‘The Fast And The Furious’ Writer David Ayer Claims He Received “Nothing To Show” From It
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David Ayer is furious about a fast one Hollywood has apparently pulled.
In a recent interview on Jon Bernthal’s “Real Ones” podcast, the writer/director (Suicide Squad and End of Watch) said he has “nothing to show” for writing The Fast and the Furious, the first film in the long-running series.
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“Biggest franchise in Hollywood, and I don’t have any of it,” Ayer said. “I got nothing to show for it, nothing, because of the way the business works.”
The 2001 film The Fast and the Furious was adapted from a Vibe magazine article, “Racer X.” Gary Scott Thompson and Erik Bergquist wrote drafts of the script, but Ayer claims he injected diversity and the culture he knew.
“When I got that script, that s— was set in New York, it was all Italian kids, right?” he told Bernthal. “I’m like, ‘Bro, I’m not gonna take it unless I can set it in L.A. and make it look like the people I know in L.A., right?’ So then I started, like, writing in people of color, and writing in the street stuff, and writing in the culture, and no one knew s— about street racing at the time.”
Ayer continued: “I went to a shop in the Valley and met with like the first guys that were doing the hacking of the fuel curves for the injectors and stuff like that, and they had just figured it out and they were showing it, and I’m like, ‘Oh f— yeah, I’m gonna put that in the movie.'”
The franchise has grossed more than $7 billion worldwide.
Ayer feels that “the narrative is I didn’t do s—, right?”
“It’s like people hijack narratives, control narratives, create narratives to empower themselves, right? And because I was always an outsider and because, like, I don’t go to the f—ing parties. I don’t go to the meals, I don’t do any of that stuff. The people that did were able to control and manage narratives because they’re socialized in that part of the problem. I was never socialized in that part of the problem so I was always like the dark, creative dude, beware.”
The lessons of his experience led him to embrace independence in other projects
“F— all the middlemen, right? I get it. It’s up to me, I gotta self-rescue, right?” Ayer said. “I can f—ing whine about getting shot at and all the rounds I’ve taken over my career — I’ve gotta self-rescue, and I’ve gotta create an ecology where it’s safe for me to be creative, and that’s it. And that’s what I’m doing now.”
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