Barry Herz, welcome to the rundown.

Oh, thank you for having me.

When did you become interested in the Fast and Furious?

I think the first uh flicker of interest was when I was a teenage movie theater worker um back in 2001. Over the course of that summer, I probably saw the first one 15 20 times cumulatively in little chunks stitched together and I just really kind of dug it. I was always a big tent kind of movie go even as a kid. I like blockbusters. I like art house. I like foreign language. I like indie. And something about, you know, Fast Cars, Cool Guys, Hot Women, Heists, it all kind of clicked and uh I just kind of kept going with the series.

So, why did you want to write a book about it?

Well, I was thinking always wanted to kind of write some kind of book about the film industry being eventually becoming a critic and a writer and a journalist and I was struggling to think it was like all the kind of movies the big movies had books about, you know, you can find a million books about the Godfather, a million books about Spielberg. Um, but then I started thinking I was like, well, you know what, no one's ever written about fast before. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized there's quite an interesting arc to it. Um, it's not only this how the series evolved itself from this like little piddly street racing movie with threesome jokes into like this worldconquering spy actionfilled blockbuster, but the offscreen drama of it all was fascinating, too.

Did you get any help from Universal? That's the studio that makes the Fast and the Furious movies.

Um, the short answer is no. Um, I kind of sold the book to my publisher. I said, "I have not talked to anybody over there about this. Got no advanced permission or anything like that, but I'm sure I can deliver something interesting whether that happens or not." And then once that deal was signed, I first people I went to were the Universal reps. I went down to LA for a very uh friendly but um efficient lunch with two of their uh VPs and comms. and they basically said, "Go with God, but we're not cooperating."

Why do you think that is?

I think partially because it's a franchise that is still very much in motion.

It's not something that is just sitting nicely in their catalog that they'd love any kind of retrospective on would help, you know, boost interest in that library title.

It's very much a going concern and it's a tricky concern for them because the last film uh Fast X in 2023 while it made like upwards of 700 million globally that was not quite enough for how much that film cost and how much Universal was expecting it to gross and it's an ongoing kind of headache for them in a way. So here I am like an unknown Canadian journalist and why introduce me into the mix for for anything.

Who actually authored The Fast and the Furious?

Well, I feel like with any success, you find there's like a million different authors who want to take credit for it. I mean, it all starts with a very forgotten piece of intellectual property, which is a 1998 Vibe magazine article by a New York writer called Kenneth Lee. Uh, and Kenley was a tabloid journalist at the time writing about crime in the city and he happened upon this subculture of street racers out in Queens basically. Uh, he wrote an article about it for Vibe and that article made its way to Universal executives who optioned it. And then you get really tricky in terms of what the screenwriter credits are because it's that idea and pitch went through upwards of dozens of people.

So there isn't like one person. It's it's multiple

it's multiple people. I feel if you had to kind of narrow it down and you talk with most of the people who were involved at the earliest stages, you would find two writers who kind of stand out. Um, one is David Ayer, um, who has gone on to be quite successful

and the other is Gary Scott Thompson, um, who has really maintained the rights or the credit rather to the characters throughout the whole franchise. So any of all the sequels you see, you will see based on characters created by Gary Scott Thompson there.

I mean, Marvel has like Kevin Feige and DC has James Gunn. There isn't like that for the Fast and the Fierce franchise.

There's no like creative architect who has been involved across the whole thing.

I would say um it has had uh the same producer almost the whole way through which is Neil H. Maritz.

Um one of the most successful producers in Hollywood history even if a lot of people don't know his name. Um but he was there at the very beginning. The job of a producer is varied and can be defined differently from film to film. So, he'd be the one stabilizing force there. But in terms of like overall mastermind, it's gone through a lot of different hands.

How how important is the Fast and the Furious franchise to say the last 20 plus years of Hollywood?

I think if you were really to think about it deeply, it will be a quarter century old next year. um which is kind of remarkable and preposterous at the same time. Um really do mirror the past 25 years of Hollywood in general. Um we've seen filmmakers increasingly rely on these kind of connected cinematic universes where one film leads to another and characters from a different kind of almost timeline pop in uh so that it boosts audience interest and makes you tag along for the adventure. I mean, FastT was really at the forefront of that.

We've seen a lot of efforts to reach wider, more diverse audiences. Um, and Fast was doing that organically, naturally before even d the word diverse was kind of like a studio watch word. And we've seen a lot of uh expansion into international markets. you know, a lot of appealing to the Chinese market, appealing to South America, making sure that these films get more money outside of the North American circuit that they were typically locked into. And Fast was doing that before really anybody.

When you watch the movie, they are incredibly diverse. Was that was that by accident or was that by design?

Kind of depends on who you talk to. Um when you uh get into the origins of the first film, I feel most people are of the mind that it was by happy design. Um, they were talking about they were trying to recreate this subculture in which, you know, the writer David Ayer and the director Rob Cohen did some heavy research into into Southern California and they found that it was very much Latinos, it was Asian kids, it was black kids, it was mixed kids, it was everybody was kind of it didn't matter the color of your skin so much as the size of your engine. Um, and so they cast that first film very deliberately to reflect that culture and to try to stay as authentic as they could. And then as the films got bigger, it wasn't necessarily so much about appealing to um, Prasly targeting different demographics as more so like, okay, here's the people we have and here's who we could think work well together on screen and let's just build up this kind of United Colors of Beniton super team. um that happen to just you know naturally appeal to different marketplaces

and Vin Diesel he's racially he could be anything almost when you watch these movies I mean his his background like okay I I couldn't really figure out what his actual ethnics

I mean yeah across the franchise we learn he's somewhat Italian he has Cuban he has family in Cuba um he's a great Spanish language speaker by the seventh film he's fluent Um and yeah, so but it very much reflects Diesel's own um very carefully crafted persona. He's always been ethnically ambiguous in that he it's able for him to flit into one role or the other, but at the same time you can't really pigeon hole him. Um so it's a very kind of crafty thing that he's been talking about again in very vague terms since the very beginning of his career. And it also allows the audience to see themselves in him in some ways.

Exactly. So you can be one ethnicity or the other and you can find that, you know, way into relating to those characters on screen.

The chronology of these films is really interesting, right? And you mentioned characters coming from one timeline to another. How can you just explain or walk us through just the chronology of these films? Yeah, I think.

Okay, I I might have to double check myself as I run this through, but the correct chronological order of them is part one, part two, part four, part five, part six, part three, part seven, part eight, part nine, part [laughter] 10. So, there was a very fun kind of retroactive continuity thing, a retcon as, uh, nerds like me say, um, that happened with part three and part four, which was basically the result of director Justin Lynn, who has directed more fast films than anybody and I would say is probably has become the creative architect of that series. Um, it was his desire to keep one character and one actor specifically alive that had been killed off at the end of part three and they loved this character so much. Uh, Han played by Sun Kang, good friend of Justin Lynn. And the audiences loved him so much and they were particularly bummed when he died. And so Justin and S basically, you know, put their heads together. It's like, well, does he have to be dead? And Justin grew up with a lot of comic books, a lot of television, Star Trek where, you know, continuity could be twisted and torqued and people did not have to die just because they died.

So then the timeline was kind of shifted around so that everything pre the end of three was essentially a flashback.

There's a lot of like dying and then coming back. There's a lot of dying and coming back.

and it they've they've kind of doubled and tripled down on it as the series has evolved perhaps to diminishing returns.

Yeah. Um well, I think you've said in said in the book that the films have mostly stayed clean of some of the toxicity that other movie franchises like Star Wars or DC seem to have. What did you mean by that?

Uh, I feel like the online fandoms, particularly over the past five, six years or so, when you have like a beloved property like Star Wars that engenders such rabid passion, um, when you switch things up a little bit to maybe be a little more diverse, a little bit more contemporary, a little bit more progressive, um, you engender you you really engender a lot of, uh, toxicity among a certain, uh community that can feel so attached too attached to a property. So when you know the Star Wars stuff did uh Ry as a as a female Jedi that was apparently the worst thing in the world you could possibly do. Um but the fast fans because it's kind of baked in with like that more diverse community. Everybody can join so long as you can drive that it was never really a problem necessarily. They just wanted to see the franchise grow and expand and for that family and again family is such a key element of these films in that both the organic family and the found family um that everybody was welcome. It was a big kind of open family party and if you could drive you can come along.

Do you think that's the key to the movie success is this notion of family? Like I I keep wondering like why they're so as as popular as ours. I think you mentioned it's like the eighth highest grossing uh film series and it's like more than like Batman, Jurassic Park, Transformers, like 7.3 billion at the box office. Is that kind of why like these movies are as successful as this notion of family?

I think it's partially why. And it's something they didn't really start to really heavily embrace in pro until probably the fourth film, I would say. Um, it's kind of funny if you rewatch the first film. I believe the only character who says the word family in there is this cop played by Ted Lavine who never appears in any of the films ever again. Vin Diesel very canily realized that, okay, people are forming these attachments, emotional and otherwise, and they're seeing it reflected in their own home lives. Let's try to mirror that because think about it like what happens in a family when it comes to automobiles. are passed down from generation to generation. Fathers teaching sons, mothers teaching daughters how to drive. Um it is very much uh a bloodline kind of thing.

And so if you could kind of emphasize that on film, then you would form these deeper attachments to these characters and you would buy almost, okay, they're doing these ridiculous scenarios. They're jumping out of skyscrapers. They're leaping from planes and cars. I guess I buy it because I want to see what happens to these people. I actually care whether Dominic Terretto lives or dies.

But unlike other film series like The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, there's not like a lore, right? Like there's no mythology for these movies to really draw from. So I've always wondered like how do they keep coming up with stories? I mean, if they're just basically street racing and and heists.

I mean, that's the that's the great thing, though. They're not beholden to any kind of mythology or lore. There's there's not like this Star Wars universe you have to abide by in terms of timelines. It's like the battle of Yavin is there, so they can't be doing that at that time. Um, there's really

all you want to do is see these guys drive and pull off these crazy stunts.

So, a lot of the films really are they construct these big set pieces first and then they kind of reverse engineer the story around it. And for the fifth film, which is where the franchise really kind of leveled up, um, they recognized that, okay, the first four, a lot of street racing in there. There's only so much we can do from having a guy drive from point A to point B faster than the other. So, let's up the ante. Let's turn it into a heist film. Let's make these guys actually have a mission, an impossible mission, one might say, in the Ethan Hunt. And that's really where they kind of started leveling up.

That's that starting with a setpiece that's not unique to the fast movies either, right? Like, isn't that kind of now I don't know if it's the standard, but I think Mission Impossible does pretty much the same thing.

Mission Impossible totally does the same thing. A lot of the Marvel films certainly in the, you know, in terms of action are rec a lot of those sequences are the first thing that gets constructed and developed.

Um, and so it's not unique, but Fast was kind of the ones doing it first. And you see it especially in the Mission Impossible films, which up to I think uh Ghost Protocol, um, they were all standalone kind of affairs. you know, Tom Cruz had different team members each time with the exception of like Ving Reigns, right?

And then you see with the Ghost Protocol, which came out just a little bit after five, is that oh, he's trying to he's trying to bring all these people back and unite them and suddenly Simon Pegs and everything and we're having all these people come back into the fold. So, this is very deliberately echoing the success of what FastT was doing.

Um, I want to ask you about women in these movies. Uh, notably Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster have been from the very beginning. Later you get Chariss Therone and my favorite Helen Mirren.

Oh, of course. Yes.

Um, but they're not necessarily at the center at the of these films the way that the the men have. And I'm just wondering if you think the Fast and Furious movies has has done a disservice to its female characters and by extension their fans.

I mean, 100% certainly. And I think this was something that Michelle Rodriguez, who is very vocal about anything and everything in the press, um has publicly taken the franchise to task over. And there was at one point, um I believe it was between film seven and eight where she went out there and said like, "Listen, if you're not going to start giving us more to do and adding more women to the picture who are not just, you know, romantic objects, um I'm out." Um, and to their credit, they did start to work in a little bit more and give uh, especially the characters played by Jordana and Michelle, a little bit more dialogue between them and interactions that didn't just involve talking about the men in their lives. Um, but it is a it is a big problem. It has been since the beginning. But it was going to be even worse if Michelle hadn't spoken up during the production of the first film and said like, "Well, I'm really just being characterized here as this sex object.

Give me something to sink my teeth into a little bit." And as light as it was in the final film, it could have been much worse.

Well, let's talk about more about the stars because obviously these movies kind of rest on the shoulders of Vin Diesel. How did he come to be cast? It's kind of an interesting story.

Originally, the studio Universal had their eyes on Timothy Olafant, who they were very hot on at the time, coming off of Doug Lyman's Go. Uh, he also had of the very similarly themed Gone in 60 Seconds coming out a little bit later. Kind of a interesting choice, let's say. And I'm a big Timothy Olafan fan. Me too.

Um, but they needed somebody who was a little bit more mysterious, had a little bit more lure to him. and along comes Vin Diesel. Um, but he also had something of a problematic reputation around the industry at the time of the first film. Uh, but heads with directors. Um, had a little bit of an ego problem. And I mean, we're talking about a guy who had not led a film. Like, he was supporting roles at best. Like, he got a big break with Saving Private Ryan. He was just had finished Pitch Black, which was I guess you could call it his first lead role, but a relatively small movie.

Um, and yet there was something about him, a magnetism, and especially one that bounced off the energy of Paul Walker, who was cast first and who this was really the person whose the vehicle was built around. It was never intended as a Vin Diesel star project. Paul was there from day one.

So then how does a Vin become the the lead, I guess?

So once the first film really pops and explodes at the box office, he is, you know, rightly considered one of the top names in town, demands an astronomical amount of money for the sequel. Um, and they say no. Paul was however contractually locked into it. Um, and he was there. So they're like, "Okay, we'll make the sequel without you. Goodbye."

Uh he goes on to make Triple X with Rob Cohen who directed the first Fast film. Does pretty well but maybe not amazing. Tries a couple other things including trying to get his Riddic sequel off the ground. And by the time the third Fast film comes around in which he's not involved in it at the start, they realize they need some kind of kick toward the end, some kind of reminder that this is a Fast and Furious film. and they reach out to Vin and they say, "Can you do this little cameo at the end and not only will we pay you a very high amount of money, but we'll make you a producer on all films going forward and that is where it starts to have the VIN umbrella of it all." So, starting on the fourth, he is really there in every aspect you could be, star, producer, and getting paid very handsomely.

He also doesn't really show up to set on time, does he?

He has a a very poor reputation of showing up to set on time. Uh many sources I spoke with uh for the research of this book point to him basically staying inside his trailer for ungodly amounts of time. uh holding processes up, being very particular about certain points of the script, certain points of action, and a lot of days were wasted waiting for Vin.

Mentioned Paul Walker and um one of the tragedies of this series is that he passed uh in the middle of making Furious 7. How did they finish the movie without him?

I mean, that was kind of a horrible and unprecedented situation for the industry at large. Um, not only was there just the tragedy of losing him so young, there was the horrible irony of it happening in a car crash in a movie about car crashes,

right?

So, when that happened and it was around Thanksgiving break, um, they were about halfway through finishing Furious 7 and there was still a lot of scenes that he needed to shoot. Um, so they had to make a decision. Are we gonna scrap the movie? are we going to try to recreate it or how are we going to do this? So, a lot of very smart people came together, figured out they could do it with a mix of practical um and visual effects. Well, get his two younger brothers onto the set, Caleb and Cody. One was a good match for his face, one's a better match for his body. Kind of smoosh them together. We'll have another actor who was also kind of a good fit for Paul kind of help them adjust to the acting styles. We're gonna take every single archival minute or second of Paul Walker that's ever been captured on film. We're going to take that and we're going to ex extract all that footage and digitally manipulate it. And that's kind of what they did. They kind of, for lack of a better term, zombified Paul Walker as a being cinematically and finished the film.

Did this sort of set Hollywood on a path of digitally resurrecting actors in in some way? Because I mean, we've seen this with with the Star Wars movies. Carrie Fischer obviously died before uh Rise of Skywalker came out. Ian Holm was resurrected for Alien Romulus. Is is fast? Could they be given credit for also starting Hollywood on this path too?

I mean in to the degree that they were doing it, yes it had been done before in very limited fashion. Um but they were really inventing technology and practices on the fly as they were doing this. And you know, one of the people I spoke to for the book who's very heavily involved in the visual effects there, um, you know, of course, didn't think that they were, you know, at the forefront of this AI deep fake train, but they were.

And that's where we are today. And that's why you have some troubling um you know emotions in the fan community when someone like Vin Diesel goes out to a crowd and says for the next one I'm we're bringing back Brian Oconor. We're bringing back Paul Walker's character. Okay. How are you doing that? Probably in a way that is going to be disturbing to a lot of people.

Dwayne Johnson, The Rock, he joins in Fast Five. Do these series really take off when he joins? Like is he is he could he be credited with really launching these into a new stratosphere?

Uh absolutely. I feel if you canvas any fast fan and ask them which their which entry is their all-time favorite, five will come up 95% of the time because that is when Dwayne Johnson arrives and just adrenalizes the franchise um and sends it into the stratosphere and everybody involved in that knew it the second that he started shooting. Um, he just brings this huge, bountiful, charming, cocky energy to it. Um, that just ramps up everything.

And not the best relationship with Vin Diesel.

Uh, no, not the best relationship with [laughter] Vin Diesel. You have two alpha guys, right, coming together to play protagonist and antagonist, and you're colliding them. And in Vin Diesel's tension, you would kind of in Vin Diesel's story rather, you would hear him say like he was using that tension to fuel the on-screen action. And if you were to talk maybe to Dwayne Johnson and his people, it was like, well, Vin was kind of just being a jerk for the sake of being a jerk. And that's where the tension kind of lied. And it was always at like a steady kind of simmer, but really exploded during the production of the eighth film.

Yeah. They're not even sharing scenes really.

I mean, they're not sharing scenes. The Rock went on Instagram to, you know, lay out this tirade against an unnamed male co-star. Nobody needed a name to know who he was talking about.

And they've since been at loggerheads, although um apparently they have decided to embrace and and make up. And The Rock made that uh cameo at the end of the 10th film.

Promising more adventures to come. So, you know, money talks at the end of the day.

In the fifth movie, when they're fighting, they neither of them wants to be seen as losing. So, they have to count how many punches each one gets.

Yeah. So, it's fight math. Um, basically, so when you have these stars of these caliber, nobody wants to be seen as getting their butt kicked more than the other. [groaning and screaming] So, every jab, every blow, every punch, it's all calculated so that everybody comes out equal. One person I spoke to for the book said, "Basically, there's never a winner in a Fast and Furious fight. It's a tie. It's always a tie."

Well, we haven't seen a Fast movie since 2023's Fast X. What's the status of the series?

It's not great. Um, especially because Fast X ended with two giant cliffhers. Basically, every character's lives were in question. There's a jet carrying a bunch of them, then crash into a mountain. We didn't see what happened to that. And then Vin Diesel's character and his son are staring down like this avalanche of of rock and debris and fire and we just don't know what happens. Um, partially it's been in a kind of deep freeze because they've been trying to figure out the economics of it. Like these movies have become so expensive to make because the cast demands so much money by this point. They shoot it in dozens of locations around the world. The stunt work, the effects work, it all adds up. And that's before you even get to marketing costs and the math just isn't mathing as the kids like to say.

So, it's been on a little bit of a freeze before that. And also because um Vin Diesel is facing a civil lawsuit um for sexual uh assault which has been kind of under reportported. Um it was you know he has contested all those allegations. It has not been tested in court. It will go to courts in February of 2026. I imagine and the people that I have talked with uh have have said this that once that is resolved one way or the other, we will have a better idea of what the future of the Fast and the Furious is.

Be hard to see a movie without him.

It would be. I mean, this is the rare big blockbuster film where you just cannot simply recast the hero. You know, we've had four Batman's, we've had, you know, five Spider-Mans, but there's only one Dominic Tretto, and it's Vin.

Creatively, though, has the franchise run out of gas?

I think you could probably have used that argument after each one of the films has come out, like, okay, we've kind of hit the peak here. There's nowhere to go. And yet, they always kind of seem to find a way to surprise you. So, I think the way to go and the sentiment inside Universal seems to be this way as well is we can't really go bigger. We've gone as big as we possibly can. We've gone to outer space. Um, we're not going to necessarily introduce some fantastical element like time travel maybe. Um, [laughter]

so we got to take it back to the streets a little bit, do a little bit more hard scrabble, a little more grit. I do not think that uh creatively it it's exhausted itself. I I think it will always, at least for the time being, find ways to surprise us.

I did find I watched the last movie last night and I thought when they had when Jason Mamoa I thought brought an incredible chaotic energy.

Oh yeah. I mean he's doing this weird gender queer Heath Ledger Joker kind of thing. And he just like brings a huge spark to that energy. So all you need is like that one kind of X factor in there like Dwayne Johnson was for five like Jason was uh for 10 like or Jason Mimoa. Yeah, there's a lot of Jason.

Um so when Staithm came in, when Mimoa came in, you just have to add that um wildcard element and you can create great things.

Last question. What's your favorite film in the series?

I'm going to have to go with the consensus and say five. Um five is where it really all comes together. Uh, it's not only Justin Lynn kind of uniting the disparit elements of the first four films, but really upping the ante in terms of action. I feel that film has like easily like three or four action set pieces that are alltimers in their own right. You not only have that vault chase through uh Rio de Janeiro, but you have that train heist in the beginning.

Um, you have the bus flip at the very beginning. Um, you have, uh, this some great street racing in there. Um, you have some amazing fights that Vin Dwayne fight through the warehouse where they're just really like tearing that place and each other apart. Um, it's wonderful and uh, the acting is great. It just all comes together. Definitely one of my favorites, too. Listen, Barry, this has been amazing. Welcome to the family, the explosive story behind Fast and Furious, the blockbusters that supercharge the world. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Oh, thank you for having me.