Rejected Cars of The Fast & Furious

what would have happened if this car had replaced the super as the main car in the first fast and furious movie would super prices still be as crazy as they are right now what if johnny tran drove a mustang instead of an s2000 would race war spectators have been run down all this and more in just a moment hello i'm craig lieberman if you don't know who i am you're not alone i'm a gearhead who's been ticking ring on cars since the 1980s i've owned more than 40 cars in that time but i never dreamed that some of my own cars would start in a major movie franchise my r34 gtr my toyota supra and my nissan maxima all had starring roles in universal's first two fast and furious movies and i served as a technical advisor to these early films i love all things automotive and my videos help me share my passion with like-minded people all around the world there have been many great cars in the fast and furious movies over the years but the cars from the first movie have become icons some of them have sold for insane prices at auctions after the film's main star paul walker passed away back in 2013. the manner in which cars are normally chosen for a movie goes something like this the director the producers the picture car coordinator and a whole group of other people discuss the options and a decision is made based on a myriad of factors first off the car needed to fit the character and needed to be suitable for the action sequences written into the script can't be driving a lowered car on dirt roads and of course in this case it had to fit into our meager two million dollar budget we also needed to remember that we were going to need four identical cars for any character if we were going to use this super or 240sx we'd have to have a total of at least four supras that were cosmetically identical so universal decided that renting the hero car from a private individual from a person like myself or one of the other picture car owners was simply cheaper than building it from scratch and they were absolutely right only cars that were being sold in the usa at the time would be considered at all everything else had to be ruled out the cars also had to be a representation of the current tuner scene and the car culture in the usa no russian cars no australian cars and no cars again that were not sold new in america supercars were ruled out completely for obvious reasons this was a movie about the tuner culture in los angeles lambos and ferraris didn't belong here and we certainly didn't have the money for them anyway same thing with the old school cars getting finding old rx3s to build four of them was just not going to work out for us this technical advisor my job was to make recommendations and so when i was sitting in that first production meeting i went up to a grease board and i started explaining the food chain of japanese tuna cars of that period at the top of the list of course was the skyline gtr whether it was r32s r33s or r34s after that you look at cars like the acura nsx the mark iv supra the z32 300 zx cars like the mitsubishi 3000 gt vr4 were definitely worthy of consideration and in fact a 3000 gt was written into the very early version of the script but the ft-3s rx7 also should be on this list and it certainly was on my list then we get down to second-tier cars and i started recommending cars like the honda s2000 the 240sx of course this was back before drifting was big in the u.s so those cars weren't you know super super popular yet cars like the sw20 toyota mr2 had to be in there i figured a fifth generation honda prelude might be good uh lexus gs the s140 or s160s would probably fit if we did vip style kind of thing 2g mitsubishi eclipse i don't think the 3g was out yet or maybe it was but it was just ugly as hell then cars like this the dc2 integra came to mind followed by the hoti roku family further down the line were cars like the honda civics the del sols and maybe even honda accords some cars though that could have made the cut included cars like the lexus is but the is wasn't even released until july of 2000 when we were well into filming by that time the wrx would be another great one but it wasn't in america until 2002 and all we had at the time was the less exciting arguably impreza the evo of course didn't come to u.s shores until 2003. the e46 m3 did not go on sale until october of 2000 and the movie was almost wrapped by that time so it was too late for any consideration factoring all those and we got into a more serious discussion and right off the bat we summarily rejected a whole slew of cars and these are the cars we were going to reject no right hand drive cars simply won't be considered this movie is about the japanese tuner scene in the usa yes i'm aware that some right-hand drive cars were already here in the usa but using them would be impossible because we'd have to fly three more over from japan then purchase things like body kits prep them paint them modify them and this just was not in our budget and more importantly we simply didn't have the time further it was thought that the right hand drive cars would confuse audiences you've got to remember this movie was not for car people it was for average american young people hyundais were rejected flat out at the time hyundais were known as econo boxes and they were certainly not held in high regard in the tuner market there were virtually no body kits available there were no power mods for these cars while hyundais are much better today in 2000 they were economy cars with a reputation of extremely poor quality kias were also ruled out largely because these cars had also been completely ignored by tuners there was no aftermarket for these cars and the kias anyway in the 1990s were let's be honest a little bit ugly sort of slow and saddled with many of the same mechanical quality control problems that plagued the hyundais so those just weren't going to fit for us all mercedes vehicles were rejected summarily why because back in the year 2000 not too many teenagers were bringing modded benzes to the street races and dom's crew certainly certainly wasn't rich so they just simply didn't fit in with the characters or what we were doing the vw beetle was specifically mentioned in the meeting in fact the final verdict was it's not a manly card not my words bmw z3s were rejected on basically the same grounds that many people thought they were effeminate or might be viewed as such by audiences i've seen some fine examples of these cars at car shows over the years but back at that time frankly universal wasn't too hot on convertibles it makes it harder to hide the stunt driver's face when a movie character is supposed to be behind the wheel and ultimately it was a german car and at that time they just didn't fit into a movie about street racing in the usa all domestic sport compact cars were also ruled out none of them were deemed to be desirable or interesting to audiences why not because speaking frankly the consensus was in the room that nobody was going to be excited about cars that they can rent at any airport and at the time in the usa cars like cavaliers sunfires saturns and ford focuses were not popular in the tuner culture on the west coast moreover here in california in the year 2000 you almost never saw one of these cars modified they just never caught on in southern california mazda had what the 323 and the 626 at that time but both were rejected because almost no one was making cosmetic or performance modifications for them the miata was discussed but an s 2000 was chosen over the miata because it was deemed to be more masculine now i know miata people are going to scream but at the time the miata was mostly thought of as a car for girls the world knows better now but back then the miatas were simply not on the same level as a lot of the tuner cars in fact most people who drive them that i knew back then were women so now it's time to take a moment to explain the reasons why we chose the cars that we did because i don't think i've ever covered this in a video so it goes like this brian started off in the eclipse then he would transition to this mark iv super it was the other way around the way the script was written in fact it was originally written as a 3000 gt but ultimately the super fit the requirement largely because of the one-piece target roof the scene where the roof is ejected out in the desert was written into the script from the very beginning and since the 300zx had a two-piece roof it was ruled out the 3000 gt could have been used because there was an option to have a target top on that but the 3000 gts that showed up to our casting calls were not to their liking so the super got the nod the fd rx-7 was our choice from dom the roll cage was going to be a deal breaker though and so if we got the owner to remove the cage the car would be accepted and that's exactly what happened jesse my original thought for jesse that an e36 bmw m3 or audi a4 s4 would do the trick especially because he was a techie guy and that car seems to be you know one of those cars people think of as more high tech an example of each of these cars actually showed up to our casting calls but neither of them were riced out enough to get director rob cohen excited they were both very plain and very clean so in the end the vw jetta that we showed to rob i think we only showed him pictures actually was the one that he had to have so we rented it vince for vince i thought an sw20 mr2 would be a good choice however since the actor was too big for the car we were going to have to rethink that i then suggested a lexus gs again the s140 or s160 using maybe kind of a stance look or maybe a vip theme but rob wasn't excited about the examples we presented they were clean bodies and just had offset the honda prelude was also too small for him so in the end picture car captain david martyr decided to just rent my maxima because vince's car really only had one big scene and it didn't really matter what he drove you have to wonder how history would have been different if they had chosen something else ferletti played by michelle rodriguez at the time i originally thought that letty would have looked good in an sw20 mr2 if they didn't accept that car for events but she ended up with the 240sx mia now if you remember mio she was a nursing student in the movie so the thought was her car could be a bit more toned down and integra was one of the cars i endorsed and i think a big part of the reason for choosing this particular car had to be that the actual owner of the car that we used was a lady by the name of june she so that was easy for them to see a woman in that car and that's what happened johnny tran although the script originally read pete tran what was really interesting is that that script also designated a mustang as you would expect my hand went up in that meeting instantly what are we doing here but ultimately bad guys get black cars in movies or at least they did back then which is part of the stereotype and it was a coincidence that co-technical advisor r.j devera owned a black honda s2000 david marter asked rjffa be willing to loan the car to the production and a deal was drug no stunt cars were needed so this was an easy decision and that was that hector's role was pretty minor so we didn't need to spend much time on this choice so we simply chose a honda civic which happened ja rules character needed something a bit flashier fortunately we ignored the cars with 20-inch spinners and selected bill cole's red integra danny yamato played by rj devera who might note is much better at gran turismo than he was portrayed to be on film and this car was a last minute deal leon leon was a challenge we went a long time without picking a car for leon i always saw leo know in some sort of hardcore project car like a hachiroko or a 180 or something like that it just seemed to fit but that didn't happen so then i suggested if we can get a gtr in the movie maybe that'll work out because it's just one appearance really so leon got the gtr that we rented from motorex from sean morris that car was originally white and then was painted yellow for the movie the cars we rented from private owners were designated as the hero one car the hero one car for those who don't know is the nicest shiniest car of the bunch and it's used for close-up shots and when they pull up it's got to be nice and pretty and the interior shots and all that hero2 is a pretty detailed cosmetic replica of the hero1 and hero2 is used as a backup of hero1 breaks down or if they need two shiny cars in two different locations then we get into the stunt cars the number of stunt cars is dictated by how many stunts the cars will do in tokyo drift for example they had 10 evos for this film given the stunts we had scheduled we had two stunned cars for each hero one car in most cases there were a couple of exceptions but that's generally the rule there's also something we call a buck or process car in some cases the buck is for soundstage work and green screen an example would be the car on a green screen as they're doing a background projected on a screen and in a couple of cases we'd cut a car into a shell and mount it to the mick rig i've covered this before as an example with my supra there were actually six additional cars in addition to my hero 1 car today the process of building movie cars and the recent fast and furious movies is very different instead of renting the hero cars these movies now have a 7 million budget just for picture cars they can now buy or build whatever they want and build it any way they want to the cars and the later movies that dennis mccarthy and his team have been building like the flip card the charger and the truck are truly special they're just absolutely amazing but what's different is that in the first couple of movies the cars stayed with the characters all the way through the movie in most cases today the cars they use in these movies are lucky to survive even one scene and this is why the cars from the first few movies are truly special and perhaps even more collectible that's going to be it for this time everybody please don't forget to subscribe it will really help me grow my channel and thank you for watching take care everybody [Music] you

Channel: Craig Lieberman

Views: 837,350

Rating: 4.9313464 out of 5

Keywords: The Fast & Furious, Paul Walker, The Fast and the Furious, Mitsubishi 3000GT, Toyota Supra, Lexus GS, Mitsubishi Eclipse, Honda S2000, Acura Integra, Honda NSX, Acura NSX, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Toyota MR2

Id: qKxAyErDPZ4

Length: 13min 33sec (813 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021