James Wan explains why FURIOUS 7 was the hardest film of his career

Director James Wan took a break from making horror films to tackle 2015 Fast & Furious movie, Furious 7. This was a very different type of film for Wan to play as her previous films were all horror thrillers Saw, InsidiousAND The Evocation.

The director recently looked back on his time as a director Furious 7 and called it the most difficult film of his career. He explained why during an interview with THR:

“It was definitely the most difficult film of my career. I’ve made technically demanding films since then, but Furious 7 has reached so many different levels, especially the emotional one. It was my first big budget film. I made The Conjuring for $20 million, and then Furious 7 was in the hundreds of millions.

There’s definitely a lot more pressure on a director when he’s getting hundreds of millions of dollars to make a movie! Wan also wanted to put elements into the film that were “a little more tense and suspenseful and scary.” One of the first ideas he pitched was the scene where Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) is trapped in a bus dangling off a cliff and must race to the top of the cliff before the bus falls off the edge.

The director also spoke about the difficult time during production when they had to adjust to the circumstances of Walker’s tragic death. He said:

“When Paul Walker died, we were like, ‘Shall we close the film forever?’ But collectively we felt this film should be Paul’s legacy. Thankfully, I had done some stuff with Paul, like his final action movie, but there were still a lot of pieces missing in the movie that needed Paul. I only shot half of what I needed from Paul before he died, and then we worked with visual effects to salvage what we had.”

At the time it was much harder to pull off due to the cinematic technology available, but they managed to get the best they could by using the dialogue Walker had spoken throughout the franchise, digital effects and Walker’s brothers Caleb and Cody will act as stand-ins. Wan shared:

“Completing that film now, in today’s world, with AI technology, is so simple. But we didn’t have that kind of technology at our disposal. So we had to dig really deep into our bag of tricks to make it work”

The director also recalled the most emotional day during the production of Furious 7said:

“The hardest part of that film was editing the end of the film where we say goodbye to Paul. He was very tearful. It was hard to watch the ending we put together and not cry.

Yes, that ending was definitely emotional. There wasn’t a dry eye in the theater with that.