How ‘Fate of the Furious’ raced over frozen lakes and Havana streets

Asking F. Gary Gray to direct “The Fate of the Furious,” the eighth chapter in the hugely popular “The Fast and the Furious” movie franchise, was a no-brainer for the folks at Universal.

He’d just made the studio’s hit N.W.A music biopic “Straight Outta Compton.” He’d helmed a successful car-caper film before, the 2003 “The Italian Job.” Gray had even worked with many members of the sequel’s sprawling cast before: Vin Diesel on “A Man Apart,” Jason Statham and new villain Charlize Theron on “Italian Job,” Dwayne Johnson on “Be Cool.”

Although the South Central L.A.-raised Gray and Universal had enjoyed a great working experience with “Compton,” the filmmaker had one concern before taking on their golden baby, though.

“It was like, ‘What are you going to do next? What CAN you do next?’,” Gray, 47, explains. “There’s been seven movies; it’s been a massive success. So when I heard that Dom was going to go rogue, I thought that is exactly where you need to go in order to make an eighth film work – and not only work, but great. When you have a franchise that’s so used to serving this theme of family, family, family, and then the family falls apart, I wanted to be a part of that story.”

In “Fate’s” script by Chris Morgan, who’s been driving the franchise’s intersecting plot lines since the third installment, Diesel’s Dominic Toretto is seduced/blackmailed/something by Theron’s superdiabolical cyberterrorist Cipher to betray his hard-driving ad hoc family and aid her nefarious scheme – while he’s on his honeymoon in Cuba with Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty, no less.

The love of Dom’s life – as well as fed-turned-friend Hobbs (Johnson), goofball Roman (Tyrese Gibson), tech whizzes Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) and their mysterious government overseer Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) – doesn’t know what to make of Dom’s sudden, dark shift.

But they do know they have to stop what he and Cipher are up to because The World. Vehicular mayhem ensues in Germany, New York City, Arctic Russia, below the sea, up in the sky …

It was a daunting undertaking on a scale Gray had never attempted before.

“?’The Italian Job’ was fun. This movie is insanely massive – in a fun way, but it’s just on a whole ‘nother scale,” he admits. “Y’know, we took the Mini Coopers through Los Angeles, drove through the subway, had a little race with the train. But it’s nothing like having cars fly through the streets of Manhattan off of buildings and having nuclear subs chasing Lamborghinis and going to what could be considered a forbidden city – Havana – and racing these vintage cars through the streets at 100 miles an hour without killing everyone. It was a ton of challenges that we certainly didn’t come close to facing with ‘The Italian Job.’?”

Gray thinks he managed to put his personal touch on “Fate,” though, while making sure to acknowledge that he couldn’t have made the movie without series veterans such as picture car coordinator Dennis McCarthy and the second unit action/stunt teams headed by Spiro Razatos, Jack Gill and Andy Gill.

“It seems like most of my earlier movies prepped me for this one: Working with the actors, doing some action, traveling around, getting performances with drama and humor and all that,” Gray reckons. “You find my humor in here, you find some of the dramatic pockets that you’ve seen in the past with me, and this action is unique; I wish I could take all of the credit for that, but I can’t.”

It took an unprecedented kind of preparation to stage and shoot “Fate’s” opening sequence in Havana, a drag race through the city’s colonial streets in the ancient automobiles Cubans have famously kept running since the U.S. embargo of the Communist nation came down more than half a century ago. Former President Obama’s relations thaw with the Castro regime enabled “Fate” to become the first major Hollywood production to shoot on the island in decades.

Further diplomacy was required, however.

“If you could imagine having to bring the entire infrastructure in to shoot what we shot, that was just the beginning,” Gray notes. “That was just kind of a logistical challenge. Having to consider not only all of the things we needed to consider creatively – and it’s a beautiful place to shoot – but we had to consider a lot of things that were being negotiated between the two countries. We had the State Department negotiating, ambassadors; there were people on a level I’ve never had to consider negotiating on our behalf.

“Some of the simplest shots that we dreamt up required major negotiations. For example, we couldn’t bring a drone into Cuba; that could be considered a spying device. But we brought in helicopters, and that was one of the first times there’s been an American airship over Havana. You could race at 100 miles an hour with cars that were 60 years old up and down the streets of Havana, but you could barely send an email. So it was a major contrast, but it was a phenomenal experience, profound in a lot of ways, for all of us. Well worth it.”

Speaking of negotiators (interestingly, Gray also made a movie about one in 1998), Dom later goes after a Russian ambassador’s motorcade in Manhattan. Former friends and enemies haul after him, but Dom’s got his own posse: 100 or so driverless vehicles whose computer systems have been hacked by Cipher. Many of which while parked in structures stories above the street.

“The experience of shooting a car chase, and then raining cars in New York, was unique,” says Gray, noting that some elements of the unprecedented urban insanity were filmed in Manhattan and some elsewhere. “Some of our movie magic and secrets, we keep ’em secret. There was a combination of techniques for different vehicles at different times. But some of it was very timely, with all of the hacking going on. Hopefully, this is just kind of a movie thing you can have fun watching on the big screen, but the ability to do at least parts of what you see in the movie is already here.”

According to “Fate,” nuclear submarines can be hack-jacked too. Iceland stood in for Russia during filming of a multivehicle race across a frozen lake, with the sub underneath, but not always.

The lake part was real.

“Beside the cost of destroying and drowning three Lamborghinis,” Gray starts, “having to work with engineers to make sure it’s safe to have 40 vehicles racing on top of melting ice was quite a thing. As a matter of fact, we lost a tractor; it just kind of fell in. So, you can imagine the level of engineering it took to make sure our stuntmen were cool, our actors were cool and our crew was cool. Otherwise, the story wouldn’t be how cool this movie is, but you just sunk 1,000 people and their vehicles for the sake of getting a creative shot or two.

“We had to strategically place everyone in order to make sure that the shots were safe. Otherwise, one wrong turn and a crack, and suddenly you have an entire crew in danger.”

The debate will go on forever – or at least for the run of F&F movies, of which “Fate” is reportedly Chapter?1 of the final trilogy – as to whether it’s the ridiculous action or the character relationships that fuel the series’ popularity. Ironically, this “family no more” episode may boast the most complex family values seen yet.

And that, it appears, is what Gray may be proudest of engineering.

“One of the reasons why it’s a global phenomenon is because of the family thing,” he says. “If you turn that on its head, which we’ve done, it’s a different approach. It’s the family that’s falling apart. But it’s taking the theme of family to the next level. You don’t want to roll your eyes and say, ‘OK, we’ve seen this before.’ This storyline helps to make you feel that this is fresh. If you’re going to experience eight … give me something different, and I think we did.”