/Film Interview: ‘Fast And Furious 6’ Director Justin Lin On Linking Stories And Designing Ever-Larger Spectacle
By Germain Lussier/May 24, 2013 8:35 am EST
With Fast and Furious 6, Lin does that again but now he’s leaving the franchise behind him. However he leaves behind a newly rejuvenated fan base, a laundry list of beloved characters and a complete story with room to expand.
We spoke to Lin on the eve of Fast and Furious 6 and discussed those things as well as the wacky timeline, building a mythology, filming the street race scenes, trailers spoiling the action, shooting 6 and 7 back to back and and the all-important Corona budget.
/Film: Hey Justin, congratulations on the movie. I’m a huge fan of the franchise and I thought this was insanely great. I really enjoyed it.
Fast Five was such a massive movie. Did you and [screenwriter] Chris Morgan think you’d be able to top yourselves in terms of scope?
Obviously the centerpiece of these movies are action set pieces. Here we have the tank, the flip car, we have the plane. Do those get conceived before there’s a script and then backwards engineered? How does that work?
I think the special circumstance was the plane. I knew the plane was going to be the culmination of this chapter of Fast and Furious, so that’s why that got going. When you look at these films, outside of action, there’s not a lot of real estate for characters, so unless I know where we are going and what the character arcs are, I can’t design the action.
Is there anything that you or Chris Morgan have talked about that is just too big, too expensive to do?
One of my favorite parts of this film, and you touched on it a little bit before, was how you really go back and use the previous five movies as a skeleton for your story. Why did you decide to do that now in six as opposed to five or maybe leaving it open for seven?
When he signed on, I was like “Okay, great” and then we were able to earn another. I think with these sequels, they’re not just a given. These people earn another chance to do something and the fact that we were able to build this whole mythology and really acknowledge the growth of characters, it naturally evolved into other genres. If you watch the film, it doesn’t say “Fast And Furious Six,” it was always designed to be Fast Five and Furious Six as kind of the “A and B,” so Six was always designed to be the one that ties all up all of the questions that fans have.
Tokyo Drift is my favorite of the six, just because it’s so much more about the cars and it’s so much fun. But watching Fast and Furious, I thought “Wait, this is not in the right order…” How did you manage bringing Han back for the fourth?
To the studio’s credit, they’ve been my partner on this whole journey. Instead of being very conservative and saying “Well just do what works and do the same thing over again” they were very genuine with “You want to push the genre? Well, let’s do it. Let’s try it.” That really helped. Another pivotal moment was getting Han into Four. That, to me was a big, big moment and honestly had they said “No” I would have stopped. That was imperative to tell the audience we do care about all of the characters, there is a relationship, and there is something we are building.
Was it hard to exhibit patience in linking them? Was it hard to say “Let’s hold back and build those relationships before we get to Tokyo?”
During this film, I smiled the biggest when we get to the inevitable street race scene, with the cars and the music and the girls. Are those scenes as fun to shoot as they are to watch or can they be kind of a pain?
Really?
There are a lot of expensive, classic cars in this film and obviously you didn’t buy them or you would have spent two hundred million dollars on cars. How much of the budget, percentage wise, do you think goes, not only to the expensive cars, but wrecking inexpensive cars?
It’s funny, I saw the movie last week and it was the same day you guys released your final trailer. I was very surprised that the trailer gives away a lot of the major action pieces, but none of the big twists in the plot? How did you feel about that trailer?
You mentioned you’re leaving the franchise in good hands, but it feels like watching this movie you were sort of planning to come back. It sets up a seventh film so well. My question is, was that your plan at some point? Also, how much of what’s going to happen in the seventh film did you have a hand in?
Fast and Furious 6 is now open. Click here to read our review.
