Back in 2001, The Fast And The Furious wasn’t about sending cars into space. It wasn’t about smashing cars through skyscrapers, or driving cars across frozen lakes, or cars being picked up by magnet-planes. It was about TV-DVD combos, and it was about quarter-mile street races – with souped-up cars speeding through empty roads in the dead of night. Ever since then, the scale of Dom Toretto’s full-throttle Fast Saga has NOS-boosted into all kinds of gravity-defying stunts. And while Fast X has plenty of bonkers setpieces up its (torn-off) sleeves, it’s also going back to those quarter-mile races. Well, of a kind anyway.
“There are many ways of doing quarter-mile races,” director Louis Leterrier tells Empire. “We’re doing a vertical quarter-mile race, which is very interesting…” Did he just say a ‘vertical quarter-mile race’? Vertical, as in, up a building? Or a cliff? Just when you think they’ve done everything, there’s always more new roads left to explore. But for the most part, expect slightly more grounded stunts in Fast X compared to the rocket-car-in-space insanity of F9. “We’ve landed back on Earth,” laughs Leterrier. “What we did was go back to the original tone. You have to have stuff that feels real.”
As ever, plenty of vehicles took the brunt of the action. “When you see a car dropping from a plane and landing on two cars, well, we did drop a car and then it landed on two cars,” says the director, promising major carnage in a wrecking-ball-centric sequence glimpsed in the trailer. “A one-ton ball interacting with a car cannot be replicated.” It’s going to make for one hell of an epic episode of Scrapheap Challenge afterwards.
Read Empire’s full Fast X interview with Louis Leterrier in the upcoming June 2023 issue, on sale Thursday 13 April. Become an Empire member now to access the issue in full on launch day, or pre-order the issue online now here.