The Fast And The Furious has been a mainstay of popular culture since the first film’s release in 2001. Most recently, it came out with a tenth installment, Fast X, which was even teased to be the first part of trilogy to end the series.
Based on an original short story titled Racer X, the first film was written by Gary Scott Thompson and Eric Bergquist. Writer/director David Ayer, known for directing and writing Suicide Squad and End Of Watch came on at later stage in the writing process, to add a bit more of his influence to the project. But, as Deadline reports, he feels he didn’t get the proper credit he deserved for his work.
Biggest franchise in Hollywood, and I don’t have any of it. I got nothing to show for it, nothing, because of the way the business works. he told Jon Bernthal, on Bernthal’s podcast, Real Ones.
When I got that script, that s— was set in New York, it was all Italian kids, right? I’m like, ‘Bro, I’m not gonna take it unless I can set it in L.A. and make it look like the people I know in L.A., right?’ So then I started, like, writing in people of color, and writing in the street stuff, and writing in the culture, and no one knew s— about street racing at the time.
I went to a shop in the Valley and met with like the first guys that were doing the hacking of the fuel curves for the injectors and stuff like that, and they had just figured it out and they were showing it, and I’m like, ‘Oh f— yeah, I’m gonna put that in the movie.’
With the injections of life that Ayer felt he put into the script and the story, he also feels “the narrative is I didn’t do s—, right?” But with the hardships also came a valuable lesson in his career, in terms of taking on more independent projects where he has control.
I can f—ing whine about getting shot at and all the rounds I’ve taken over my career — I’ve gotta self-rescue, and I’ve gotta create an ecology where it’s safe for me to be creative, and that’s it. And that’s what I’m doing now.
Fast X is available to buy on disc and to stream online.
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