How Tokyo Drift Shifted the Fast and Furious Franchise’s Action

With Fast X about to hit theaters, we’re spending the week looking back at how the hugely popular Fast and the Furious films have managed to push the boundaries of action scenes and car chases, largely through the use of – and devotion too – practical effects.

Today we look back at the arrival of frequent Fast director Justin Lin for Tokyo Drift, as well as the reunification of the original gang in 2009’s Fast & Furious.

Head here for our look back at The Fast and the Furious and 2 Fast 2 Furious. Or watch our epic look back at the car chases of the entire Fast series at the top of this page.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

For the third entry of the franchise, the producers decided to bring in someone new to direct. Justin Lin had managed to get Hollywood’s attention with his first feature, Better Luck Tomorrow. That movie was so good, it also serves as the unofficial backstory for Sung Kang’s Han, who makes his Fast debut in Tokyo Drift.

While this might have been Lin’s first Fast and Furious movie, it certainly wouldn’t be his last. He’d go on to direct half of the franchise (as of this writing), with Tokyo Drift serving as a learning ground for Lin to work out his philosophies about how to shoot car chases – like what needs to be real and what is O.K. to fake — on the streets of Tokyo. Well, Tokyo and LA – a lot of the film was shot in Los Angeles.

Tokyo Drift’s first race, where this installment’s main character Sean (Lucas Black) and Tim the Tool Man Taylor’s oldest son (a.k.a. Clay, played by Zachery Ty Bryan) rip through an under-construction housing development, is crucial because it sets up the type of race that this film is going to leave behind. Despite the lack of the franchise staple NOS, this is a race that’s all about brute force. It’s emphasized in car choice – Clay’s Viper has a V10 engine and the 350 V8 in Sean’s Monte Carlo is no slouch either.

It’s also emphasized in the race’s complete lack of grace as they powerslide into port-a-potties, drive through the framing of unfinished houses, and bump into each other down a straightaway before the Viper slams into some construction supplies and Sean flips his car like… seven times?

The point is that this race was a real street fight and was meant to contrast the rest of the film, which aspires to a more elegant type of racing: drifting.

While the first garage race in Tokyo perfectly contrasts the housing development chase by showing Sean that brute force won’t get him the street cred he desires, it was the drift lesson up the mountain that proved more difficult to film. Not only was the mountain a dangerous location to shoot on, but they also needed the driving to look like it was being done by an amateur.

To do it all safely, they brought in Keiichi Tsuchiya, a drifting legend. He’s actually known as Drift King thanks to his use of drifting in non-drifting racing events, and is one of the major forces that popularized drifting. The scenes of Sean clumsily drifting up the mountain were actually filmed with Tsuchiya behind the wheel.

Tsuchiya planned out the stunts with Terry Leonard, the second unit director, who went out of his way to emphasize how bad the driving needed to be. But when it worked, it worked. And while the mountain ascent was a tricky scene to shoot because of the potentially dangerous driving conditions, but it was the final chase through Tokyo that proved to be the most complex.

The one thing you notice when you’re in Tokyo is Shibuya Square; there’s thousands of people crossing there. I felt like this was important to show our characters trying to avoid what’s naturally organically there. We didn’t shoot this in Tokyo, obviously, because it was impossible. But I really felt that it was important to have this go through Shibuya. So we ended up creating a set on a parking lot in Burbank.

Creating the film’s fake Shibuya Square (on a parking lot in Burbank) took a ton of shipping crates and lights, which of course would be replaced in post with a CGI city. To get his crowded Square, where there should be thousands of people crossing the streets while the chase was going on, Lin couldn’t avoid using computer effects. But he was comfortable with it because he understood what absolutely could not be faked: the cars.

Director Justin Lin understood what absolutely could not be faked: the cars.

“I wanted to make sure that the car moves were all real, so that the only CG work is the buildings,” he said on a Blu-ray extra feature. “The way the smoke’s coming off the car. I wanted all that to be as real as possible.”

Finding the balance of what could be cheated with CGI and what absolutely, positively needed to be photographed is something that Lin continued to experiment with in all his FF movies. And when a stunt needed to be done in real life, he was also figuring out new ways to photograph those as well.

The first Fast and Furious film gave birth to the Mic Rig. For Tokyo Drift, Lin employed a Go-Kart to get some eye-level shots of the action. And his IRL Lakitu was the platform he used to help get one of Lin’s favorite shots of the film.

“One of my favorite shots is when we went through Shibuya Square, it was all one shot,” he said. “Like you actually go 360 [degrees] around, and it was very difficult. I wanted you to get a sense of the cars as they’re drifting through the Square, and I wanted it to be around people.”

Unfortunately, Tokyo Drift disappointed at the box office. It is the lowest-performing movie of the franchise, bringing in only $159M on an $85M budget. The franchise was at a crossroads: Go the American Pie route and keep producing lower- and lower-budgeted, direct-to-DVD sequels, or plunk down another $85M, woo back the original cast, and try their hand on a rebootquel.

Fast & Furious (2009)

Fast & Furious may be the most textbook example of a rebootquel. And that’s not a bad thing. It brought back the original cast and it got to flex its bigger budget by remaking the first chase from the original movie at a scale that original never could have afforded.

“It’s kind of an homage to the first film,” writer Chris Morgan, who joined the franchise with the third movie, said on the Blu-ray extras. “The first film opens with them in their stealth cars and taking on an 18-wheeler. How do you do that bigger? You attach five other trailers to it and fill it with gasoline.”

The segment is a reintroduction of Dom and Letty, and Michelle Rodriguez really stepped up for the scene: She did most of her own stunts. She was hanging off the semi, doing 40 miles per hour at times. But she wasn’t the only one in this chase pulling off some incredible stunts. The drivers of one of the two trucks did something many of the crew weren’t sure was possible.

The car needed to do a 180-degree spin, and in one continuous motion, keep driving in reverse. Initially there was talk about doing it in multiple takes, but the first time the stunt guy did it, he nailed it.

That may sound like luck, especially since they did it on the first take. But getting that 180 in a single shot was really important to Lin, who was back to direct after Tokyo Drift. In fact, he even plunked down serious money to make sure he had a truck that was capable of pulling off the gag.

“We had to spend a lot of money building this truck,” said Lin. “This is something we designed and built just for this movie. It was very costly and it was worth it because it was good to see this all in one fluid move.”

But it wouldn’t be a Fast and Furious chase if the best driving stunt was a two-truck doing a 180. Shots like Dom dislodging the tankers, Letty’s leap of faith, and Dom getting rear-ended by the truck are all exhilarating as well. And a big part of what made those stunts so impactful was the way they were photographed.

The franchise has been a constant innovator in how its filmmakers shoot their action, and the fourth entry continued this legacy. Yes, the film still relied on its old methods: The Mic Rig was used to shoot the interiors of Tego and Rico’s two-truck 180 spin. They also brought in pursuit vehicles, which are basically huge, remote-controlled jibs mounted on SUVs. They’re extremely good at getting really dynamic shots, and have become increasingly common on big-budget chase sets because they’re just so versatile.

For this film, the crew needed all the cameras they could get, plus a helicopter to shoot what was the biggest explosion yet in a Fast and Furious movie.

“I’m feeling pretty good about this,” said special effects supervisor Matt Sweeney at the time. “We’ve got a whole bunch of gasoline, a whole bunch of det cord in here. We got a big old 80-ton crane to pull these over the edge. We got seven cameras. We’re good to go.”

The tanker jumping over Dom was clearly CGI, but its impact into the truck and the other tankers was absolutely real. And the moment where it quickly cuts from CGI action to a real stunt was something Lin would increasingly tinker with in his future entries – especially in Fast Five’s train heist and Fast Seven’s building jump, where he learns how to better sell the CGI by incorporating elements of a single stunt that are actually photographed.

But Lin’s biggest test of skill came during the fourth fim’s climax.

“For the finale, I thought it was appropriate to have a tunnel because a lot of what logistically takes place is the smuggling of the drugs,” he said. “So I thought it’d be appropriate to have a chase through there, and it was the most difficult thing I think I ever had to do.”

First they tried to scout real tunnels in Mexico, but that didn’t work out. Shooting on location in those tight tunnels would have forced him to make too many compromises creatively. He couldn’t fit both his camera and cars in the ways that would have allowed him to get the coverage he wanted.

“CG was used to enhance environments,” said Lin. “But it wasn’t used to create cars so that someone that is into cars, the one thing that they love, which is the tangible car on the street, was taken away from them.”

They ended up constructing their own “tunnels” set in a 1000-foot long warehouse. It’s easy to draw comparisons between this tunnel sequence and the Shibuya Square sequence in Tokyo Drift. In both instances, Lin chose to fake the surroundings because, like an expert magician, he understands and exploits the limits of human perception. The tunnels may be fake, but as long as Lin continues to create unique car maneuvers and photograph collisions in ways the audience has never seen before, they’ll be too busy looking at the mayhem to contemplate the photorealism of the background.

Justin Lin and company clearly proved to the studio that the Fast and Furious franchise was never meant to be direct-to-DVD. While the rebootquel wasn’t the best film in the franchise, at that moment it was the most successful. For the next one, the studio wanted them to tinker with the formula, and was ready to give them $125M to do it.

Check back tomorrow for our look at Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6!