LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: ‘Fast & Furious’ might be one of the most profitable Hollywood franchises of all time, but it was on the verge of closure at one point. James Wan, the director of ‘Furious 7’, recently opened up about the possibility that the film could have been axed following the untimely tragic death of Paul Walker. Wan, with multiple blockbusters at his disposal, also added that upon its revival, the project was the “hardest movie” of his career.
‘The Conjuring’ showrunner James Wan, 46, revealed that uncertainties ensued after Walker was killed in the road accident where he was in the passenger seat of a car, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. While the film's ending scene involving Walker was already done, they had almost half of the scenes with Walker left to be shot. But Wan revealed that ultimately they decided to carry on with the project in order to honor Walker, who has been one of the main protagonists of the franchise since its inception in 2001.
‘My first big-budget movie’
“It definitely was the hardest movie of my career,” declared Wan in the interview. Explaining, he said, “I’ve done technically challenging movies since then, but Furious 7 just hit on so many different levels, especially an emotional one.” The ‘Saw’ director, who is known for creating box-office magic with low-budget movies, further said, “It was my first big-budget movie. I made The Conjuring for $20 million, and then Furious 7 was hundreds of millions.”
However, he wasn’t daunted as much by the enormous budget as he was by the scale of it. Wan continued, “But the size of the production did not turn me off; I actually embraced it. I really wanted to create a movie that had the look and smell of their franchise, but I wanted to design set pieces that were a bit more tense, suspenseful, and scary.” He recalled the iconic scene from the trailer of 'Furious 7' that has now become a cult favorite and said, “The first thing that I pitched to Universal’s Donna Langley in the room was the scene where the bus is going over the edge of the cliff, and Paul Walker’s character, Brian, has to climb onto the side of the bus and run to jump off. Two years later, that became one of the highlights of the trailer.”
‘Do we just shut the movie down for good?’
However, these challenges were nothing compared to the tragedy that befell after the death of Walker. The ‘Insidious' director continued, “When the passing of Paul Walker happened, we were like, “Do we just shut the movie down for good?” But they later felt that the franchise needed a fitting farewell to the character. He said, “But we collectively felt like this movie needed to be Paul’s legacy. So we wiped our tears away and sat around in editorial, going, “All right, how do we do this?” Thankfully, I had shot certain stuff with Paul, like his ending action stuff, but there were still many bits missing in the film that needed Paul.”
Wan also talked about the difficulty of completing the movie by saying, “I shot only half of what I needed from Paul before his passing, and then we worked with visual effects to salvage what we had.” Bemoaning the lack of AI during that time, Wan continued to discuss how they roped in Walker’s brother Caleb and Cody to finish the film. “To complete that movie now, in today’s world, with AI technology, it’s so simple. But we did not have that kind of technology at our disposal. So we had to really dig deep into our bag of tricks to make it work, and one of them was having Paul’s brothers [Caleb and Cody Walker] step in and shoot the other half of the movie.” Editing different words from the other films, they also added dialogues for Walker, “We then pulled different words that Paul had spoken all through the franchise to create sentences for us.
Despite being heavily rewritten and reworked, ‘Furious 7’ became one of the highest-grossing ‘Fast & Furious’ movies of all time. The cast and crew became emotional while editing the movie as Wan reminisced, “The hardest part of that movie was editing the ending of the movie where we say farewell to Paul. It was very tearful. It was hard to watch the ending that we put together and not cry.”
