The Evolution of Fast and the Furious Car Chases

In the two decades since Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto and his crew started boosting DVD players in Long Beach, a very talented group of filmmakers and technicians has been pushing the art and craft of designing car chases to the absolute limit.

While they haven’t been able to avoid CGI in some of their more bombastic sequences, The Fast and the Furious franchise prides itself on doing it for real with practical effects. And in today’s Hollywood, that’s a rare principle that deserves to be celebrated.

So if you’ve ever wondered, “How the f#@k did they shoot that?!”… well, we’ve got you covered. This is the evolution of the Fast and the Furious car chases.

The Fast and the Furious (2001)

The Fast and Furious franchise started from some real humble beginnings. It was based on a 1998 Vibe magazine article titled “Racer X,” which highlighted the underground tuning scene in LA. From the drop, this film always knew the cars were the stars and it had some great action sequences, despite what now would be considered low-stakes reasons for the Toretto family to get into a car chase.

The film’s opening scene, where three Civics highjack a truck full of DVD players, seems mundane on paper. But this opening heist really stood out, despite the film’s $38M budget. From a technical perspective, it has everything that could make a chase compelling: precision driving, high-risk stunt work, an element of surprise where things don’t go totally according to plan… And let’s be frank: Watching a Civic squeeze in under a truck f#@king rules.

In The Fast and the Furious, the chase itself is the mission instead of being a repercussion of the mission.

The chase was so good that the climax of the film is functionally the same heist… except this time things go wrong. Hell, they even pulled a bigger-budget version of the heist again in a later movie (but we’ll get to that later).

But it’s these heist chases that make this movie rather unique. Most car chases involve a pursuit either to catch up to or outrun other characters or consequences. In The Fast and the Furious, the chase itself is the mission instead of being a repercussion of the mission.

In this way, these Fast & Furious heists work more like the dogfights in Top Gun where the characters work together to achieve their goal, rather than how most car chases are used – for escape.

Not only is it exhilarating to watch Dom, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), and Leon (Johnny Strong) swarm the truck in The Fast and the Furious’ climax, but the stunt work for Vince’s character is fantastic. Watching the stuntmen hang off a semi while getting shot at and going like 40 mph does exactly what a good chase scene is supposed to do: keep you on the edge of your seat.

The film’s director, Rob Cohen , ensured the car chases in FF are compelling from a narrative and action standpoint, but the film’s stunt coordinator, Mic Rodgers also worked to change the way car chases were shot. He invented a new vehicle for shooting action shots of car interiors with the actors in the car. It’s called the Mic Rig.

Basically, the stunt team stripped these cars of their engines and tires and fixed the body and interior onto the back of a van chassis, which allowed them to attach lights and cameras to capture the actor doing the stunts in the car. In reality, it was Mic or one of his guys driving the rig and doing powerslides, 180s, 360s, etc., while the likes of Diesel or Paul Walker mimed it in the cars. The Mic Rig was such an advancement in the way car interiors of action sequences were shot that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded it its technical achievement award in 2001.

The heists weren’t the only driving scenes that really stood out in the film. The drag race sequences also did their part to influence the vibe of the franchise.

Using blurs, speed lines, and a decent amount of CGI, the film did a great job of creating that tunnel vision feeling which conveyed the speed of the drag race in a fresh and unique way. That scene, despite its heavy use of CGI, probably had the biggest cultural impact early on. It brought NOS (nitrous oxide) to the mainstream, and without that scene, Need for Speed Underground probably wouldn’t have been developed.

But there was one drag race that was all real, and results in what is is probably the coolest shot in the movie. Yeah, I’m talking about when Dom barrel-rolls the Charger over Brian’s Supra.

What makes this shot so great is that the Charger flip is shown from inside the Supra. We’ve seen barrel-rolls in movies before, but never from this perspective. And thanks to the power of a great edit, we get to see the Charger gracefully soar from inside the Supra and then cut to a wide where it violently crashes back down to Earth, reminding us of the sheer amount of power it took to pull that trick off in the first place.

In the beginning, the producers were nervous that the film wouldn’t be able to stand out after 2000’s Gone in Sixty Seconds remake, but its depiction of LA’s foreign tuning culture really struck a nerve. The movie made $207M on its $38M budget, so of course there was going to be a sequel.

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

2 Fast 2 Furious is a sequel in every sense of the word. It may not be the most memorable film of the franchise, but it takes what made the first one good and then adds to it. Tej (Ludacris) and Roman (Tyrese) became part of the Fast & Furious fam here, and the film also did its best to try to amplify key stunts from the first one.

As noted, one of the best shots in the original was Dom’s barrel-roll. When that car hits the ground, it does a great job of visually communicating the raw force it takes to get a car that high into the air. 2 Fast 2 Furious uses a drawbridge jump to exaggerate that same feeling.

Yes, the first race in the film also uses some unmistakable CGI to achieve some truly bombastic visuals. But director John Singleton also knew that at least some of that chase needed to be real. It may not be as obvious as Brian’s CGI leapfrog, but it took a ton of work to pull of the bridge jump in Suki’s pink S2000.

Since the S2000 was a convertible, they couldn’t hide a roll cage in the car – which was needed to make the jump safe for a driver – so the stunt team turned the car into a giant remote-controlled vehicle… with a catch. The S2000 could only drive in second gear, and it was controlled by the stunt team in a chase vehicle that needed to stay within 100 feet or so of it.

On the day of the shoot, the actual ramp was only six feet off the bridge. While the S200 survived the jump, the follow car did not. The brakes on the pursuit vehicle weren’t as good as the team thought, and it wasn’t able to stop before going over the ramp. Luckily only only minor injuries occurred when the airbags went off.

Even early on, the Fast & Furious franchise managed to balance CGI with stunts that were grounded in real life. Watching those Civics drive under the big rigs in the first movie was was fun as hell, but it also came with a feeling… the kind of feeling that could only come from that Beavis and Butt-Head giggling on the couch side of my brain: “Man, wouldn’t it be cool to see that tractor trailer run over that car?”

Luckily, Singleton was thinking the same thing because the real highlight of the mid-movie chase was watching the Mustang get absolutely chewed up by those tractor trailers! As with the first FF, the director knew he had to end his film on a big stunt. He called it “new millennium Dukes of Hazzard stuff.” And that’s a pretty good way to describe the Camaro jump into the yacht, which actually took three months to plan.

The stunt was done in two pieces. The first was jumping the Camaro off the dock. To get the car ready, they had to remove pretty much every thing that made it… well, a car. The engine, the transmission, anything heavy really, including all of the fluids, had to go. They put in a fake bottom too. It was basically a Camaro body and some wheels because they had to make the car as light as possible, so it could get as much distance on the jump as possible. When they were ready to shoot, they towed the car to get it up to speed and then they jumped it some 150 feet.

Of course, the interior shots of Brian and Roman airborne were done on a green screen, but the landing on the yacht… that’s real. Kind of.

The team reconstructed a part of the yacht in a parking lot and also rigged it with some pyrotechnics and beat-up pieces of the boat, so when the car hit there would be some debris kicked up. For the car, they built what basically amounts to an industrial zipline. And the rest was history.

Stunts-wise, 2 Fast 2 Furious did some interesting things with its car chases, but it was still clearly swimming in the wake of the original. For the third entry in the franchise, the filmmakers knew they were going to need a new hook for audiences.

Check back tomorrow for the story of how the Fast films went Tokyo Drift!