Fast Five 5 (2011) Biography, Plot, Development, Writing, Filming, Marketing, Trailer.

Fast Five 5 (2011)

Fast Five (also known as Fast & Furious 5) is a 2011 American heist action film directed by Justin Lin and written by Chris Morgan. It is the sequel to Fast & Furious (2009) and the fifth installment in the Fast & Furious franchise. It stars Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Matt Schulze, Sung Kang, Tego Calderon, Don Omar, Gal Gadot, Dwayne Johnson, and Joaquim de Almeida. In the film, Dominic Toretto (Diesel) and Brian O’Conner (Walker) recruit a team to steal $100 million from a corrupt businessman while being pursued for arrest by U.S. Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) agent Luke Hobbs (Johnson). While developing Fast Five, Universal Studios deliberately departed from the street racing theme prevalent in previous films in the series, to transform the franchise into a heist action series involving cars.

By doing so, they hoped to attract wider audiences that might otherwise be put off by a heavy emphasis on cars and car culture. Fast Five is considered the transitional film in the series, featuring only one car race and giving more attention to action set pieces such as brawls, gun fights, and the central heist. The production mounted a comprehensive marketing campaign, with the film being advertised through social media, virtual games, cinema chains, automobile manufacturers, and at NASCAR races. Lin, Diesel, and Walker’s returns were finalized in February 2010, and principal photography began that July and lasted until that October, with filming locations including Atlanta, Puerto Rico, and Rio de Janeiro. Brian Tyler, the composer of the previous two installments, returned to compose the score.

The film is notable for primarily featuring practical stuntwork as opposed to computer-generated placements seen in other entries in the franchise. Fast Five premiered at the Cinépolis Lagoon in Rio de Janeiro on April 15, 2011, and was theatrically released worldwide on April 29. The film received generally positive reviews, with praise for Lin’s direction, the action sequences, and the performances of the cast. Fast Five grossed $626 million worldwide, becoming the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2011, the then-highest-grossing film in the franchise, and set records related to Universal’s highest-grossing opening weekend in several international markets. A sequel, Fast & Furious 6, was released in the United States on May 24, 2013.

Plot.

After being sentenced, Dominic Toretto is being transported to Lompoc Prison by bus, his sister Mia Toretto and friend Brian O’Conner lead an assault on the bus, wrecking it and freeing Dom. While the authorities search for them, the trio escapes to Rio de Janeiro. Awaiting Dom’s arrival, Mia and Brian join their friend Vince and other participants on a job to steal three cars from a train. Brian and Mia discover that agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) are also on the train and that the cars are seized property. When Dom arrives at the train with his accomplices, he realizes that their leader Zizi is only interested in stealing one car; the Ford GT40. Dom has Mia steal the car herself before he and Brian fight Zizi and his henchmen, during which Zizi kills the DEA agents assigned to the vehicles. Brian and Dom are captured and brought to crime lord Hernan Reyes,

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the owner of the cars and Zizi’s boss. Reyes orders the pair interrogated to discover the location of the car, but they manage to escape and retreat to their safehouse. Dom, Brian, and Mia are framed as the murderers of the DEA agents, causing the U.S. government to send a team of Diplomatic Security Service agents, led by Luke Hobbs and assisted by local officer Elena Neves, to Rio to arrest them. While Brian, Dom, and Mia examine the car to discover its importance, Vince arrives and is later caught trying to remove a computer chip from it. He admits he was planning to sell the chip to Reyes on his own, and Dom forces him to leave. Brian investigates the chip and discovers it contains the complete financial details of Reyes’ criminal empire, including the locations of US$100 million in cash. Hobbs and his team arrive at Dom’s safehouse,

but find it under assault by Reyes’ men, searching for the chip. Brian, Dom and Mia escape after a chase across the adjacent buildings. Dom suggests they split up and leave Rio, but Mia announces she is pregnant with Brian’s child. Dom agrees to stick together and suggests they steal the money from Reyes to start a new life. They organize a team to perform the heist: Han, Roman, Tej, Gisele, Leo, and Santos. Since it would be difficult to steal from 10 different locations, Dom’s team attack one of the locations and burn the money stored there in front of Reyes’s staff. Afraid of further attacks, Reyes consolidates the remaining money in an evidence vault inside a police station. Dom’s team do surveillance, buy equipment, and acquire Reyes’ handprint. After cars won in street races prove to be too slow for security cameras, they steal four 2010 Dodge Charger police cars to blend in.

Development.

By February 3, 2010, it was confirmed that a fifth film, referred to as Fast Five, was going into production in the Fast and Furious series, and that a sixth film was being planned. It was also confirmed that Diesel, Walker, writer Chris Morgan and producer Neal H. Moritz would all return to their roles for the new installment. Moritz said that, following the success of Fast & Furious (2009), which had reunited Diesel, Brewster, Walker and Rodriguez from the original film, the production wanted to bring them back again for the next one. Diesel felt that the story between the characters portrayed by himself and Walker should continue, envisioning it as three chapters, of which Fast Five would be the last. Diesel also wanted to bring back a variety of characters that had been in previous films without interacting, put them together and “have a lot of fun”.

The production had originally intended to film on location in Rio de Janeiro. However, the Puerto Rican government offered tax incentives totaling nearly $11 million, influencing the decision to film there, using Puerto Rico to represent Rio de Janeiro. Universal intended to transform the series from street-racing action into a series of heist films with car chases in the vein of The Italian Job (1969) and The French Connection (1971), with Fast Five as the transitional movie. In April 2011, Universal chairman Adam Fogelson said: The question putting Fast Five and Fast Six together for us was: Can we take it out of being a pure car culture movie and into being a true action franchise in the spirit of those great heist films made 10 or 15 years ago? Fogelson said that the racing aspect had put a “ceiling” on the number of people willing to see films in the series, and that, by turning it into a series where car driving ability is just one aspect of the film, he hoped to increase the series’ audience.

Writing.

Lin wanted to explore the elements of “freedom and family” in the film and collaborated with Morgan towards that ideal, both having worked together on previous installments of the franchise. Morgan worked with Diesel to produce a story arc that would further explore and develop Diesel’s character. An idea involving heisting a large safe had been conceived by Morgan during the production of Fast & Furious, but that film’s premise did not work with how Morgan envisioned it. He later incorporated it into Fast Five.

Filming.

On a budget of $125 million, the shooting of Fast Five was scheduled for July and August 2010. Shooting had started by July 14, 2010. Three film units worked simultaneously. The main cast were required to travel to Rio at the behest of Lin, who felt it important to understand the area and its culture to give the film a good sense of place. Diesel agreed that it was important to shoot key scenes in Brazil, commenting “we were able to shoot where other productions might not be able to shoot because our franchise has such good street cred.” The Rio film unit captured aerial shots of the city including Sugarloaf Mountain, Fort Copacabana, Ipanema Beach, the Dona Marta lookout point and the Christ the Redeemer statue. Establishing shots of the heist team members were taken as each arrived in Rio. Gibson was filmed arriving in character at Galeão International Airport but, when it became publicly known that a scene was being shot at the airport, the cast and crew were mobbed.

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A similar situation occurred while Ludacris was shooting a scene in which his character buys a car to drive around the city. A scene where the completed heist team walk down a beach was filmed in Copacabana. The rooftop chase across favelas was filmed in Puerto Rico, where the production could have more control over the area. The main and second filming units began filming in and around the capital, San Juan. The island’s mixture of tropical greenery and wide streets allowed the production to re-create the densely populated favelas of Rio while completing the larger action and external scenes without incident. Production designer Peter Wenham had the task of transforming Puerto Rico and Atlanta into the previously scouted Rio locations in four weeks, as the production deemed Rio unsuitable for filming many of the larger scenes. Wenham had to reinforce buildings to support the heavy camera equipment, and to alter the colors of more than 30 buildings in the city to make them suitable for filming.

His team needed to alter the buildings and strew debris to make the area look disheveled and appear as a Rio favela. Wenham remarked that, though the development was difficult, in part due to the heat, it was “a walk in the park” compared with filming in the Rio favelas themselves. Wenham aimed to maintain a monochromatic color scheme for the film, with muted blacks and grays, including his choice of colors for the cars used. He only chose to add a multitude of colors in the favela set. The Teodoro Moscosco bridge connecting San Juan to neighboring Isla Verde was used to film the final showdown between Dom and Reyes, while a U.S. Navy base pier 60 miles outside San Juan stood in for the bridge for scenes involving the vault smashing cars. Action scenes were also filmed in the Hato Rey and Río Piedras districts of San Juan.

A foot pursuit in which Diesel, Brewster and Walker are chased across favela rooftops by Johnson and his team was filmed over the course of a week in the small hillside town of Naranjito, Puerto Rico. The scene was considered difficult to shoot, as pathways were slippery from moist tropical heat and the scene involved actors and stunt doubles running while avoiding dogs, chickens and other stray animals loose in the area. To capture the scene, a 420-foot cable-camera rig was used to allow for a fast moving, birds-eye view of the action, and cameras on cranes were set up on rooftops and in alleyways. Walker and Brewster made multiple takes of the conclusion of the scene, requiring them to jump nearly 30 feet from a building onto a waiting safety mat. In total the production employed 236 technicians, 13,145 extras, and generated 16,824 room nights at hotels, contributing $27 million to the Puerto Rican community.

Filming moved to Atlanta, Georgia, for the final phase. Wenham and his team transformed a defunct train yard into an abandoned auto plant used by the protagonists as their headquarters. Redesigning the train yard took place over several months. It was required to allow enough space for stunt drivers to drive into the building, and it had to include an integrated lighting system. The design team removed walls, hauled out old railway cars, suspended rusted car parts and auto-plant car rails, and constructed smaller buildings within the main building to transform the site. With twenty-five pages of script to shoot in a limited time, cinematographer Stephen Windon and his team spent three weeks setting up a series of high-powered, motorized lights in the rafters of the building, that could be controlled remotely to allow lighting to be altered quickly while fully illuminating the set.

Vehicle stunts.

The climactic vault heist required four weeks of preparation with every scene and camera angle determined in advance. The filmmakers hired stunt director Spiro Razatos and stunt coordinator Jack Gill to direct the second-unit action filming. The pair initially began research for the stunt by testing the capabilities of the prop vaults and the Dodge Chargers driven by Diesel and Walker. Filmed on the streets of Hato Rey, the chaotic scene demanded specific timing that had to be synchronized with the various character interactions also occurring during the scene. Razatos chose to use a series of camera cars including a crane-mounted camera atop a Porsche Cayenne, which allowed him to film from a variety of angles and heights while the vehicles were in motion, and a Subaru Impreza with a steel cage built around it that allowed for tracking shots. The Subaru’s driver Allen Padelford would occasionally accidentally collide with the vault, creating a shower of sparks that inadvertently became useful footage.

Padelford also developed a top-mount dual-drive system for the Chargers that allowed a stunt driver to control the vehicle from the roof, while the actor focused on their performance inside the car. Six versions of the 8-foot high vault were built, each with specific uses. One of the vaults was a façade built onto the front of a semi-truck and was used for filming close shots of the vault destroying street cars. Another vault was a reinforced, four-wheel self-drive vehicle that was connected to 30-foot (9.1 m) cables and dragged through the streets of San Juan by the two stunt Dodge Chargers. The four-short-ton (3.6 t) vault was driven by stunt driver Henry Kingi, who had to wear a temperature-controlled suit to compensate for the temperatures within that could exceed 100 °F (38 °C). A scene where the vault tumbled as the cars rounded a corner was a practical effect, and the result was more violent than the filmmakers had anticipated. Over 200 vehicles were destroyed by the vault during filming. Several stunts had to be cut including a final scene that would have seen the vault hanging over the edge of the Teodoro Moscoso Bridge.

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Marketing.

The Facebook game Car Town by Cie Games and the theater chain Regal Entertainment Group (REG) collaborated with Universal in a cross-media marketing promotion. Car Town allowed players to view the trailer for the film in an REG-branded, in-game drive-in theater and race around a virtual Rio de Janeiro. The game also featured missions and locations based on the plot of the film, while allowing players to race against Fast Five characters and take part in a bank heist. REG offered players of Car Town the ability to purchase tickets in-game via Fandango for films at REG theaters. By buying these tickets in-game, players were given promotional codes which in turn allowed them to unlock a virtual 1970s Dodge Charger, used by Diesel’s character in the original film. REG promoted the partnership between the film and the game in their theaters across 37 states, online and through social media, while Universal promoted it via their own Facebook, Twitter and YouTube sites. In October 2011, it was claimed that over 200 million races had taken place within the virtual Rio de Janeiro environment in the six months since the campaign’s April launch.

Box office.

Fast Five grossed $209.8 million (33.5%) in the United States and Canada and $416.3 million (66.5%) in other territories for a total of $626.1 million. Worldwide, it is the seventh highest-grossing film of 2011. It achieved a worldwide opening weekend of $109.6 million. The film reached a peak of number 55 on the list of all-time highest-grossing films worldwide in October 2011. It became the highest-grossing film in the Fast & Furious franchise in worldwide grosses (as well as separately in the US and Canada, and outside the US and Canada) but was out-grossed in all three cases by Fast & Furious 6.