The Nacelle Company and Vice TV are back with Icons Unearthed: Fast & Furious, the third installment of their hit docuseries. The series dives deep into the world of Fast and Furious, beginning with the true-life inspiration behind the first film. Icons Unearthed: Fast & Furious follows Icons Unearthed: Star Wars and Icons Unearthed: The Simpsons, and continues the series’ trend of exploring some of the biggest pop culture touchstones of all time.
While perhaps not an obvious choice for the focus of a docuseries, the Fast & Furious franchise has a tumultuous story that in many ways rivals the drama of the actual films. From the series’ tonal shift from grounded action thriller to CGI-heavy juggernaut, to the public feud between The Rock and Vin Diesel, to the tragic and untimely passing of Paul Walker, there were likely countless aspects Icons Unearthed: Fast & Furious to explore. Thanks to interviews with screenwriters, stunt coordinators, cast members, and more, Icons Unearthed: Fast & Furious is able to do so with firsthand information.
Icons Unearthed creator and director Brian Volk-Weiss spoke with Screen Rant about becoming a fan of the franchise, the improvisational nature of the series, and more.
Brian Volk-Weiss on Icons Unearthed: Fast & Furious
Screen Rant: We’ve talked about your love for Star Wars and The Simpsons, which led to the first couple of seasons of Icons Unearthed. Did you have that kind of relationship with Fast and Furious?
Brian Volk-Weiss: Absolutely not. I will say this; I’m not even sure why, but I had seen every single movie in the theaters. There was something about it that got me to go see them, but I was not at all a diehard fan. And that’s an understatement.
Was it more, then, about the pure cultural impact of the franchise?
Brian Volk-Weiss: Yeah, I mean, that’s a fancy way of [saying it]. The truth of the matter is that the whole premise of the show Icons Unearthed was that we were looking at these iconic things and trying to explain to people how they came about. With Star Wars, we were conservatively the 89th documentary about it. Bizarrely enough, with The Simpsons, I think we were one of the first, if not the first. With Fast & Furious, I can guarantee you we were the first.
It’s funny, because why on Earth would we have been the first? How can you have this franchise that’s literally doing around a billion dollars a movie – with theme park rides, toys, all these things – and nobody’s covering it? I was like, “You know what? The day has come where I need to make a documentary about a subject I have not been obsessed with for 30 years.”
Even though it’s been around for twenty years now, did you find it easier to get access or information for Fast & Furious? At least compared to Star Wars and The Simpsons, it’s relatively new.
Brian Volk-Weiss: We had some good luck and some bad luck. The good luck was that the people that make [Fast & Furious were] kind of really frustrated, because they’re making something that is obviously staggeringly popular, but they don’t get respect. When you’re covering a topic like that, very often people want to talk to you and tell you about what they’ve done. In that regard, we were very lucky, and we got tons of people talking to us, with one major exception: the people working on Fast 10.
By pure bad luck we were producing the season simultaneously with Fast 10 being made, so everybody was all over the world shooting. There were so many people we probably would have gotten, who we knew wanted to do it, but couldn’t because they were making the movie.
Something else that I think is interesting about this franchise is that the behind-the-scenes is already part of pop culture. You have The Rock and Vin Diesel stuff, and you have Paul Walker, of course. For this series, do you dive deeper into the things people already know about, or do you focus more on the stories that nobody’s heard of?
Brian Volk-Weiss: It really is both. Part of what we always like to do is find the real story behind what went down, so as it relates to Vin and The Rock, we definitely got a fair amount of scoop that has not been public. Everybody knows what happened; everybody knows that The Rock thinks Vin was not being professional. [As for] the specifics of what made a normally very, very diplomatic actor [and] producer, Dwayne Johnson, go public on Instagram slamming another star? That was not well known. What was the straw that broke the camel’s back? We got the straw. What were the details that led up to that straw? We got those facts. What were the ramifications after that came out?
Everybody knows The Rock won’t do another movie with Vin, and that the [Hobbs & Shaw] spin-off happened because of the fight, but there was a period before Hobbs & Shaw got greenlit where everybody was still trying to figure out what happened, and how to fix it. The result of that process is what led to Hobbs and Shaw. We got tons and tons of details about the lead-up, the actual event, and then the after-effects of the breakdown in their relationship. I feel like you asked me two questions, and I only answered one. What was the other?
It was whether you focused on what people thought they already knew versus things that were totally unknown.
Brian Volk-Weiss: Yeah. To be completely honest with you, this is probably the easiest time I’ve ever had with that. It’s a lot easier to get new information on Fast & Furious than it is on The Simpsons and Star Wars. One of the things that I, as a non-fan – by the way, now I’m a fan, but originally I was not – really wanted to figure out was: why are these movies so popular? What we unearthed, just to put the title in my answer, was a real epiphany. We had already been shooting, and we had been in post for a little while, before I finally saw the nugget that allowed me to understand why these movies are so popular. It’s a really interesting thing; It’s improv.
I don’t know of any other franchise that does improv the way Fast & Furious does. I’ll tell you the moment when I noticed it, and then I’ll give you a couple examples. We were interviewing one of the stunt coordinators of [2 Fast 2 Furious]. There’s a scene in the movie, I remembered it vividly, where Paul Walker is driving down the street racing with [Eva Mendes], and they’re not looking at the road ahead. They’re staring at each other, so they’re looking sideways while going a hundred miles an hour down a residential street. It is a brilliant scene; it is so stressful watching that scene, because you have these two guys driving up driving a hundred miles an hour down a residential street, not looking at where they’re going. We found out while making that episode that that scene was completely improvised.
[There was] something else they were supposed to shoot, [and] they weren’t able to make it work in the allotted time. Somebody said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. What about if they’re just staring at each other while they’re driving a hundred miles an hour? We could probably shoot that before the sun goes down.” They embrace that. Not only that, [but] at the end of the scene when the whole thing’s over, and they don’t crash, Tyrese says to Paul Walker, “Oh, did he do the whole not looking at the road thing?” which is the perfect button to a perfect scene. Both the action and the dialogue were improvised. That’s how I figured out what makes these movies different, and what makes them special. Here’s an example.
When they were making Fast Five, which is considered arguably to be the best of the films so far, there’s a scene that in the script had a car crash into a moving train, and there’s a fight going on on top of the train. The shot in the script is two people are fighting on top of a train, and then a car [bumps the] train while they’re fighting. When they shot the car [bumping] the train, there was a complete mess-up, and the car crashed into the train.
When they were shooting the actual stunt of the car jumping over the train, that was being done in New Mexico. The fight starts inside the train, and then goes on top of the train. All the stuff being shot inside the train was being filmed in Atlanta, and just by coincidence, they happened to be filming the same scene simultaneously about two thousand miles apart. When they shot the car jumping over the train, there was a complete mess-up, and the car crashed into the train.
[With] any other movie, the first thing they would have done is called the insurance company and been like, “Oh my God, we messed up. We need another five million dollars to redo the scene.” Not in Fast & Furious. The phone call they made was to the people in Atlanta shooting the interior of the train, and they were like, “We got great news. We just accidentally launched the car into the train, and it’s stuck in the train. Could you refilm what you’re shooting in Atlanta so that the car is actually embedded in the train, and the fight that had been on the roof happens inside the car with the car sticking out of the train?” And they did.
That’s incredible.
Brian Volk-Weiss: No other franchise. Can you imagine in James Bond, the stunt goes wrong, and they rewrite the script because they screwed up the stunt? No one would do that.
Did you find there was any sort of behind-the-scenes drama surrounding the fact that the series has become so heightened over the years? It’s mind-blowing to revisit how grounded the first film is in your first episode.
Brian Volk-Weiss: No. That’s the thing. It’s so interesting. In James Bond, or even Marvel movies, or even now Star Trek – Star Trek had Gene Roddenberry, Star Wars had George Lucas, James Bond had the Broccoli family. There was always this overseeing entity that, for lack of a better expression, managed quality control. I’m not trying to say Fast & Furious doesn’t have quality; they do have quality. You can’t not have quality when you’re spending a quarter billion dollars to make a movie.
My point is, unlike those other franchises where they kept saying, “Would James Bond do this, yes or no?” and if the answer was no, they didn’t put it in the next film, Fast & Furious went the other way, where they just started embracing the wackiness. They kind of did it subconsciously, or at least not out in front, for episodes four through eight. If you watch the ninth film, [though,] they literally talk about it. There’s literally a scene in the movie where they are comparing themselves to Marvel superheroes. They’re literally saying, like, “Isn’t it kind of weird how people shoot at us all the time and we never get hit? Are we in the Matrix?” Then, the scene literally ends with them being, like, “Nah. Why are we even thinking about this?” That’s the kind of thing that would have been an SNL sketch twenty years ago, but they put it into the movie. They embraced it.
Watching the first episode of your series, it’s crazy to realize that people like Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez were not famous at all before the first film. Was there something that particularly surprised you about the impact of this franchise as you were making Icons Unearthed?
Brian Volk-Weiss: It’s funny what you just said. I keep going back to James Bond; imagine if Sean Connery ended up becoming the lead producer of James Bond. Imagine if Harrison Ford ended up becoming the lead producer of Star Wars. That’s what happened here. A guy who was cast in a movie, literally cast like any other actor over the last hundred years, somehow is able to finagle almost complete control of the franchise. A billion-dollar-a-movie franchise, a ride at multiple theme parks all over planet Earth, it’s already led to two spin-offs, there’s two more on the way, and he’s an actor.
He’s literally a regular actor who was one of the leads, he wasn’t “the” lead, and he ended up becoming basically what Tom Cruise is to Mission: Impossible By the way, that was set up before they even pitched [the film to] Paramount – that Tom Cruise would be in charge of Mission: Impossible. [Vin] bails on the sequel, he doesn’t even show up, and yet somehow he’s back for the third with a cameo, and by the fourth movie, other than the head of the studio, he’s the most important leader of the franchise. We get into that a lot, and we also get into stuff like that. What I mean by “like that” is, basically, this franchise has so many weird things that work that [shouldn’t]. Imagine an airplane with one wing and no cockpit that still flew as perfectly as an airplane with two wings and a cockpit. That, to me, is Fast & Furious.
About Icons Unearthed: Fast & Furious
Icons Unearthed: Fast & Furious takes a look at the origins and evolution of one of the most successful film franchises of all time. Featuring interviews with screenwriters, directors, and members of the franchise’s cast, Icons Unearthed: Fast & Furious presents the story of the Fast Saga in the words of those who were there along the way. Icons Unearthed: Fast & Furious was created and directed by Brian Volk-Weiss, and is the third season of the docuseries. The first two seasons, Icons Unearthed: Star Wars and Icons Unearthed: The Simpsons, are available for streaming through Vice TV.
Check out our previous interviews about Icons Unearthed here:
- Icons Unearthed: Star Wars
- Icons Unearthed: The Simpsons
Icons Unearthed: Fast & Furious premieres on January 16 through Vice TV.
