‘My approach to filmmaking is always one of integrity’
Vin Diesel talks about The Fast and the Furious, one of the most profitable franchises to come out of Hollywood, and about his character Dominic Toretto, among the most memorable roles the superstar has ever played.
Q. been almost 15 years since this team first took to the streets of LA. Now here you are, all these years later, bigger, faster, and stronger. How do you wrap your head around this ride that you’ve been on for years? A.
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The first thing I do is think how blessed I am to be a part of something that has reached the kind of success that none of us ever really anticipated. And so much has happened to me in my personal life; I’ve become a father and I’d like to think that I matured a little bit. I can’t stress enough how much of an impossible task this might have felt like 15 years ago.
Q. Each time out you’ve upped the ante: more cars, bigger, better action but the heart and the emotion have certainly been pumped in Fast & Furious 7. How important is that balance? A.
My approach to filmmaking is always one of integrity, regardless of whether it’s a drama piece or whether it lives in the world of action. The idea that we could even attempt to one-up the stunts and the action sequences is fun, and it’s a rich, rich challenge. But, increasing the emotional stakes is what will set this saga apart from any other movie. The emotional heartbeat of the movie is something that everyone we know can relate to, everyone we know is invested in.
Q. The idea that the films are finally in sequential order, the way that you intended them to be, how does that feel? A.
Miraculous. The fact that the audience has allowed us to jump around in the chronology of Fast and has been willing to take that ride, and has stayed with us, is a feat in itself, because, you know, Fast & Furious 7 is the first time we are beyond Tokyo Drift. There’s something very exciting about that, because now we’re truly in a new frontier. One of the most important reasons for doing the movie was to now go onto that unknown road that is Furious 7 and beyond.
Q. After all the team has been through, all the places they’ve travelled, the things that they’ve done, both good and maybe not above the law, is it all catching up with them now? A.
All the events from the previous movies and even some events that the audience has never seen before, but they know are in the mythology of Fast & Furious will all come together in this movie. Questions are answered and new thoughts are proposed. And you’ll see when you watch the movie, that themes that have been initiated or themes that have been planted in previous movies, all come full circle here.
Q. All the themes stay pretty relevant across the board. This one brings in a theme of vengeance in a way that has never been seen before. Dom’s had his missions, and he’s done heists, he’s done his thing. This time it’s very different. A.
It’s something that we were really conscious about, to be directly answering the previous film with the kind of unforeseen, residual effect from completing a mission for the law, in essence. So Dom Toretto specifically, is recruited, so to speak by the Luke Hobbs character, to essentially fix a problem that the Hobbs world, the guys with badges, can’t fix. And we all know that Dom Toretto would never partake in that, but we also know that Dom Toretto has a heart, and the name on that heart is Letty. And so this government is able to get Dom and his team to do things that they wouldn’t normally do. The fallout of that is the birth of new enemies, and enemies that have their own families at stake, and their own sense of loyalty to draw upon that allows them to exact this revenge on our team. It’s one of the cool things about the way that we’ve been doing this saga for the last ten years or so — nothing is left to happenstance. You will revisit characters that you’ve seen, and that’s what’s so fun about this. We’re fortunate in that we were able to take something that was a handicap many years ago, the fact that it was not based off an existing IP, there were no novels, there were no comic books, it was a completely homegrown saga. And we’ve finally now started to use that to our advantage.
Furious 7 will premiere on 19 June at 1 p.m. and 9 p.m. only on Sony PIX
chapter to really appreciate where we are when we step into the first new chapter of the unknown road.
Q. Not only has Shaw killed Han, he tries to kill Dom and his family, and blows up the Toretto home, destroys the place that we’ve known for years. When you saw those first pages the first time and discussed that idea, was it a little tug at your heart? A.
You can’t help but to feel moved by that, but it was by design. We wanted to very quickly tell you that our heroes are going to be faced with somebody equally committed to destroying them. And what better way, again, to illustrate to the loyal audience, that have been watching for so long, how high the stakes have been raised, what better way than blowing up the Toretto house?
Q. Why do you think Jason Statham was right for the role of the villain? A.
Jason is one of those actors who keep it cool and consistent. He’s a wonderful talent to watch, period. We needed a character that represented the location we’d just lived in for two hours, which is London. Jason Statham did that. We wanted to get a formidable character, but we wanted the character’s formidability to be different than Hobbs’ formidability that we employed in 5. And then last, but not least, I went on Facebook, and I asked the fans, “Who would you like to see me work with? Who would you like to see me incorporate, if I could?” And the top name was Jason Statham, more than the next three combined.
Q. Did you enjoy the scenes with Jason and the extreme physicality of them? A.
I very much did. For the more physical face-offs, we had started training a month early, and before we went back down to Atlanta, we were actually training here in California. The scenes where we are intense with one another were not the most enjoyable scenes on the set, because there was a tension that was present. Thank God we’re friends and we are rooting for each other in real life because the intensity that we had to build against one another was so deadly.
Q. He’s going to go after this guy. Through Hobbs, he comes in contact with someone, played by Kurt Russell, who makes Dom an offer he can’t refuse. A.
That’s right. There is a device called God’s Eye, which as Dom says in the movie, is a glorified tracking device, but on steroids. Kurt Russell was one of those guys in the ‘70s and ‘80s that we all enjoyed going to see in movies, and we thought was a real badass at that time. The irony is Kurt Russell was chosen not necessarily to service Fast 7, but was chosen to service Fast 8. And the design was to have him introduced here, as we start going into a new shadowlike world of higher stakes, one that was designed to play out and pay off in the eighth film.