David Ayer opens up about laying the foundations for the FAST AND FURIOUS franchise and how he has ‘nothing to show’ from it

David Ayer (Training day, Suicide Squad, Fury) was one of the screenwriters working on the 2001 film The fast and the furious, and if he hadn’t been involved, the film would have been very different from what we got. Ayer is the guy who laid the foundation for the Fast & Furious franchise, set the tone for the film series!

Ayer was a recent guest Jon Bernthal’s Real Ones and spoke on the show about the work he’s done on the franchise, how he’s changed the direction of the story and setting, and how he has “nothing to show” about it.

The director said: “Hollywood’s biggest franchise, and I have none of it. I have nothing to prove, nothing, the way business works. If you can’t tell, Ayer’s a little peeved.

The film is based on a Vibe magazine article, “Racer X” and Gary Scott Thompson AND Erik Bergquist wrote drafts of the initial script. Then Ayer came on board and injected everything that made the film work. He explained: “When I received that script, it was set in New York, there were all Italian children, right? I’m like, ‘Bro, I’m not going to take it unless I can set it in Los Angeles and make it look like the people I know in Los Angeles, right?’ So I started writing about people of color, writing about street stuff, writing about culture, and nobody knew shit about street racing at the time.

The director continued, “I went to a shop in the Valley and I met the first guys who were hacking fuel curves for injectors and stuff like that, and they just figured it out and they were showing it, and I thought , ‘Oh man, yeah, I’ll put that in the movie.'”

Ayer went on to explain how he’s not given any credit for anything he’s brought to the film and the franchise. He went on to explain that “the narrative is I didn’t s—, right?” He says the reason is that he’s an outsider and has never really played the Hollywood game of partying and socializing.

He said: “It’s like people hijack narratives, control narratives, create narratives to empower themselves, right? And because I’ve always been an outsider and because, like, I don’t go to fucking parties. I don’t go to meals, I don’t do any of that. The people who have done this have been able to control and manage the narratives because they are socialized into that part of the problem. I’ve never been socialized into that part of the issue, so I’ve always been like the dark, creative type, mind you.

This experience empowered him to embrace independence in other projects, saying, “F—all the middlemen, right? I understand. It’s up to me, I have to save myself, right? I can complain about getting shot and about all the rounds I’ve taken throughout my career: I have to self-save and I have to create an ecology where it’s safe for me to be creative, and that’s about it. And that’s what I’m doing now.”

Good for him! I had no idea Ayer had such a huge role in the development of Fast and the Furious, but now it all makes sense.

Via: EW