"Hardest Movie Of My Career": Furious 7 Director Recalls Impact Of Paul Walker's Death

Aug 19, 2023

Furious 7 director James Wan recalls the impact that Paul Walker's tragic death had on the development of the hardest movie of his career.

Paul Walker's untimely death turned Furious 7 into the most challenging movie of director James Wan's career. Midway through the production of Furious 7, Walker was a passenger in a speeding vehicle when the driver lost control. The car hit a sidewalk curb and launched into a tree, and the resulting fire tragically killed the Fast & Furious star and left the cast and crew uncertain on how to proceed with the movie.

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Wan talked about the impact that Walker's death had on the production of Furious 7 and his own emotional reaction to the events. As Wan's first blockbuster production, Furious 7 was always going to be a challenge, but the death of Walker midway through filming made it an emotional struggle too, and while the creators considered canceling the movie outright, they elected to continue filming to honor Walker's memory. Check out his quote below:

"It definitely was the hardest movie of my career. I’ve done technically challenging movies since then, but Furious 7 just hit on so many different levels, especially an emotional one. It was my first big-budget movie. I made The Conjuring for $20 million, and then Furious 7 was hundreds of millions. But the size of the production did not turn me off; I actually embraced it. I really wanted to create a movie that had the look and smell of their franchise, but I wanted to design set pieces that were a bit more tense, suspenseful and scary. The first thing that I pitched to Universal's Donna Langley in the room was the scene where the bus is going over the edge of the cliff, and Paul Walker's character, Brian, has to climb onto the side of the bus and run to jump off. Two years later, that became one of the highlights of the trailer.

When the passing of Paul Walker happened, we were like, 'Do we just shut the movie down for good?' But we collectively felt like this movie needed to be Paul's legacy. So we wiped our tears away and sat around in editorial, going, 'All right, how do we do this?' Thankfully, I had shot certain stuff with Paul, like his ending action stuff, but there were still many bits missing in the film that needed Paul. I shot only half of what I needed from Paul before his passing, and then we worked with visual effects to salvage what we had. To complete that movie now, in today's world, with AI technology, it's so simple. But we did not have that kind of technology at our disposal. So we had to really dig deep into our bag of tricks to make it work, and one of them was having Paul's brothers [Caleb and Cody Walker] step in and shoot the other half of the movie. We then pulled different words that Paul had spoken all through the franchise to create sentences for us."

In the near-decade since it happened, Paul Walker's death has reverberated throughout the Fast & Furious franchise. Even with only half of his part filmed, Furious 7 managed to re-write and re-film Walker's scenes with the help of his brothers. Together, they were able to complete his story and provide a touching conclusion for his character, Brian O'Conner. After one final race between Brian and Dom (Vin Diesel), Walker's character was temporarily retired just before Furious 7 cut to a black screen with the words "For Paul" in white.

Of course, Furious 7 isn't the only way that the Fast & Furious movies honor the late Walker. F9 also features an acknowledgment of O'Conner, with his famous blue Nissan pulling in at the end of the movie as Dom points out the presence of an empty chair. It's never stated which character is supposed to be coming, but the implication alone helps to honor Walker without having to struggle to recruit his brothers for the production once again. That, too, won't be the end of O'Conner's story.

Related: Brian O’Connor's Return Creates A Massive Challenge For Fast & Furious 11

While Furious 7 has earned praise for its tribute to Walker, Vin Diesel has promised that Fast 11 will be giving O'Conner a proper goodbye. Walker may have been given his official send-off by the franchise, but O'Conner himself also deserves acknowledgment before the Fast & Furious series ends. Long after the emotional filming of Furious 7, Paul Walker's memory is still at the core of these films, and his legacy has not been forgotten, as Wan has been happy to prove.

Source: THR