F9: THE FAST SAGA Filmmakers Consulted NASA Rocket Scientists About Launching a Car Into Space
F9: The Fast Saga introduces a car with a built-in rocket engine and that car boldly goes where the Fast and Furious franchise has never gone before. I couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculous concept, but we all knew it was going to eventually happen! Of course, they were going to send a rocket car into space!
During a recent interview with Vulture, director Justin Lin and his creative team talked about this whole concept. While the idea is completely far-fetched, the filmmaking team wanted to make sure to get it right, so Lin consulted some NASA rocket scientists to try and figure out how this might work in the real world.
“Going to space was not something I took for granted or I was very flippant about. It is something that I did have a lot of conversations about. A lot of conversations. And it went from rocket scientists laughing, going, ‘What the fuck?’ to us saying, ‘Well, can this really happen? If other rocket scientists have to get up there and the capsules are coated with these polymers? Blah blah blah.’ This is something that was thought out. If anything — logistically, scientifically — it’s one of the most sound action set pieces in our franchise.”
But you know what Lin did take for granted? Common sense and real-world physics. As I pointed out in my review, the actors weren’t even wearing their seat belts as they were crashing their cars all over the place. But, they had to make sure to get get the space stuff right. Let’s be honest, the rocket car wasn’t the most outlandish aspect of the movie.
F9 executive producer Josh Henson went on to talk about how the whole space concept was born, saying:
“Kind of as a joke, [visual effects supervisor Alexander Vegh and I] put together a pitch that looks like, ‘Okay, Dom and the gang go to the moon, and they race cars; they’re racing cool rovers on the moon and Dom wrecks his rover. And the bad guy’s about to get away, but he’s just at the Apollo 11 site. And he finds the original moon rover, and he’s racing.’ We kind of did it as a joke, and we pitched it to Justin, and we had a good laugh. But then Justin’s like, ‘Well, maybe there’s something there.’”
Lin also addresses the scene where Tyrese Gibson’s character Roman starts hinting at the fact that they’re invincible superheroes because they never die in the crazy-ass situations where they should have easily died. Hell, their clothes don’t even seem to get dirty. He explains:
“Look, we’re 20 years in. For the self-awareness, I felt like it was appropriate … to be able to have the character articulate that. Personally, I love it. We wanted to acknowledge that for the first time. To say, ‘Hey, let’s be very conscious of it.’ Twenty years in, this is the time to let the audience know, ‘Hey, you guys have definitely been a part of this.’”
So, there ya go. What did you think of all the wild over-the-top things that they threw into F9?