There is no The Fast & the Furious as we currently know it without Justin Lin. The director altered the franchise's entire chronology with Tokyo Drift, faltered a bit with Fast & Furious, and then slammed the NOS button for Fast Five, officially pivoting the series away from its humble street-racing roots and into the globetrotting heist extravaganza it remains today. If you're looking for the specific moment where these movies shifted gears, look to the favela rooftop foot-chase in Fast Five, which not only still stands as one of the franchise's most technically impressive set-pieces, but also managed to pack in a number of vital character moments for Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), Brian O'Connor (Paul Walker), Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster), and Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson). Before F9 hit theaters, we sat down with Lin and asked him to dive into any particular F&F scene he wanted. He immediately chose the favela chase.
Most surprisingly, he mostly wanted to discuss how it almost never happened. Here's what Lin told us:
"I remember sitting there and getting the news that we just couldn’t get the budget to work and we weren’t gonna be able to go to Brazil, which meant the favela chase was going to be cut. We had to figure out another way. I went to my AD and I asked him, 'In the existing schedule, how many days can we do?' And he said, 'A day and a half.” That was easily a six-day chase. I was like, 'Screw it, we’re going to do it in a day and a half."
Getting the scene done not only meant breaking out every indie movie trick Lin ever learned on films like unofficial Fast entry Better Luck Tomorrow, it also meant having his main cast members on-set practically pulling off these stunts as often as possible.
"[It meant] not even putting a stunt guy, but putting Vin on a wire where he’s jumping from roof to roof, and at the same time, you have Hobbs coming through the window and they meet for the first time. Obviously, now it’s become an iconic scene where Hobbs ultimately has his first face-to-face with Dom. Getting the coordination and doing that practically and getting the timing right, it’s laughable now, but back then the budget was so tight it was like, 'We only have three windows to jump through, then we’re going to be out of windows.' We had to do it and do it right."
The chase's climactic moment doesn't belong to Diesel or Johnson, though. That lands squarely on the shoulders of Walker and Brewster, who had to take an extremely literal leap of faith to add an exclamation point to the end of the scene.
"We were trying to challenge everybody. We weren’t going to make it unsafe, but that kind of trust and commitment from Paul really helped Jordana. They just went for it. I watch it now and I can just see Jordana’s face, I know her so well, when Brian is basically saying 'trust me,' she really had to trust him. Because they were about to jump off a roof. That, to me, you just can’t get that any other way."
Check out even more behind-the-scenes stories from Lin in the player above. F9 is currently in theaters.