Breaking Down How Fast and Furious “Race Wars” Was Filmed

When we take the time to look back over the Fast and Furious franchise, it’s kind of amazing where it came from. Today, it’s one of the biggest movie franchises to ever exist. Heck, it’s classified toward the top of all entertainment ever. However, the original movie certainly came with humble beginnings.

In fact, there weren’t even very many critics who thought that the film was going to make it. They thought it would die before even getting an audience. Many predicted a flop. Hopefully, they retired after those reviews but that’s a topic for another time.

One of the amazing things about the first movie is the strict budget that it was on. As the film quickly became a cult classic, we become even more impressed to learn some of the ways that they made the scenes come to life. Unlike movies with a big budget, it seems as if those behind this one had to really make some creative magic. They couldn’t necessarily just go out and purchase everything that they needed to make the scene right. Therefore, there was a lot of resourcefulness put in play.

This time, we catch up with Craig Lieberman, the guy who worked on making sure that the movie was at least somewhat accurate to real life. In this one, we actually get a breakdown on why some of the scenes are so outrageous. Craig tells us that he had certain ideas and is very familiar with how racing works. However, there was definitely some conversations about how to sprinkle in movie magic. After all, making things exactly accurate to real-life would probably get boring rather quickly.

In fact, filming the scene wasn’t so glorious at all. Instead, Lieberman fills us in with the idea that racing all day in the desert proved to be a bit of a challenge. Not only was it intense to race in the heat but mechanical struggles would follow as well.

This time, we dive into all sorts of different concepts that made “Race Wars” come together. Craig spills the beans on everything from a borrowed idea from Top Gun all the way to Johnnie Tran having “100k under the hood of that car.”

When they designed Race Wars, it was supposed to be a generic and fun racing event to show off the hero cars. However, at the end of it all, it would somehow evolve into a cornerstone moment for the franchise. Even within a couple of minutes of screen time, we can come up with about a dozen awesome quotes. – Craig Lieberman