Motorcycle-mounted cameras, cars flying through the air and people standing around. This behind-the-scenes video offers a dual view of life on the Furious 7 set – one filled with intimate energy, the other filled with jaw-dropping practical stunts.
The first half mostly shows Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, a woman spraypainted gold, James Wan, Michelle Rodriguez and others having contextless conversations about where to put their arms and how to walk out of frame. Typical b-roll banality. Of course, tucked away inside these candid moments are bittersweet shots of Walker and Diesel joking around and smiling in conversation with one another. A kind of casual ease that comes with familiarity and friendship.
At one point, Walker watches a sequence alongside Wan in the video village and says, “That’s sick,” which would make a perfect segue to the car-flinging insanity of the second part of the footage if it didn’t drop so early. (Instead, it’s a segue to Rodriguez dressing like a girl for the first time in her career and knocking people out with her charm.)
So, yeah, the second part of the video. The 9-minute mark shows us Tony Jaa divebombing a safety mat followed by Rodriguez and Rhonda Rousey battling in formal wear, but the real fire starts just after the 12-minute mark.
We get glimpses of chase scenes, cars spinning out, parking garages exploding in clouds of cement, and cars flying through the air. Flaming trunks, gunfire and high speed burnout. There are also shots of the action captured from cars outfitted with the Biscuit Rig. Very meta.
The icing on all the explosive cake comes at the 14-minute mark where we get footage of the team dropping vehicles out of an airplane. (Here’s how they did it.) A billion cool points to the stunt man who chases after the car – camera strapped to his forehead – and jumps out of the plane after it. A billion and one to the guy who leaps out backward before the cars.
It’s amazing. A celebration of practical effects in their extreme. The kind of set ups that require intense planning, to-the-second camera choreography and unfathomable safety prep, but that yield ridiculously bad ass, one-of-a-kind shots. If your friends think the “CGI” in Furious 7 was good, show them this video and blow their minds.