Fast & Furious 7 Behind the scenes with the Lykan HyperSpo

We were looking for a place where we could take our cars and jump from one building to the next. When we saw Abu Dhabi, the beautiful water, the beautiful dunes, and these incredible skyscrapers, we were like, okay, that's the place. That skyline in particular became the backdrop for one of our even crazier action set piece, the Lycan driving between three buildings. To be able to do it there was amazing. The whole idea behind this Lycan theft was that it had this one chip in it that they needed, and the car is being stored in the top of this enormous building. We were able to shoot that on stage and bring in 150 party members, all dressed to the max in evening gowns and tuxedos. You have no idea what level this party's about to go to. Now let's figure out how to make this really interesting to the audience, because a car inside of a party, usually it just goes in and goes out the other side. No one's ever seen this before. Time to unleash the beast. So we came up with, hey, he's gonna make a lap around this whole entire party sequence. And you're going, well, where are they gonna go? What the hell are they gonna do? Are they gonna drive in an elevator and go down the elevator? You've got a lot of people in evening gowns and tuxedos, and they can't move really fast, and they're on a marble floor. They drop their drinks, now there's liquid on the floor. Ready, and action! Then I got word from James Wan, who said, hey, I want Jason Statham to come in here and start firing a machine gun at the car. I want Jason to jump over the top of the car. I want the car to hit him. So when they come flying in here, Dom pitches the car sideways and hits Jason Statham's character, and he goes over the top of the car and to the ground, and then gets back up and starts shooting. Jason goes over the top, we hit the piano, we hit the bar, we hit everything we can hit in there. And at the same time, he's being shot at by a machine gun and shot at by these grenade launchers, and so columns are blowing up around the car. So now we've got all these different avenues that really spice it up. Dom, cars don't fly! He turns, and he just makes a beeline for the big glass window. Oh, ----! And it goes blowing out this window, jumps through the air across to the next tower. To go out the windows was on a set piece that was out in the parking lot. Nine cameras going, we have six of them out here, we've got three cameras inside. We had 40 feet of trussing deck, and then the windows were built on that, and Dan put the car on one of the air mortars, and we would shoot it out of that window and into boxes. Survive! We would get the exit from one side, and then get the entrance on another side, and we did it multiple times for different buildings that we're supposed to go into. We built a set to land in at the Atlanta Convention Center. Right there for the hit! That second building, James wanted fairly empty, like it wasn't finished yet. Open walls with the aluminum four-by-four beams in it, just a lot of wires hanging down. The facts is, squib these windows, they'll be going hot, they're gonna blow the windows. These are breakaway aluminum frames. As the car comes through, all that's gonna break and go with the car. I built ramps that were three feet tall, 120 feet long, and I had Steve Kelso drive it as fast as he could drive it, and drop off, he had about five or six feet between there and the window, so we could get him dropping as if he's dropping in, hitting, and then just slamming through everything that was in that second building. Nice, all right. When we were able to use those towers, and we knew we could go farther, so we went from one building to the next to the next. And then we did another landing with a redressed interior, which now was an art gallery. I say, car, you guys snap around, you will see the car jumping through, and then run right toward us. I've got real stunt people in there, all dressed up very nicely, like they're art gallery exhibitors and they're patrons, and they've gotta move pretty fast. Well, they can't see the car, it's on a countdown, and so I say, we're gonna say, three, two, one. Everybody has to be moving, you can't be thinking to move, you've gotta be moving, because the car's coming in really fast. So that was the tough part. Three, two, one, car! It lands, it goes out of control, and now Dan built a rig that spins as it goes across the floor. Dan soon had created this car that was on a complete rotating spindle, but would travel down the length of the set, so I could put my stunt doubles in there and film this car rotating. As they're trying to bust a whole dash loose to get this circuit board out that contains the device that they want, and then they've gotta dive out. Got it! Get out! This lichen, very, very low to the ground, hard to get in and out of, so doing an action sequence and sitting way down inside the car and having to dive out of it is a whole different bug. We've gotta get two stunt doubles out of a spinning car, and we want the car to jump out of the window all at once, so we tested it, we took the doors off, and said, let's see if you guys can jump out of the spinning car, and we found out that if you don't jump out as it's starting to spin, the back tail end hits you. You're rotating in there, you don't really know where you are, so the stunt guys had to look for some kind of pinpoint area out on the set, and they said, when I see this come around, I know I have to go out. We said, okay, and action. Spun the car, and they all dove out in the perfect angle. We went through the window, the car jumps out the other side. Then I got a message from James, and he said, oh, by the way, I want Vin's character to hang up on the edge, so I had to put that character on a cable and rotate the car in so that he could jump out of the car and not penetrate through the glass. Then they dropped the car 60 feet just to the ground for the impact of it going out the next window with our heroes out of it. It actually came out pretty cool, a lot bigger than what it started to be. And that's the great part about F.A.S.T. is that you don't ever say no. You're always trying to give the audience more than what they saw in the last one.