When Fast Five marked a critical and commercial high point for the Fast & Furious franchise, the series was reinvigorated. Fast 6 was even more successful at the box office, and all involved began plotting out a bright future for the franchise spanning many more films to come. Unfortunately, in the midst of filming Furious 7, the series lost a friend and star due to Paul Walker’s untimely passing. Production shut down, as making a movie was the least important thing facing those involved at that point.

After reconvening, the producers, stars, and director James Wan agreed to finish Furious 7 as a tribute to Walker, but it would involve a massive amount of restructuring, rewriting, and reshooting. In effect, the entire third act of the film was changed, and instead of setting up future sequels, Furious 7 goes off on an emotional note as Walker’s character rides off into the sunset.

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Image via Universal Pictures

As the franchise is about to release its eighth installment, The Fate of the Furious, with no signs of slowing down, Collider’s Steve Weintraub recently spoke with screenwriter Chris Morgan for an extended conversation about the series as a whole. Morgan has been with the franchise since Tokyo Drift and is one of the key architects of this series, so during the course of the conversation, Steve asked about the original ending that was planned for Furious 7 and Morgan opened up about the intended story arc for Walker’s character.

“Well, the original ending, if I remember correctly, was our guys end up solving the problem and then kind of becoming—again, going more outlaw, it was sort of a happier ending that kind of ends with the insinuation that they were gonna go off onto this heist or this job. But the core issue for Brian, Paul’s character, was this kind of ‘Who am I?’ sort of question. He’s a guy who used to be a cop and in the thick of the action and a racer, and all this stuff, and now he has an amazing wife, a kid and another one on the way. Then he starts to look at his life and it’s not a midlife crisis but to say—we said it in the movie, ‘I miss the bullets, I miss the action’ and the point of the adventure was to show by the end of it that the thing that’s truly important to him is his family and being there. It wouldn’t mean that he has to stop those adventures or those things, but the context is just a little bit different, he has a different understanding of who he is at his core and what’s most important in life.”

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Image via Universal

But when Walker passed unexpectedly, Morgan says they considered just shutting the movie down permanently—until inspiration struck:

“Then the tragedy with Paul happened halfway through our shooting. We had him in a lot of the action stuff and not a lot of the dramatic sequences, and so those were gonna be impossible to get. Then we had the question of like—there was a real moment where not only were we all just emotionally devastated, but there was a real question of is it even possible to finish. There was a beat where we were actually all just thinking about just shutting it down and not going on with it, but we took a little time and everyone had a chance to grieve. Then we all started thinking about it and I started specifically thinking about, ‘How do we build that story? What do we have with Paul?’ and really for me it was about, ‘Can we give the audience a cathartic experience to say goodbye? Can we do something that is worthy of Paul that he would appreciate?’ So it really kind of came down to that last sequence, so I just ended up writing it out and I took it into the studio and I was like, ‘This is what I think the end of the movie is’ and they loved it and the studio loved it. That was the moment when we all agreed, ‘We need to do this.’”

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Image via Universal Pictures

As for how this altered Brian and Mia’s arcs going forward, Morgan says there wasn’t a crazy adjustment to be made:

“In regards to the story, the story actually kind of was the same. The only difference is that whereas we let Brian and Mia and their family kind of go off to just be a family and drop the action-y elements of their lives and stop risking everything when family is so important to them, otherwise we would’ve just kind of continued with Brian learning and adjusting his character a little bit.”

Morgan also revealed that not only did Walker’s passing make them consider scrapping Furious 7, but they also thought about ending the franchise with Brian driving off into the sunset:

“In the end of the movie we were kind of just leaning into kind of a different sort of adventure, but then with what happened to Paul, once that film came out and it did well and it was great, it could’ve been the end of the franchise. We actually where thinking there for a minute, ‘Maybe we just leave this, go out on a good note and leave it alone’ and we all kind of made an agreement to say that we wouldn’t revisit this unless we had a story that did something dramatically different, that was worthy of being done.”

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Image via Universal Pictures

Indeed, the loss of Walker directly informed the darker story that they hit upon for Fate of the Furious:

“We did seven movies where it’s basically Dom kind of holding the family together and working together and solving a problem, so we started thinking about it and I came up the idea of like, ‘Well, what if we do the thing that’s the most forbidden thing of the franchise? What if Dom goes dark, what if he’s our bad guy? What would the family do?’ So I ended up calling the studio and talking to Neal Moritz and talking to Vin, and they immediately were like, ‘Now that’s interesting, There’s something there.’ I think what happened was Paul in the last film may have driven the thought process to what this story is. I think there’s actually an interesting thematic similarity in the story of this film, for the team but particularly for Letty, which is loss. They lose the foundation of their lives, they lose Dom, they don’t understand it, they don’t know why, and it’s very emotional. There’s a little bit of that that we get to address with the audience with, ‘Look, we’re doing the franchise now and Paul’s not with us, so we’re feeling a little bit of loss and it is scary and the foundations will shake’ So what’s the answer to that? And I think this movie gives a good cathartic sort of lesson of how to deal with grief and loss and the main thing is to stay through it and at the other side of it you can be stronger and you can kind of find the joy.”

As of now, Fate of the Furious is intended to kick off yet another trilogy, with ideas already percolating for Fast & Furious 9 and 10, but it’s interesting to hear how that trajectory was altered in Furious 7. I think most can agree that Morgan and Co. came to the right conclusion about how to write Walker out of the franchise, and Furious 7 still stands as a touching tribute to the actor and a remarkable filmmaking achievement in and of itself considering the challenges that were faced in making the movie work.

For more from Steve's interview with Morgan check out what he had to say about the original idea for Tokyo Drift and plans for the Universal Monsters Universe.

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Image via Universal