One of the funniest things you could to is take somebody that’s only familiar with 2001’s The Fast and the Furious, show them the ridiculously long four-minute trailer for Fast X, and then watch their brain try and compute how on earth those two movies could possibly be part of the same franchise.
That’s the beauty of The Fast Saga, though, because it isn’t supposed to make a lick of sense. While his appointment wasn’t exactly universally lauded, director Louis Leterrier at least appears to have understood the insanity of his assignment, by making some bizarre comparisons describing how he tried to wrangle all the disparate parts together in an interview with IndieWire.
“Normally, being a film director is like being a conductor in charge of a 100-piece orchestra. This was like doing it with Metallica next to me playing at the same time, and Daft Punk playing nearby, and everybody had to play together and make it seem organic.
I didn’t want to break the stuff that was working. I just wanted to take the opportunities I saw to enhance a couple of things here and there and put a new spin on them, while also bringing my own original ideas and everything the actors gave me. I walked into the Rolls Royce of film crews. I’m not a sculptor or a painter, I’m a director. So I surround myself with a crew and a cast and a post-production team and a studio. And if all of us are making the same movie, it’s a smooth process.”
As much as any self-respecting music aficionado would kill to see Metallica and Daft Punk playing side-by-side with a full orchestra behind them, the result would more than likely be incomprehensible noise. That’s pretty much The Fast Saga in a nutshell, to be fair, which does at least indicate Leterrier knew exactly what he was getting into from the jump.
Published: May 18, 2023 10:24 am