'Furious 7' action scene is just plane crazy
Filmmaker James Wan was welcomed into the Fast and Furious family with a heck of a stunt challenge fitting the franchise: film a bunch of cars falling out of the back of a flying airplane.
"I was like, 'Huh. Interesting. How am I going to shoot this?' " says Wan, a director known for horror films (Saw, The Conjuring) who's now a bonafide action-movie guru with Furious 7 (in theaters Friday).
The seventh installment in the over-the-top, automobile-filled series features a host of massive stunt set pieces, though one 20-minute sequence stands out: Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), Brian O'Conner (the late Paul Walker) and their racing crew take to the air and are dropped onto a mountainous Azerbaijan highway to break out a hacker. From an armored bus. In the middle of a speeding convoy. Full of heavily armed mercenaries.
In other words, vintage Fast and Furious stuff.
The episode in the middle of the movie is "spectacular," says screenwriter Chris Morgan. "It is a lot of action and character beats crammed into one set piece."
It was "a big enough challenge just figuring out how to get the cars out of the plane, let alone all the stuff that comes before and after that," adds producer Neal Moritz about the scene, which culminates in Walker leaping from a falling bus and onto the back of a car driven by Michelle Rodriguez's Letty plus Diesel driving off the side of the mountain. (Walker had been filming this scene just before his death in a November 2013 car accident.)
Some computer-generated effects were used, but Wan kept it as real as possible. He took two passes dropping vehicles out of a moving plane alongside skydivers with cameras mounted on helmets.
He then used rigs built by his team to put the cars on so he could simulate the action of falling vehicles while filming Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris interacting and bantering in character. "I couldn't exactly put my actors in the cars and throw them out of the plane, could I?" Wan says with a laugh.
That was only part of the stunt — the director also had to get them down.
While the cars were dropped over Arizona desert, they did the landing in the forests of Colorado, which stood in for Azerbaijan. "If you don't buy that aspect of it," Wan says, "you're not going to buy any of the movie at all."
The director used giant cranes across mountain terrain to swing the cars onto the road so they could race off to the mission at hand, and later added the parachutes in post-production.
Not everything made it out of the movie intact, though. Most of the vehicles tossed out of the plane landed in good shape, though Wan admits that there was one without any parachute, "and, boy, that just bounced and pancaked when it hit the ground."
Witnessing that happen was "amazing," he says. "From a distance, it was like watching those old Looney Tunes cartoons with Wile E. Coyote going off a cliff."
