The most insane Fast & Furious stunts and how they were filmed

The Fast and the Furious was one of the first Universal films to utilise a "Mic Rig" device, a sort of half-vehicle whose back seats had been removed and replaced by a long frame which attached to the vehicle that would be seen on-screen. The Mic Rig vehicle therefore allowed room for cameras to shoot the on-screen car’s drivers, as well as operate both vehicles independent from the actor in the driving seat.

For the first film’s climactic train race, one of the few races in the 2001 original to live up to the high-concept excitement the franchise would later bring, the timing of both the speeding train and Brian and Dom’s vehicles was executed with military precision and then sped up in post-production.

The yacht jump (2 Fast 2 Furious)

The climactic set piece of the maligned sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious sees Brian and Roman jump their Camaro off land and directly onto the back of a speeding yacht. The scene was accomplished across two takes edited together – the car was initially driven off land and catapulted via a ramp directly into the ocean, then a second take saw the car wired up in the air and gradually glided into a makeshift rear of a yacht which was triggered with explosives. The two shots were then superimposed over one another. The crew then took to the real-life Florida Everglades on a makeshift yacht of their own, with the Camaro and its associated wreckage installed.

The Hachiko Square drift (The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift)

Tokyo Drift remains the slight outlier in the Fast & Furious franchise, but does feature one of the series’s most breathtaking moments, in which one-shot protagonist Sean Boswell "drifts" his car through an enormous crowd of people gathered in Tokyo’s famous Hachiko Square. Somewhat understandably, the production couldn’t actually shoot the stunt in the Square, so the crowd had to be superimposed using CGI, something noticeable via dodgy mid-Noughties green screen, while the aerial shot of the crowd dispersing was digitally created.

You might also notice that many of the action shots in this scene, and the rest of Tokyo Drift, are from slightly low angles – the result of cameramen being installed on go-karts, who trailed the stunt cars to shoot.

The gas tanker heist (Fast & Furious)

For the opening to the 2009 series reboot Fast & Furious, Michelle Rodriguez and her stunt woman really were strapped to the back of a gas tanker speeding at 25 mph. Meanwhile, the individual gas tankers gradually cut loose by Dom and Letty were housed with secret drivers mechanically operating them from the inside. While much of the opening was finished using solely practical effects, that standard didn’t extent to the moment in which an exploding gas truck bounces towards the pair as they are forced to make a split-second attempt at escape. That, somewhat understandably, could only be achieved on a computer.

The great train robbery (Fast Five)

As much as you might think the majority of this memorable opening was computer generated, most of it was shot practically, at a staggering cost of $25m. The production team rented a working 600-yard train line, along with an operational train, and used hydraulics to fire vehicles out of the hijacked freighter. As for the climactic moment in which Dom and Brian leap from their vehicle and tumble into the ocean below, stuntmen for Diesel and Walker really did perform the gargantuan feat, while the dovetailing car was filmed shortly after. Both shots were then superimposed over each other in post-production.

The speeding vault (Fast Five)

Stunt coordinator Jack Gill spent months figuring out the logistics of successfully dragging a bank vault through the streets of Rio de Janeiro strapped to two muscle cars, eventually building seven different vault stand-ins for various stunts throughout the scene. Two were hollowed out and motorised, with engines operated by two stunt drivers, one could tip and slide, two were different weights allowing for different degrees of mass destruction, one was used exclusively for static shots, and one was specifically developed to roll and bounce. The insides of the vaults mechanically operated by drivers were so hot that the stuntmen had to wear special temperature-controlled suits in order to not dehydrate.

Betraying its Brazilian setting, this set piece was in fact shot, along with much of the film, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where a small suburb outside of the city doubled for busy downtown Rio.

The tank race (Furious 6)

You know what’s enormously helpful? When a country grants the Fast & Furious wrecking crew carte blanche to entirely destroy part of their infrastructure. For Furious 6’s high-speed chase between the heroes and Luke Evans’s tank-driving super-villain, the Tenerife government opened up a stretch of motorway for the stunt team to use in whichever ways they saw fit.

The tank used in the scene itself was a real-life historic World War Two veteran, but modified so it could drive 60 mph rather than the typical 30. The crew sent real cars careening headfirst into the tank in order to achieve that “just splattered” authenticity, and CGI was used to digitally remove the many hotels and street signs decorating the mountains on either side of the highway. Disappointingly, the memorable shot in which Roman leaps from his pulverised vehicle into Brian’s Ford Escort was accomplished entirely through CGI.

The cargo plane (Fast & Furious 7)

Believe it or not, the standout scene in which the Fast & Furious heroes parachute their vehicles out of a cargo plane and land safely enough to speed away without a hitch actually happened. It’s still entirely implausible, both elements of the stunt cut together in post-production and the cast inserted into their cars via CGI, but the F&F stunt team did indeed send cars plummeting out of an airplane, where they smashed to the ground in a prearranged (and entirely vacant) drop site in the Arizona desert.

For the final shots in which the cars finally touch down on the ground, the vehicles were hoisted seven feet above the earth, where they each started their engines and were gently lowered, giving the impression of a smooth slide into driving mode.

The bus jump (Fast & Furious 7)

Another stunt performed with very little CGI, the immediate aftermath of the ‘parachuting cars’ scene involves Brian nearly plummeting off a cliff while latching onto an upturned bus. In order to escape with his brains still intact, he races up the bus while it slides off the cliff edge and leaps over the widening chasm and onto Letty’s car.

And, yes, this all sort of happened. Paul Walker’s stuntman really did run up that bus, albeit on wires, the bus really was levered off the cliff edge, and it really did plummet to the ground below. The entire stunt itself took a week to shoot.

The skyscraper smash (Fast & Furious 7)

And here’s the crème de la crème of vehicular madness, a scene so gleefully, brainlessly brilliant that it can’t help but sum up the franchise’s continued success. During a sojourn to Abu Dhabi, a real-life 1,002 foot skyscraper complex is the site of a high-speed scrape in which Dom and Brian, driving a $3.4m Lykan HyperSport supercar (with diamonds in the headlights), are shot at by Jason Statham and his trusty rocket launcher. To flee Statham’s dastardly baldness, the pair gun the car out of one of the skyscraper’s five towers, floating through the air and smashing into another one of the towers.

It’s only there that the pair discover that their vehicle has no brakes (of course it doesn’t), forcing them to once again speed through the second tower and into the next one. There the pair leap from the car as it careens out of the tower, where it hurtles down to the ground.

While the Fast & Furious crew couldn’t literally perform the stunt in Dubai itself, they did wind up doing the next best thing: constructing three 40 foot glass and steel enclosures inside an Atlanta soundstage, which a stunt driver proceeded to speed through. And they say Hollywood has ran out of ideas...