Action man Vin Diesel returns to play former convict and elite speed racer Dominic “Dom” Toretto in Furious 7, the seventh film in the action-packed, adrenaline-pumping Fast & Furious franchise, that hits our screens on Thursday, April 2. A not-so-furious chat.

It’s been almost 15 years since this team first took to the streets of Los Angeles. Now here you are, all these years later, bigger, faster, and stronger. How do you look at this ride you’ve been on for years?
The first thing I do is think how blessed I am to be a part of something that has reached the kind of success that none of us ever really anticipated. And so much has happened to me in my personal life; 
I’ve become a father and I’d like to think that I’ve matured a little bit. 
I can’t stress enough how much of an impossible task this might have felt like 15 years ago. 

Each time, you’ve upped the ante: more cars, bigger, better action… but the heart and the emotion have certainly been pumped in Furious 7. How important is that balance?
My approach to filmmaking is always one of integrity, regardless of whether it’s a drama piece or whether its action. The idea that we could even attempt to one-up the stunts and the action sequences is fun, and it’s a rich, rich challenge. But, increasing the emotional stakes is what will set this saga apart from any other movie. The emotional heartbeat of the movie is something that everyone we know can relate to, everyone we know is invested in.

After all the team has been through, all the places they’ve travelled, the things that they’ve done, is it all catching up with them now?
All the events from the previous movies and even some events that the audience has never seen before — but they know are in the mythology of Fast & Furious — will all come together in this movie. Questions are answered and new thoughts are proposed. And you’ll see, when you watch the movie, that themes that have been initiated or themes that have been planted in previous movies, all come full circle here.

This one brings in a theme of vengeance in a way that has never been seen before. Dom’s had his missions, he’s done his thing. This time it’s very different…
It’s something that we were really conscious about, to be directly answering the previous film with the kind of unforeseen, residual effect from completing a mission for the law, in essence. So Dom Toretto, specifically, is recruited, so to speak, by the Luke Hobbs character (played by Dwayne Johnson), to essentially fix a problem that the Hobbs world… the guys with badges… can’t fix. And we all know that Dom would never partake in that, but we also know that Dom has a heart, and the name on that heart is Letty (Michelle Rodriguez). And so this government is able to get Dom and his team to do things that they wouldn’t normally do. The fallout of that is the birth of new enemies... enemies that have their own families at stake, and their own sense of loyalty to draw upon that allows them to exact this revenge on our team.
It’s one of the cool things about the way that we’ve been doing this saga for the last 10 years or so — nothing is left to happenstance. You will revisit characters that you’ve seen and that’s what’s so fun about this.  We’re fortunate in that we were able to take something that was a handicap many years ago… there were no novels, there were no comic books, it was a completely homegrown saga... and we’ve finally now started to use that to our advantage.

At the end of Fast & Furious 6, we met your new foe in a very dramatic way. How dangerous is Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham)?
It was imperative to introduce the next villain in a way that automatically affected you emotionally. For you to feel like a villain is being introduced and at the same time he is taking away someone that you’ve already grown comfortable with. It creates an emotional response to the villain that you can’t anticipate and you can’t make up. And that’s at the forefront of our story here. 

Why was Jason Statham right for the role of the villain?
Jason is one of those actors who keep it cool and consistent. He’s a wonderful talent to watch, period. We wanted to get a formidable character, but we wanted the character’s formidability to be different than Hobbs’s formidability that we employed in (Fast & Furious) 5. And then I went on Facebook and I asked the fans: ‘Who would you like to see me work with? Who would you like to see me incorporate, if I could?’ And the top name was Jason Statham, more than the next three combined! 

Did you enjoy the scenes with Jason and the extreme physicality of them?
I very much did. For the more physical face-offs, we had started training a month early, and before we went back down to Atlanta, we were actually training here in California. The scenes where we are intense with one another were not the most enjoyable scenes on the set, because there was a tension that was present. Thank god we’re friends and we are rooting for each other in real life because the intensity that we had to build against one another was so deadly.

We’ve been to some pretty incredible places with you through this franchise, but Abu Dhabi is pretty special.
Very special. The audience now has grown to somewhat expect these new locations and they enjoy travelling with the characters that they know so well. They still wanted to come home in 7, but as a characteristic of the saga over the years, fans have enjoyed travelling with the characters. 

As a producer, you must have had a hand in picking the director. Why James Wan?
James Wan (the man behind the Insidious films and The Conjuring) is somebody who has conquered a genre… he has proven you can take a horror genre and be extremely successful with it. He’s become the new face of horror and what’s exciting about him is that he wants to do more. He was very excited about coming into this and trying to do something that’s memorable. There is a sensibility to his shooting style that I think was imperative for this kind of reset chapter. I call it “reset chapter” because 7 incorporates so many things that happened before, but in some ways, this is the new frontier. So for all of us involved, we’re finally at a place where we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. It is the unknown road ahead that is exciting and I think that James has taken scenes and shot them differently, with a certain kind of tension that he’s mastered in his horror world.

Do you have an outline for future films?
I think what Fast & Furious has done as a saga has proved that there is a new way to approach sequels and sagas. The way that they used to do it in the 1980s and 1990s was to make a movie and if it was really successful, they would use the brand and market it again and again and expect diminishing returns. The secret to counter that is to have a long view of what your story looks like over multiple pictures and, with Universal, I wouldn’t have been interested in just doing 7 if they didn’t have an idea or feel comfortable with what the new trilogy would look like, of how 7, ‘8’ and ‘9’ would roll out and how they would connect to one another. One of the things that I’m most proud about in the last three films is how much each film speaks to one another and how connected they are. 

What’s going to happen to Dom and Letty?
I will tell you that it’s an intense ride. I remember when we did the first test screening for 6, my agent’s son, who is 15 years old, came out of the movie going, ‘I love it, I love it even more than 5’. I asked him, ‘What did you love?’ and he said, ‘I love the Dom and Letty relationship’. This is a 15-year-old boy,who is supposed to love all the guns and crashes. And then he says, ‘I just have one question... does Letty ever get her memory back?’ When a 15-year-old boy is going to a giant action movie and walking out of there asking you if Letty is ever going to get her memory back, you’re on to something.
Fast & Furious 6 was the first Fast movie where the women audience was larger than the male audience, just by a couple of points.The female role models in this are very powerful, beautiful, intelligent, independent, strong women and I think women enjoy seeing that. This isn’t a movie where the women are damsels in distress... they’re right alongside you, sometimes they’re cooler than you, and yet they still maintain this beautiful femininity. I think this is going to be one of those movies where we’re going to see more of a female audience than even Fast 6.

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