BEHIND THE SCENES OF FAST AND FURIOUS 7

This is crazy! Hey buddy, cars don't fly. Hey, cars don't fly! The audience has seen just about everything with all of our fast films, so we really kind of brainstorm amongst all of us to try and figure out what we can do that's different and interesting that will wow the audience. So we sit down and talk about it and go, how are we going to top the next one? The very first stunt sequence that I designed was our heroes parachuting out of the back of a plane, in their cars, and at the very last minute break their parachute and then rescue this particular character. The sequence is so fun. Because it's a team effort, you've got the Roman character and the Tez character there to bring that humor into the scene. Tez! What are you doing? It's pretty cool. Day one, when Sparrow and I were called in to do second unit, they were discussing cars coming out of a C-130. What they didn't really realize was there were so many factors that are more complicated than probably any other sequence I've shot. So we definitely want to be low enough to see that chute opening in front of us. A number of people came up and said, well, people have thrown cars out of a C-130 before. So we knew it could be done. But how do you get cars coming out of an airplane that you can't control completely? Oh, my God, look at that. And have helicopters and crew and people down below and be three feet away from them and shoot them and do it exciting and safely. And so that was the R&D part of it, trying to figure out how to get all these cars out of the C-130 together with guys in the air with it and make them drop flat. Every single car that we dropped fell differently. And even though some of them were a little front-heavy and some of them were back-heavy, the weird thing is if you rolled the windows up, they tended to start stabilizing themselves. Because when we first sent the cars out with no drogue chute, they're free-falling at 175, and so those skydivers could never catch them. They had to be a part of the car when it went out. So we said, you guys grab onto the cars. Just run out with them and grab onto it so that its first initial drop, when it's gaining its terminal velocity, you're with it. And that was the key element that made it all work. The operators we have were all from the Red Bull jump team, and they were all very good at knowing which is up and which is down pretty quickly and then just fixing the car in the way that we need it and then getting away from it because you can't hold onto the car and shoot it like that. You have to push the car away from you to get the wide shot that we need. And then James saw what we did, saw what the angles of the car were, and just seamlessly dropped it in. Whoo! Now we're moving. I worked with my really incredible second-unit director, Spiro, to tie it all together and try to make it cohesive. He had these great rigs at Danville for first unit, and they were gimbals that were 15, 20 feet off the ground. So he had Dom's car in the air, and it could tilt way down like this and move around and turn. And they started with the camera car 200 yards away and flying in at speed as this car's starting to drop like this, and comes around, goes around it, and this car's turning like this, and you come all the way in and you're in on Ben. And it cuts so great with the footage we have. The gimbal work is amazing. I was so jealous of Tyrese being in that rig. Let's make a movie, people! It's just like riding in a roller coaster backwards. I mean, who wants to do that? Okay, now I'm nervous. I wanted to be tumbled about like I'm inside of a washing machine. Oh, again! I thought that was the coolest thing ever. No! Out of the four cars, we lost two of them because of winds. The parachute didn't get away from the car, so we're getting a call, you know, hey, this car's not stopping and it's heading towards the freeway. We got it, but that one was something that got our hearts pumping a little bit. The airdrop sequence, we did it in two parts. After these cars come out of the airplane, they land on top of a mountain with one road. Letty's going to lead, followed by Ted. As they glide down, they're never going to hit the ground. They just come to a stop and we pull them back to number one. The big issue was they had to be real cars. We want the cars running in the air, and when they pull the release, this thing's going to drop 10 or 12 feet out of the air, hit the ground, and take off and spin the tires. So Dan Sudeik, our effects coordinator, came up with this trolley idea where he starts one crane very, very high up in the air, and then we pull the car all the way to the very top, which is almost 180, 200 feet up, and I was the first one to test it. So he trips the cable, I start gaining speed coming down this trolley, and as it bows out, then he trips the second one and it drops 12 feet and it hits the ground and I gas it up when we go through, and I thought, my God, this actually worked. He designed the slide for life for four of our hero cars, and huge cranes that we had to put in at Pike's Peak and slide these cars down, and then we'd release them, bounce them one time, and they'd hit the road and go. By building a rig like this and doing it this way, it's just such a cool look on film. It's something you just don't ever see. I mean, a parachuting car and then releasing and dropping and then starting to chase it, and then we had four of them doing it. I said very early on that this sequence will end up being a great trailer moment, and sure enough, it's in the first trailer. Yeah, great, fantastic, awesome.