FAST & FURIOUS 9
Cinema’s most revved-up franchise has still got surprises in store. Prepare for all-new mayhem and a mysterious resurrection
We’ve had to wait a year to see the magnet plane. And the return of Han Seoul-oh. Director Justin Lin tells us why it’ll be worth it.
Nine films in, and the Fast & Furious gang have won over huge swathes of the world with their bananas set-pieces, insane stunts and endless chats about family. It’s a formula that creates a challenge, though, for returning director Justin Lin. In steering four instalments between Tokyo Drift and Fast & Furious 6, Lin took the series from a crime drama with fast cars to a globetrotting, world-saving action franchise. Now that he’s back after a two-film gap, he somehow has to amp up the drama and outdo his own action yet again, boldly going where no car movie has gone before. How do you keep going bigger instead of going home?
“I don’t think we’re ever trying to do something just to do it,” claims Lin, speaking to Empire from LA, where he’s recently wrapped the sound mix. “People talk about the scale of the action but I personally would not be comfortable pushing the boundaries if we don’t have the right themes and character, the emotional arcs. That’s the balance we have to hit.”
He started work on the film’s action scenes in tandem with the rest of the script, figuring out potential big stunts and the locations for them — which this time include Scotland, Georgia, Thailand and, rumour has it, space (Lin will “neither confirm nor deny” that, but does worry that “we’re beginning to run out of nooks and crannies around the world”) — but also the personal decisions that would lead to those moments. It’s not enough to have magnet planes and cars swinging from rope bridges like Lightning Mcqueen’s remaking Indiana Jones; you have to care about the drivers of those cars as well, the family built around Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto. “When I first joined this franchise, it was in a very different state to where we are now,” says Lin. “I’m very proud that when you see a car swing, I feel like we’ve earned the relationship with the audience, to be able to push that.”
One relationship that Lin was keen to push was the story of Sung Kang’s Han, apparently murdered by Jason Statham’s Shaw — which fans accepted until Shaw was retconned from the world’s most dangerous assassin into a cheeky ally of our heroes. How could his friends forgive Han’s murder so readily? Fans stopped Lin in the street to speak out as the hashtag #Justiceforhan trended. “Obviously I went back and watched [7 and 8] and it didn’t make
sense to me,” he says. “I felt like Angelina Jolie in The Changeling, like, ‘That’s not my little boy.’ It was important, when I decided I was going to come back [to the franchise], that we find the right answer to what happened. I felt it was worth trying to take really a lot of care about Han.”
The return of Han — Lin won’t admit exactly how — is good news, but there’s bad news too. Charlize Theron’s cyber-terrorist Cipher is back with a new threat, alongside John Cena as long-lost Toretto brother Jakob. For Lin, the addition of Jakob and his crippling middle-child syndrome allowed him to address questions about biological family versus the one you choose for yourself.
“The idea of family in the franchise was really great real estate to explore,” he says. “You can’t run away from blood, from your past. So exploring that through blood relations was interesting.” It wasn’t just Cena’s physical presence, but his watchfulness and focus that made him someone who could portray the “unresolved issues” that we’re told will fuel the antagonists this time around.
Unresolved issues, sure, but also magnet planes, and an admitted disregard for the laws of physics, if not the laws of character. Lin has two more films to wrap up the series and even more outrageous action still to create. We’d say “the sky’s the limit”, but it almost certainly won’t be as long as this family is around.
FAST & FURIOUS 9 IS DUE IN CINEMAS FROM 28 MAY