David Ayer has expressed frustration at having “nothing to show” for writing 2001’s The Fast and The Furious, the film that kicked off the multi-billion dollar franchise.
As reported by Deadline, Ayer recently appeared on an episode of the Real Ones podcast, where he opened up about his involvement with the film. He shared his disappointment over the lack of recongition he received for his contribution to the script, particularly given the Fast Saga’s huge popularity and success.
“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 Fast and the Furious was adapted from the Vibe magazine article “Racer X” by Ken Li, with Gary Scott Thompson and Erik Bergquist writing the initial drafts of the script. However, Ayer said he came in to rework the script and was responsible for injecting diversity and culture into the screenplay to make it more grounded.
“When I got that script, that s**t was set in New York, it was all Italian kids, right?” he said. “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**t 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**k yeah, I’m gonna put that in the movie.'”
The franchise, which is ten movies strong (excluding the 2019 spinoff Hobbs & Shaw), has grossed more than $7 billion at the worldwide box office. Ayer takes issue with “the narrative” that he “didn’t do s**t” with it, even though he made some major changes to the script for the film that started it all.
“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**king 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.”
Ayer indicated that his experience on The Fast and the Furious and his occasional tensions with Hollywood executives (such as the issues on 2016’s Suicide Squad) made him take a different approach to future projects. Specifically, he started to value those that allowed him greater independence and creative freedom.
“F**k all the middlemen, right? I get it. It’s up to me, I gotta self-rescue, right?” Ayer said. “I can f**king 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.”
The Fast and the Furious Franchise has been with us this entire century, beginning as Point Break with street racing and slowly escalating to global James Bond/A-Team adventures with cars. Fast X hit theaters in May, marking the tenth main-series film, but Vin Diesel has hinted the finale could turn into a trilogy.
Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.