The Fast, the Furious – and the fragile egos
“Egocentric demands are nothing new on Hollywood sets,” said Lanre Bakare in The Guardian. But this one may take the biscuit. Producers of the Fast & Furious franchise have admitted that its leading men – Jason Statham, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Vin Diesel – all insist that in on-screen fights, their characters never get too much of a beating. To ensure parity, Diesel apparently suggested a “rating system” for punches, body-slams and so on. It was deemed unworkable, so the actor instead relies on his sister, a producer on the films, to make sure he doesn’t come off looking weaker than the others; but Statham actually has it written into his contract that his character can’t be smacked about too badly.
In this “arms race of machismo”, all three stars seem to have eternal vigilance as their watchword, said Erich Schwartzel in The Wall Street Journal. During one sequence, for instance, Johnson insisted that his character was shown sitting up after a fight (not lying down). Statham has been known to pop into the edit suite to “weigh in on fight scenes”. The film-makers, meanwhile, have resorted to using “creative interruptions” to get around the problem. Look out for a fist-fight on a rooftop that comes to an abrupt end when a helicopter fires a missile that splits the concrete between the men “like a fault line”.
Not all action stars are such sensitive souls, said Dani Di Placido in Forbes. Tom Cruise has never seemed to mind coming off worse in a fight; for The Departed, Matt Damon requested that his character lose every fight, to make him more interesting. The problem may lie in having three stars whose appeal rests so heavily on their machismo. As Diesel has said of on-set tensions with Johnson: “It’s not always easy being an alpha. And it’s two alphas.”