David Ayer on Laying The Foundation of the FAST AND FURIOUS Franchise and How He Has “Nothing to Show” From It
David Ayer (Training Day, Suicide Squad, Fury) was one of the writers who worked on the 2001 film The Fast and the Furious, and if he hadn’t gotten involved, the movie would’ve been very different from the one we ended up getting. Ayer is the guy who laid the foundation for the Fast and Furious franchise, he set the whole tone of the film series!
Ayer was recently a guest on Jon Bernthal’s Real Ones podcast, and while on the show, he talked about the work that he did on the franchise, how he changed the direction of the story and setting, and how he has “nothing to show” for it.
The filmmaker said: “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.” If you can’t tell, Ayer is a little irked.
The movie is based on a Vibe magazine article, “Racer X” and Gary Scott Thompson and Erik Bergquist wrote drafts of the initial script. Then Ayer came on board and injected everything that made the movie work. He explained: “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.”
The director continued: “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.'”
Ayer then explained how he didn’t really get credit for everything that he brought to the film and the franchise. He went on to explain that “the narrative is I didn’t do s—, right?” He says the reason for that is that he’s an outsider and never really played the Hollywood game of parties and socializing.
He said: “It’s like people hijack narratives, control narratives, create narratives to empower themselves, right? And because I was always an outsider and because, like, I don’t go to the f—ing parties. I don’t go to the meals, I don’t do any of that stuff. The people that did were able to control and manage narratives because they’re socialized in that part of the problem. I was never socialized in that part of the problem so I was always like the dark, creative dude, beware.”
This experience empowered him to embrace independence in other projects, saying: “F— all the middlemen, right? I get it. It’s up to me, I gotta self-rescue, right? 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.”
Good for him! I had no idea that Ayer played such a big role in developing what Fast and the Furious is, but now it all makes sense.
Via: EW