Fast X Stunt Coordinator Says He's Always Insisting on More Realism in Gravity-Defying Franchise

The people who make the Fast & Furious movies know that reality went out the passenger window a very long time ago.

In the final trailer for Fast X that dropped online earlier this week, Aimes (a new character played by Alan Ritchson) sums up just how crazy things have gotten: "If it could be done in a car, they did it. If it violates the laws of God and gravity, they did it twice." That's right, God is dead, run over by Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto in a speeding Dodge Charger. But amidst all the Nietzschian chaos, there remains a voice of sanity and reason: Second Unit Stunt Coordinator Andy Gill.

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"I worry about the minutiae all the time. Anytime I see something that’s so far out of reality, then I speak up," Gill, who has been with the series since Fast Five (very fitting, given how Fast X directly ties back to the decade-old installment), told SYFY WIRE over Zoom. "I win some of them and I lose some of them. But I just can’t not try to get it back into the realm of possibilities."

He went on to share an anecdote from The Fate of the Furious when producer Neal Moritz and screenwriter Chris Morgan pitched him a different version of the scene where the team attempts to stop a corrupted Dom by harpooning his car in the streets of New York City.

"I read the script and what I read just didn’t make sense to me because it wasn’t practical," Gill recalled. "So I wrote an email and Neal Moritz and Chris, the writer, got on a Zoom with me and they said, ‘So, you don’t understand this, let us show it to you.’ They had these little cars [with] strings and they said, ‘So what happens is Dom’s here in his Charger and everybody’s got him harpooned. He starts burning out and doing a donut. As he’s doing a donut, he’s dragging these cars around with him. Then they get airborne and now, they’re like a big weed eater in the air like this and the cables start breaking and going through buildings and everything else.’"

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Gill wasn't convinced by this small-scale demonstration and shot them down. "I went, ‘No, I’m not gonna do that.’ Neal goes, ‘What?’ I went, ‘He’s in a Charger! The car behind him is an armored car. It weighs four times what [his car] does. He’s not gonna be lifting them in the air. There’s no way,'" he explained.

With that said, he promised to workshop the idea, which did evolve into the more realistic scene of Dom "getting the slack, going forward, back. Using his mind," Gill concluded. "But if they would have overridden me and said, ‘No, that’s what we want,’ then that’s what we would’ve had to plan, which wouldn’t been a lot of effects rigs. We would’ve had to build buildings to go through and all this other stuff. But I was like, ‘Not in a million years would this ever even start to happen.’"

Want to see just how far Dominic Toretto and his family have strayed from the natural laws governing all of existence this time around? Fast X is now playing in theaters everywhere! Click here to pick up tickets for yourself and the whole *ahem* family.

Relive a small portion of the Fast Saga with Furious 7 — now streaming now on Peacock. If you want to catch up on the full story, however, click right here for our nifty guide on where to stream the first nine installments (plus Hobbs & Shaw).