How Did This Get Made? Furious 7 (An Oral History)
By Blake Harris/Sept. 11, 2015 9:00 am EST
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How Did This Get Made? Furious 7 (An Oral History)
By Blake Harris/Sept. 11, 2015 9:00 am EST
We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.
We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.
Fast Cars + Furious Stunts = How Did This Get Made?!?!
Given the box-office success of Fast & Furious 6 ($788 million worldwide), it’s not too difficult to figure out how Furious 7 got made. But there is, however, one thing that does immediately jump out about the making of this film: the staggering number of stunt performers—over 150 in total—that it required to complete this movie.
This is a story about two of those stunt performers—who just so happen to be married to each other—about the film’s two stunt coordinators—who also happen to be brothers—and about the brilliant mad scientist at the center of it all…
How Did This Get Made is a companion to the podcast How Did This Get Made with Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas and June Diane Raphael which focuses on movies so bad they are amazing. This regular feature is written by Blake J. Harris, who you might know as the writer of the book Console Wars, soon to be a motion picture produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. You can listen to the Furious 7 edition of the HDTGM podcast here.Synopsis: Ian Shaw (Jason Statham) seeks revenge against Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew for the death of his brother.Tagline: Vengeance Hits Home
Featuring:
PrologueIn February 2013, legendary stunt man Mike Vendrell passed away. Although Vendrell did not actually appear in Furious 7, he had a definite influence on the film. Some of that comes through his daughter (who followed in his footsteps and worked on the movie); some of it comes from mentoring others (like the man who helped reboot and revive the franchise); and a large part of his influence—the most unquantifiable of all—comes from stories like the following and what they represent to those in the stunt industry: Heather: The very first movie I ever did was Transformers, which was directed, as you probably know, by Michael Bay. And so I’m there—on my first day, on my first movie—and there were like 40-50 other stunt performers working on set. And between takes, these guys like to sit around telling stories. Remember the time…did you hear about…etc, etc. I love all that stuff. So I’m smiling along until one of the guys goes, “Did I ever tell you about the time I was working for Michael Bay on The Rock? Yeah, I was there when Mike Vendrell put Michael Bay in a chokehold and threatened to kill him.” I mean, I knew the story—Michael Bay had yelled at my dad after doing a very hard stunt, so he put him a chokehold and threatened to kill him—he’d told me the story before, but it was funny to hear other people talk about my dad, you know?
CUT TO: Three Years Earlier…
After they finished filming the drop in Arizona, the team moved on to Colorado to film the second part of the sequence: the landing. Jack: We thought we’d put our base camp at the top of the mountain [11,500 ft] and then work our way down. But when we put base camp at the top, people started getting altitude sickness. Headaches; hard to breathe. So we had to move our base camp down to 9,000 feet and only go back up to top when we really needed the shot. It was difficult. We really didn’t think that was going to be a problem; but we had a lot of crewmembers that just couldn’t survive up there because the oxygen depravation.Andy: Initially, for the landing part, I figured that we’d just drop the cars from cranes. The car hits the ground and then you walk away. But then Dan comes up to me and wants to show me something he was able to do with a helicopter. He had it on a big slide-for-life so that when he released it, the helicopter would slide down from an overhead line. He said, “Let’s do this with the cars.” And I go: yeah, that’s bitchin.’ So he built these two overhead lines—capable of rigging full-blown cars on these slide-for-life ropes. Then we towed the ropes and, as we did, the cars went up backwards into the air.Jonathan: So you had cars dangling from a cable up in the sky. That was Day 1, getting those shots.Jack: We’d start a car up at 300 feet and then we let it come down at speed. And as it got close to the bottom—about 15 feet away from the ground–we jettisoned it loose with a parachute on it so that it’s actually free falling as it drops to the ground. But since the parachute is only jettisoned at 15 feet—because it’s really just there for looks—that doesn’t help with sustaining the impact when it hits the ground. So we bent a lot of suspensions and we blew a lot of tires until we could figure it all out. But, just like we always do, eventually we did.Andy: And it was just so cool. Especially with the art department putting in these nice rocks and trees. The Effects firing right on cue. It looked so real…and, in a way, it was. It really was.Part 7: “The Most Important Thing in Life Will Always Be the People in This Room"After speaking with everyone interviewed for this piece, I couldn’t help but be struck by how much art imitated life. Just like Dom, Brian, Roman and the rest of the gang, these guys—Team Malaka—were a rag-tag, rough-and-tumble brotherhood. A fraternity. And although they may look like misfits, and may often find themselves in the midst of misadventures, they’re really just a family of stuntmen) trying to pull off the ultimate heist: make the audience believe that they are along for the ride. Spiro: You’re right. And the way we tease each other, make fun of each other…Andy: …because we do have fun on set. It’s a family. It’s not a harsh work environment. It’s not like a morgue. It’s high intensity, but we all have a ball.Jack: A lot of other film crews rule by an iron fist. But that definitely doesn’t work for us. That’s not our style.Andy: When people are willing to work together—and listen to one another—it just opens the universe. It really does.Jonathan: Not to say that family won’t get into squabbles everyone once in a while, but you won’t hear any screaming or yelling. It’s just not like that. At the end of the day, everyone loves and respects each other.Heather: The personalities couldn’t be more different. But you can tell that everyone is very close. Like a family. I’ll give you an example: On 7, Andy and Spiro wanted me to come out, but I had just had my daughter Kate and she was only 5 weeks old. So I said, “I can’t leave my baby for a long period of time.” What about just a week? No, not even that. But Spiro really wanted me to work on this. So he says, “Why don’t I give you my trailer. Bring your nanny and your kids and you can keep your kids on set and breastfeed your daughter between takes.” I was like: are you kidding me? Nobody lets you do that. But that’s how it is with these guys. Family comes first.Jack: And Spiro is the glue that keeps everyone together.Andy: The funny thing is that here’s a guy who does the best action car movies in the world and if you put two cars in front of him—say, a Ferrari and a VW—he couldn’t tell you the difference. Which one is the more expensive car? He’s got no idea.Spiro: I don’t know how to change a tire or check the oil or anything. I go to these meetings for Fast and Furious and they’re talking about this and this and this and I have no clue. I don’t know even know what an engine does.Andy: Cars don’t interest him that way.Spiro: But I know how to get an interesting shot that helps tell the story. I think that’s been my secret—to get great shots that also enhance the story. Cool angles are a dime a dozen. But if there’s a shot that the audience doesn’t see every day; that, to me, is what I look for. And if I’m given the breathing room, creativilly, I can make something special.Andy: And that’s where us all knowing each so well comes into play. Our guys, they know how Spiro likes the angles placed, how to find that tiny opening to see the camera—whipping in and out—they just know things.Spiro: Team Malaka.Andy: It is a family, and it’s hard to explain to producers, but it’s true.Spiro: Team Malaka!Andy: Do you really want to know where that word comes from?Jack: And if you parallel it to a Columbo, nobody on that series understood Columbo but his close friends.Andy: Are you sure you want to know?Jack: And in the end—with the help of those friends—Columbo got the problem solved. And in the end, Spiro will get the problem solved.Andy: Well Spiro, as you probably know, Spiro is Greek. And in Greek, malaka means “jerkoff.” And that’s his view of us; we’re all a bunch of jerkoffs just having fun. It’s not these highbrow, straight-laced guys reporting for duty sir. It’s just this mismatched bunch of jerkoffs putting it together and having fun.
