There are two mandatory elements required for a Fast & Furious movie (at least in the main film series). The first one is Vin Diesel drinking Corona and talking about the importance of family. The second, and without question the more important one, is cars… so, so many cars. Even with how increasingly ridiculous the Fast & Furious franchise has gotten over the years, it still revolves around its character getting behind the wheels of spruced-up cars and doing all kinds of crazy stunts. And yet, there’s one insane problem with filming such stunts that I’d never thought of while watching these movies.
Andy Gill, the stunt coordinator on the 2025 movie release Sinners, has also shot several stunt sequences for the Fast & Furious movies. While speaking with Deadline alongside Brian Machleit, who handled these kinds of sequences on One Battle After Another, Gill mentioned how with Fast & Furious, you have to be especially careful to make sure everything unfolds exactly as choreographed:
A lot of times on Fast we’ll have 12 cars all crashing at different times, but all in the same shot. So if one thing goes wrong, then your shot’s ruined.
Man, talk about working under pressure. This isn’t like a regular take with just actors spouting off dialogue to one another. If someone flubs their line or something unexpected messes up the take, most of the time they can just reset and reshoot the scene. But with Fast & Furious, these are expensive cars we’re talking about. If the shot’s ruined, those cars are now banged up for nothing. That means extra precautions need to be taken to ensure success when the time comes to film the sequence. Andy Gill continued:
So you rehearse it, you do a lot of timing runs. You start out with the little Matchbox cars, and work your way up to just what I call a walkthrough, which is just driving your cars at five miles an hour, so everybody knows where they have to be, at what time, camera knows where it has to be, the drone knows where it has to be, and you’ll do a half-speed.
Obviously I was well aware that filming car stunt sequences for the Fast & Furious movies are a complicated undertaking, but it never occurred to me that everything has to go right the first time around when it comes to these crashes. So it’s no wonder they go through these multiple rehearsals, slightly increasing the speed each time. Andy Gill wrapped up this portion of the conversation by saying:
And if the half-speed goes good, then what we usually do is what I call a three-quarter speed. We’ll go through it but not do the crashes and the hits. Now the drone knows, the speed camera on the ground knows the speed; all the players have done it multiple times to shoot it. And you do this one big master shot of a lot of stuff happening. And when it works, it’s a pretty incredible feeling.
I can imagine how great that feels, although then they have to move on to the next crash-related sequence and ensure it goes smoothly, rinse and repeat. So when can we see more of these sequences? As of this writing, Fast & Furious 11 still doesn’t have a release date, though Vin Diesel did provide a hopeful update about its progress last month. So while it won’t be possible to deliver the next movie to the 2026 movies schedule, maybe a 2027 release is in the cards.