Jack Gill: We weren’t sure it was going to work for the first couple of days. Ultimately, we found that the vault was best with just steel on the bottom. We also tried it with Delron, which is a layer of plastic we put on the bottom, but even that was too much sliding around. We tried vaults with wheels on the bottom, but the vault was way too fast. We then got out to a parking lot, got two Chargers and hooked cables up to them.Īndy Gill: I arrived when they were figuring out the vault stuff. We asked the effects department if they could build us a vault that we could drag around in a parking lot, and they said that they already had one for the first unit if we wanted to try it with that. That’s part of the reason you lost your audience in Fast & Furious 4, because once people see that it’s a CGI vehicle, they’ve lost interest.” He goes, “You know what? If you want to drag it around, drag it around. They want to see real people doing real stuff. I went to executive producer Neal Moritz and said, “Look, if we can really drag this thing around, that’s what people want to see. Basically, it was, “Let’s just get through it and move on to something more exciting.” So we thought Fast Five was the end of it, but once we got to Puerto Rico to rehearse, Spiro and myself had the idea of maybe trying to drag a safe for real. It didn’t come off great, but they wanted to continue with CGI because they said Fast Five was going to be the end of the franchise. In Fast & Furious 4, they had done a lot of CGI cars inside of this cave. Jack Gill, Stunt Coordinator on Fast Five : It was always going to be a CGI vault. I stayed in India and finished up, then we contacted my brother Jack and asked him if he could be the stunt coordinator for Fast Five. We were entrenched in that project, but we talked and I he had to go home and do Fast Five. ‘It Was Always Going to Be a CGI Vault’Īndy Gill, Stunt Driver on Fast Five : I’ve always coordinated everything that Spiro Razatos directs, and we were working on a project in India when he got the call for Fast Five. Here to tell the story of how it all came together is Gill himself, as well as several of the stuntmen under his direction, as they recount the literally bone-breaking story of one of the greatest cinematic car chases of all time. Leading it was second unit director Spiro Razatos and stunt coordinator Jack Gill, who planned out and filmed the vault chase in Puerto Rico (which doubled for Rio in the film). In fact, it’s not overstating things to say that the vault chase in Fast Five saved Fast & Furious, allowing it to become the multi-billion dollar powerhouse it is today.įast Five was directed by Justin Lin, but it was the second unit - a separate crew that answers to Lin - that was in charge of the film’s biggest action scenes. While computers would be used for cleanups after the fact, just about everything else in the scene was done practically, with a real vault and real crashes - and fans could feel the difference.Īs a result, Fast Five is widely considered the best film in the series, and in particular, the vault chase is usually considered the best car chase in the franchise. This would be especially important in the film’s biggest chase, where Diesel and Paul Walker drag around a bank vault tethered to two Dodge Chargers. As opposed to largely virtual car chases, they wanted to do as much in-camera as they possibly could. But when a new stunt team was brought on board for Fast Five, they didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past. Nevertheless, the movie made enough money to warrant a sequel. Thirteen years later, the fourth film still sits in the bottom three of just about every ranking of the 10-film franchise. Perhaps the movie’s biggest sin was that even the car scenes disappointed, with audiences rejecting the CGI-heavy chases. After the second and third films faltered, the fourth installment finally brought Vin Diesel back, which was supposed to fix everything, yet the overall response from fans and critics was that it was flat and unexciting. To put it simply, the fourth Fast & Furious film sucked. We’ve got plenty of dangerous roadside attractions and high-speed crime scenes in our view - so strap in for the ride. In it, we’re exploring the fast and the nefarious of the auto world. Join us and our sister site, The Drive, for Cars & Crime Week.
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