The Fast and Furious franchise is famous for its high-octane car chases and spectacular
crashes, but are all of those wild stunts really as dangerous as they look?
Absolutely.
Stunt driver and coordinator Robert Nagle, who has worked on every installment in the
Fast and Furious series since Fast Five, and recently oversaw the thrilling racing scenes
in James Mangold's Oscar-nominated film Ford v Ferrari, spoke with Looper in an exclusive
interview about his career.
Before he became a stunt driver, he worked as a racer — though he switched careers
when money became too big of a factor.
Nagle explained,
"Going down the back straightaway at 180 miles an hour and you're trying to think about where
the next check is coming from... it just takes away from the passion of the sport."
This is why Nagle tends not to worry about whether or not he and his fellow drivers are
up to the task.,
"A lot of the guys I hire have a pretty solid race background, because I know I can put
them in any car.
Still, sometimes even the best drivers can lose control.
Ford v Ferrari's most spectacular car crash, which occurs as Christian Bale's Ken Miles
completes his very first lap at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, was based on a real-life event.
Before working on Ford v Ferrari, the film's second unit director, Darrin Prescott, was
participating in a celebrity race when another car fell apart right in front of him.
"It was a right-hand corner and the car went a little bit wide and dropped the outside
wheels into the grass, and that turned the car sideways and shot it back across the track
and it hit a concrete wall.
[Prescott] was pretty certain he just saw somebody die."
Luckily, Prescott was wrong, and the other driver was fine.
When it came time to film Ford v Ferrari, Nagle and Prescott decided to recreate that
crash in the movie.
However, the final scene isn't there just for thrills, but to show how dangerous Le
Mans is.
After all, the wreck comes during the first four minutes of Miles' race, when he still
has 24 hours to go.
On set though, the real danger often comes from factors outside of the stunt team's control.
When asked to identify his most dangerous stunt on the Fast and Furious films, Nagle
explained that almost everything is inherently unsafe, saying,
"There's so much going on with some of these…
[There are] multiple cars... and explosions, pyrotechnics going off around us.
There's a whole lot going on and a whole lot that can go wrong very quickly."
Still, when pressed, Nagle singled out one Fast and Furious scene that was especially
dangerous: the opening of Fast and Furious 6, which he described as "pretty hairball."
In the sequence, Dominic Toretto, played by Vin Diesel, and Brian O'Conner, played by
Paul Walker, race on a twisty Spanish road in order to get home before Brian's girlfriend,
Mia, played by Jordana Brewster, gives birth.
On one side is a sheer rock cliff; on the other, nothing but ocean.
The scene was filmed on-location on Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands.
Nagle was in the camera car filming the action, while former Top Gear driver Ben Collins and
rally car champion Mark Higgins did the actual racing.
As Nagle explained, the driving wasn't the problem — the road was.
"There was this road that they wanted me to go shoot that was deemed too dangerous for
the general public to drive on.
It's got a thousand-foot drop off into the ocean with these little blocks that will probably
slow you down just enough so you get a really good view of where you're about to crash."
"This time it ain't just about being fast."
In addition to the terrain of the road itself, there was another hazard that no amount of
careful planning or skill could account for.
According to Nagle,
"I commented to the guys, 'Some really bad potholes on that road.'
Somebody [said] to me, 'You know, those aren't potholes those are divots from rocks.
They've been falling off the cliff on the other side of you that's a thousand feet up.'"
As if the road conditions weren't already dangerous enough, Nagle also had to navigate
it at full speed without any practice.
While Collins and Higgins had been racing for a week by the time they filmed the stunt,
it was Nagle's first day at work.
Nagle admitted,
"Two very top drivers that had been driving this road for the last week and I've got to...
chase them down with this camera car.
Yeah, it was a little scary."
Fortunately, Nagle's skill and experience paid off, and he was able to film the scene
in one take.
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