James Wan Explains Why FURIOUS 7 Was the Hardest Movie of His Career

Director James Wan took a break from making horror films to take on the 2015 Fast and Furious movie, Furious 7. This was a very different kind of film for Wan to take on as his previous movie were all horror thrillers like Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring.

The filmmaker recently looked back on his time directing Furious 7 and called it the hardest movie of his career. He explained why during an interview with THR:

“It definitely was the hardest movie of my career. I’ve done technically challenging movies since then, but Furious 7 just hit on so many different levels, especially an emotional one. It was my first big-budget movie. I made The Conjuring for $20 million, and then Furious 7 was hundreds of millions.”

There’s definitely a lot more pressure on a filmmaker when they are given hundreds of millions of dollars to make a movie! Wan also wanted to build elements into the film that were “a bit more tense, suspenseful, and scary.” One of the first ideas that he pitched was the scene where Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) is trapped in a bus dangling off a cliff, and he has to race to the top of the cliff before the bus falls off the edge.

The director also talked about the difficult time during production when they needed to adapt to the circumstances surrounding Walker’s tragic death. He said:

“When the passing of Paul Walker happened, we were like, ‘Do we just shut the movie down for good?’ But we collectively felt like this movie needed to be Paul’s legacy. Thankfully, I had shot certain stuff with Paul, like his ending action stuff, but there were still many bits missing in the film that needed Paul. I shot only half of what I needed from Paul before his passing, and then we worked with visual effects to salvage what we had.”

It was a lot harder to pull this off at the time do to the filmmaking tech that was available, but they managed to pull if off the best they could by using dialogue that Walker had spoken over the course of the franchise, digital effects, and Walker’s brothers Caleb and Cody to act as doubles. Wan shared:

“To complete that movie now, in today’s world, with AI technology, it’s so simple. But we did not have that kind of technology at our disposal. So we had to really dig deep into our bag of tricks to make it work”

The director also recalled the most emotional day during the production of Furious 7, saying:

“The hardest part of that movie was editing the ending of the movie where we say farewell to Paul. It was very tearful. It was hard to watch the ending that we put together and not cry.”

Yeah, that ending was definitely emotional. There wasn’t a dry eye in the theater with that one.