in. The medevac coming in.
All the personal problems held in abeyance
while the life and death situation is dealt with.
This is a real medevac team doing what they do everyday for a living.
And here is the dramatic crisis, brother or lover, where does she go?
And, of course, blood is thicker than erotica.
One of the things I did in dubbing here, was, of course all this had sound
and had dialog and so on.
And I just felt that somehow it wasn't working.
It was too much screaming and the music was fighting the helicopter sound.
Nothing had the resonance that I thought it should have.
And one day l said, "Look, let's just dial all that sound out
"and just let BT's music play, and let's let the images carry."
I think the images were clear and powerful.
Simple, but very primal and direct.
And bring the sound back in on this shot.
So that is what we did.
And it turned out to really enhance that moment
and make it more effective.
And give BT's fine score a chance to play on its own
without the sound effects.
I might say that this film has over 10,000 different sound effects
in just the racing and hijacking sequences alone.
Bruce Stambler and his team.
Jay Nierenberg, the sound designer of the realistic part of the film,
and Bruce Stambler the designer of what we call the "sound design",
the cars, anything that's created to enhance the experience.
These guys and a team of 20 other sound supervisors and editors
creating a very impacting soundtrack.
Mixed beautifully by Mike Casper and Dan Leahy,
a team that I've used on Dragon heart, Daylight, The Rat Pack, The Skulls,
and now The Fast and the Furious.
Collaborators of mine, where we are trying to bring sound
to a new level of effectiveness and viceralness and also volume.
Like I said, it's not about being loud. It's about "the art of loud."
How do you create the kind of in-your-eardrums,
in-your-face intensity,
without burn ing the eardrums out and without making it painful.
And we've worked for years trying to develop methods and theories
of how to bring intensity and relieve it,
creating, like sherbet between courses, to clear your palate,
to allow you to be ready for the next big thing.
And how to balance music, dialog, and effects in different frequency ranges,
which keep the ear completely alive and involved
and enhance the visuals without ever overloading
to a place that you can't take.
But here is a big moment, the Charger gets turned on.
I put the sound in all six speakers
to give you the feeling of this beast.
Again, we wanted to do an homage to Bullitt.
We have many steep hills in the LA city area.
And here in Echo Park we are using Micheltorena Street,
which is steep enough to ski,
to try to create the kind of flying sense of San Francisco
that was so effectively done in the great car classic Bullitt.
And Paul, to me, has a young Steve Mc Queen quality.
He has that taciturn beauty,
the all-American-ness, the competence, the grace,
the catlike grace of Mc Queen.
And I'm sure wherever Steve is
he owns this DVD.
Again, a combination of first unit and second unit directed by Rodgers.
Tearing it up on the streets of Echo Park.
The key here was to create an action sequence
that was different from the others, that had a little more stunt stuff
in terms of bikes, cars, guns.
The other stunt sequences were either racing
or you've seen the way the hijackings unfolded. They did not use guns.
And here Dominic comes in. Uses the Charger,
which was introduced in the second act as a third act character.
And a very fine and painful stunt.
Well-executed there.
Again, no one was hurt doing this.
We're zipping through the locations.
Now here on Glendale Boulevard.
Paul Walker throws this brody and fires himself,
which was good that he could do that.
And in this one lay-down, Mike Run yard, our stunt guy in this scene
did break his leg
coming into that bike lay down a little fast.
That's not him lying in the street.
That was a second unit shot.
And here, Rick Yune, playing absolutely dead with his eyes open.
I don't know how he does that. I can't do that.
I mean, I'm not an actor, as you saw when I played the pizza boy.
Here we go, the calling card, the challenge of the Charger.
Okay, come, we're going to figure out once and for all,
who's the best, you or me? Old gunslinger, new gunslinger.
The Western very much alive
in the structure and imagery of this film.
They drive over the hill on Glendale Avenue and they arrive in San Pedro,
which, if you know LA, is impossible.
But everything is possible in the speed of a cut.
Again, this was a longer scene between the two men.
The fine Steadicam work of Jimmy Muro.
And we are ready for the race, the final race to the train.
I'm going for it.
I cut all the dialog to a minimum.
I just felt it was important that the two men get on with it
and the less said, the better.
And here, the wheelie.
A thing that really took a lot
'cause the car kept flooding any time it went up like that.
But I was very dedicated to getting it.
It's one of my favorite moments when that Charger kicks up on its hind wheels.
Again, we've had a lot of races and chases
and it was time to do something different
and to find a way to keep this extremely intense,
fast as ever, if not faster,
and introduce a lot of jeopardy by the train
as well as the question of who would win.
That being secondary to the question of who would die.
Very much aiming the audience at the idea that this is Dominic's unhinging.
There is a problem in the Charger, we're, once again,
flying through the fire walls and the meters into the engine
and seeing that he's thrown a rod, and here comes the speeding train
and yet he would not stop. He floors it.
Inventing an new kind of slow motion here that we call "smurring",
which is a combination of smearing and blurring.
And another visual effect, but just to stylize the time
so that we can go inside their heads and extend the sequence
to really derive the maximum benefit and maximum effect of it.
That was very close.
Very, very close.
A gain the twist.
For a moment, it's all okay, but it isn't.
And there comes karma calling once again.
An in credible stunt choreographed by Mic Rodgers
of the car.
One of the things we did was on a bike cam
to fly with the stunt
as opposed to just cover it from six or seven fixed angles.
And here, because of the roll bars, because of the three-point harness,
he could survive something like this.
I assure you, it would be hard to survive it in reality.
This is one of the things we want to make sure we don't do,
pretend that this kind of stuff
is stuff to be imitated.
All stunt men, all under controller conditions.
This is one of the most controversial scenes,
probably the most controversial scene inside the development of the script
and the execution of the film.
It was my belief from the beginning that the cop must let the criminal go.
We had to build everything up to the place where this would be a satisfying ending.
In a film noir, maybe he could walk him away in handcuffs...
Taht's fine for Humphrey Bogart, but it would not work today
and not work for these characters.
The studio wanted always different endings.
We shot many different endings.
But, to me, this was the ending
and I shot it to be the ending.
And you'll see in terms of camera technique and everything
we had it covered so that Paul Walker could walk to face the music
as Dominic goes on the run.
Very indeterminate ending for modern films,
but puts your imagination to work.
What will he tell the police? Will Dominic make it to Mexico?
Will Letty be there?
Is Jesse dead? Is Vince going to lose his arm?
Where is Mia?
All questions to be answered in the sequel.
Anyway, I'm Rob Cohen.
I've enjoyed talking to you about my passion for this film
and some of the insights or little incidents that happened
along the line of making it.
I hope you enjoy seeing it, either for the first time or second or whatever time,
and that you will drive safely,
but in your head, live fast and furious.
I live my life a quarter mile at a time.
Nothing else matters.
For those 10 seconds or less...
I'm free.