It’s not just expensive. It’s also insane. That would be the normal reaction of people upon seeing the official trailer of “Fast & Furious 7” particularly the car drop sequence where lead stars Vin Diesel, the late Paul Walker and the rest of the gang threw race cars off the back of a C-130 plane flying high up in the sky.
James Wan, the director of the seventh installment of the very successful action thriller franchise, says filming the sequence was no joke.
It did not just take so much resources, the shoot also required a lot of manpower to do so, adds Wan, who took over from Justin Lin, in helming “Fast & Furious 7.”
The movie is due to hit theaters on April 3, 2015. Lin directed the last four films of the franchise before turning it over to Wan.
A very challenging shoot
The sequence on the car drop looked quite seamless on the official trailer and the movie itself, but Wan disclosed that the production spent a lot of resources and manpower to complete the shoot, reports Design & Trend.
Aside from skydivers photographing the race cars as they fall down from the C-130, there were also several helicopters equipped with cameras filming the action.
The shoot was taken in October 2013 while the C-130 plane was flying 10,000 feet above the Arizona-Nevada border. Vin Diesel, who plays Dominic Torreto, and Paul Walker, who plays Brian O’Conner, and the rest of the film’s stars, were part of the sequence as they were the ones who dropped the race cars from the plane.
Paul Walker was able to complete the filming of that particular sequence of the film before he died from a car accident a month later.
Wan also disclosed that the car drop scene came out during his brainstorming session with producer Neal Moritz and writer Chris Morgan. The sequence became crucial as it was part of a rescue mission that requires Toretto’s gang to head into a hostile foreign territory. The gang wants to come in to the country undetected thus, had to drop those race cars.
As real as can be
The director of “Fast & Furious 7” also said that he wanted to get as much texture and tonality of practical photography into the movie as possible. That’s why it took them quite a while to plan the entire shoot.
While “Fast & Furious 6” also showed car drop scenes towards its penultimate sequences, the drop were actually from a plane about to take off from the runway, and were more like rolling it out and not actually dropping it from the sky.
Wan is quite satisfied with the over-the-top stuff the production staff did in filming the car drop scene, which he says speaks a lot about the level of filmmaking of the movie.
He expects the car drop sequence of “Fast & Furious 7” to become part of the movie’s signature scenes when it is finally shown.