Jonathan Sim
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James Wan has singled out Furious 7 as the most challenging movie of his career.
The successful director, who got his start with the smash-hit horror film Saw, recently did a career retrospective interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Starting with Saw and going on to films like Insidious and The Conjuring, Wan reflected on getting hired to direct the seventh movie in the Fast & Furious series.
“It definitely was the hardest movie of my career,” said Wan. “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.”
Wan spoke about his interest in creating set pieces that were “a bit more tense, suspenseful, and scary.” The first idea he pitched for the film was the famous scene where Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) is trapped in a bus dangling off a cliff, and he must race to the top of the cliff before the bus falls off the edge.
He also commented on how they needed to adapt to the circumstances when star Paul Walker died halfway through production.
“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,” said Wan. “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 accomplish this, Wan pulled different words Walker had spoken from all over the franchise. Then, he enlisted the help of Walker’s brothers Caleb and Cody to act as doubles.
“To complete that movie now, in today’s world, with AI technology, it’s so simple,” Wan said. “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”
Wan also recalls the most emotional day during the creation of Furious 7.
“The hardest part of that movie was editing the ending of the movie where we say farewell to Paul. It was very tearful. It was hard to watch the ending that we put together and not cry.”
What is James Wan’s next movie?
Wan’s next movie is Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, the sequel to his 2018 DC superhero film Aquaman. The film stars another member of the Fast & Furious family: Fast X’s Jason Momoa. It’s set to release on December 20, 2023.