Any time a new Fast & Furious movie is released you get the usual assortment of jokes about the terrible writing. “It had a script?” We can all admit that story is secondary to the spectacle in this franchise, and that’s okay, but even so, the screenwriting process on Fast X was insanely tight for director Louis Leterrier after he replaced longtime director Justin Lin. We’re talking a matter of days to rewrite the entire thing.
Leterrier spoke with Esquire about coming to Fast X‘s rescue after Lin’s abrupt departure. He describes how quickly the whole thing went down, including that he only had four days to rewrite the script.
It began with a call in the middle of the night from Universal execs. Leterrier ignored the call until being alerted to the urgency of the situation. He was sent the script and asked to read it ASAP to decide if he wanted to direct the film…
“I then had these meetings, and it went really well, and three days later, I was on a plane, and landed, and from that first phone call till my first day calling action was maybe a four-day period,” Leterrier explained. “The day I landed was not a shooting day. I landed at 11:00am and it was a half a day of prep for the entire movie.”
“I read the script four times on the plane, and I said I had some ideas, and they said, ‘Great, because the whole third act is changing. Can you rewrite it tonight?’ I was literally on no sleep. I’d been on no sleep for days.”
As the filmmaker goes on to explain, you can’t just rewrite the third act without it greatly affecting the rest of the script. This meant that the full script needed a wholesale rewrite.
“Obviously, this was not going to be set in stone. But I was like, ‘Okay, yeah, I’ve got some ideas,’ and started writing,” Leterrier added. “And obviously, since the third act was changing, I needed to change the first act. And when you rewrite the third act, and the first act, the second act has to go. So basically I had to on the fly rebuild the airplane.”
That’s absolutely nutty. A production of this magnitude usually gets months of prep time. The question is will we be able to see how rushed things were? Will it have an impact on the final product? We’ll find out when Fast X hits theaters on May 19th.
