I was a stunt coordinator on Fast five, and I'm gonna do a one scene breakdown of the infamous vault chase in Fast five.

I started out as a stunt person.

I really enjoyed doing the high falls and doing all the car wrecks and all the motorcycle Rex.

And then as you get older, you're in a board room with a lot of people who don't really know action, telling you to your face that I don't think you could do that.

And then you bring it to the screen.

That's where the real enjoyment for me is is to be able to see something on the screen that they told you you couldn't do.

The vault Chase was easily the our biggest chase in the entire film.

So at the opening of this bit, we've got Vin and Paul in their chargers, and they've got cables attached to a vault.

They're gonna pull the vault through a cement wall and then carry it down through this parking garage and out the front exit.

This is a breakaway wall, obviously, that we're pulling our vault through, and these cables are really cables that go too.

But what you don't see on the bottom is we put Del Ron, which is a really thick plastic on the bottom of the vault here so that it would slide easier.

The problem we found out with Adele Ron is once you get the vault moving doesn't want to stop.

So we had to take the Del run off once we got out of the street, because once the vault started sliding right and left, we never could stop it.

This entire square here was all breakaway wall.

This was on a stage.

Once you see the vault, leave that frame.

They were back in a real environment.

We brought the vault out of this underground parking garage at speed in our first shot, made the right hand turn and tumbled the vault across this whole section you see out here and we were just guessing as to where that thing would tumble.

But that is a real £9000 ball tumbling across auto.

The cement post that we put in.

We had about two of these riel steal, £9000 vaults, two of the driving vaults and two of the semi vaults, which we'll talk about later.

Like I said, it started with Del Ron Plastic to make it slide easier on the inside.

What you see here is it's just sliding on steel titanium, so that would create sparks out both sides.

It was an intricate and tricky little piece, because if one of the Chargers turns early, he picks up a piece of the safe, and that makes the other Charger not be able to pick up his end of it.

So they have to have complete tightness on the cables from both chargers at all times.

The idea behind the Dolly track and the camera being that close to where we knew it was going to crash was that you want the audience to feel that rush in their face.

And that's the thing that really makes.

The difference in a fast and furious movie is that the audience wants to feel that they're part of this chase, and if you can't get the cameras in close enough to the action coming right to your face, you've lost him.

What you will see in the shot is something we like to do in all of fast and furious is is we like to put people in the foreground and you see this stunt guy right here.

Now he's gotta watch that safe.

If the cables break, it's coming right for him.

And then there's another stunt guy out here.

We've got pedestrians here and here and crossing in front of camera.

You'll see them go right and left, and that gives us the feel that there are people on the streets and it's dangerous.

This is a completely different set up for us.

What we did is we took all the pedestrians that were in danger out of the way, and we said, Bring this thing around the corner as fast as you could bring it just so we have speed.

We knew we couldn't put any stunt people, you know, anywhere over here, because it's a dangerous spot.

You have to be careful about each and every one of these shots.

And when you see in the cut because you've seen all those people in the foreground of the cut before that, your eye doesn't miss all of them in this one, because it's such a quick cut in this scene.

We knew we wanted to tie in a child in the foreground, looking out and seeing the vault being pulled by two Chargers.

Here's what we did is we took the bus out of it.

We drug the vault, the real vault around two or three times till we got the shot we wanted with our other cameras.

And then we put the bus back in, and this little girl you see here is Justin Lin, our first director's daughter, and we shot over her and we pulled another vault.

Pass it again, but we didn't pull the £9000 vault pastor.

We pulled another vault pastor that we had a hidden pickup truck inside the vault.

I know that's a little tough to understand, because pickup trucks pretty big, but what I did is I took a pickup truck and I cut the entire middle half out of it from the back of the front wheels to the front of the back wheels.

We took that out and we welded it back together.

So while it has is an engine front wheels and back wheels and a seat, and that's essentially it, and then we fit it down inside of the vault and we gave him steering wheels and We got this thing about about an inch off the ground so that he could actually swing it around the corner and drive it extremely close to this bus without endangering anybody.

What we didn't really know was that the truck sitting inside of a enclosed vault creates heat.

We knew it would be hot.

We didn't know it was gonna be 100 90 degrees in there.

So the stunt guy that was in there started passing out on us.

So let's bring in dry ice and put it all on top of the steering wheel in front of the steering wheel and that'll cool you off.

What happens when you bring dry ice into and enclose surface?

It takes all the oxygen out of the air.

So now he couldn't breathe.

So then I had to put a helmet on him with an enclosed shield and everything and a pipe that went out the top so that he could now breathe air that was outside of the vault.

And then he was comfortable.

So it took a little bit of time to figure all this out.

But once we got it past all these little problems, we figured out that this driveable safe was really gonna help us.

We knew we wanted to roll this vault, and we created this bank building from scratch.

This essentially was just a parking lot.

Built this entire curb here, built all the steps, built the glass, put it all in there and knew that we wanted this thing to tumble through.

So what you what we had is two stunt guys in chargers right here, right here.

Pulling a real vault in its speed and hitting a park police car just to show the immense size of this thing and get it to start turning when it hits it.

Here we put a guy in the foreground, which is what I told you about before to give it a sense of danger.

It looks like he's only a few feet away from the vault.

But this is what we call the compress lands a long lens.

It makes our stunt man right here look like he's a lot closer to the vault that he really is.

But this is just the first piece of a multiple piece sequence that you'll see.

So here we have our entire built bank building.

What we wanted on the inside was who said We wanna have a camera on a dolly darling past people that are inside of the bank building so that as we're seeing their faces at camera, the vault is tumbling behind them.

The second piece of this is the vault is back here, and it's on an enormous ram.

That's a special effects people built for us.

Aram is something that is, Ah, hydraulic piece that has a piston that shoots out an enormous rate of speed and creates the tumbling effect and the speed on on enormous track that goes all the way through the floor of the bank building so that it can't get off the track and can't hit our stunt people.

And when it's sitting back here, it's on these two arms with these two holders on it that are going through the middle as he pushes it, it starts tumbling and as it's tumbling when it hits the outside of the bank building here, it releases.

And once it's started tumbling, it's now tumbling on its own through there on the track that we want what so in this sequence, we were trying to think of ingenious ways for Paul and Vince character to stop police cars coming at them.

We came up with this idea of splitting and going into an alley each themselves, which then makes the vault come forward toward the police cars.

They're coming head on at him.

The car you see here is towed in.

There's no stunt.

People in that car you see here has stunned us.

One stunt person in it with a helmet on in a full cage and everything else.

See, the vault was coming.

It it probably 40.

And we were tone in that car.

It probably 40.

So it's an 80 mile an hour crash, and then the stunt guy in the back, we told him we thought this car was gonna hit in the back and was gonna get a little light.

And if you see it, get light, try and stuff your car underneath it.

And that's exactly what happened.

One of the key things to remember in a chase like this that every time you do a chasing and you're going down the straightaway at the end of the scene and I yell, Cut the stunt guys driving the Chargers as Paula Vin have to stop the vault.

You can't just slam on the brakes because that £9000 bald is gonna crash into you so they have to ease off the throttle.

Lt's not even hit the brakes for about another 40 or 50 feet and let the vault take another 50 or 60 feet.

T slide up behind them.

No, The biggest problem with any motorcycle son in any film is that you have no protection.

Sure, you've got a helmet most of the time, but with car stunts, you've got metal all around you in a cage, and things that protect you on a motorcycle like this could only put on so many pads inside of a police uniform and a helmet.

And that's still not steal around you like you having a car.

So you're actually trying to put your feet on some back pegs that you've put on the motorcycle that don't exist in real life.

You weld on two little tiny places where you can put your feet back there.

You said that right before you hit this vehicle, you can push like crazy and get your knees above those handlebars.

If your knees hit those handlebars.

It then turned you over and you do a nose dive into the hood.

So what actually happened here is wet.

Our stunt man riding the motorcycle just didn't get off the motorcycle quick enough.

He was a millisecond late, and he dug his shoulder into the car right there instead of turning completely over and broke his shoulder.

So in this sequence, we've got a charger pushing a real £9000 ball backwards out into the street with the other charger leading it.

And as he comes out our charger that's pushing it past to throw what we call a reverse 1 80 You go as fast as you can in reverse.

Then you spend the steering wheel.

The front end comes around the back end, and then as it comes around all the way around, you throw it into drive and you gas it.

Now you're going straight again.

It's a very, very difficult move on its own, let alone pushing a £9000 safe.

We rehearsed this one scene in a parking lot for almost a week, so we created this entire bus stop.

It wasn't there before, and we built all the glass walls and put the top on it and put everything else in there and then said, We're gonna have the Chargers split the bus stop and have the vault go through the middle.

You can see that there's a big hole here, and what we wanted the audience to see is that prior to this, a light pole had dropped in the middle of the street and we wanted it to look like the policeman hit the light pole with the front end.

It turned sideways on the side, hit the light pole and the car tumbles side over, side down the street.

Well, that's not gonna happen in reality and look really spectacular.

So what we do underneath the car, we put what's called a cannon.

So just think about a real cannon pointed toward the ground, stuck where the passenger seat is.

You weld it all into the cage, and then you give the stunt guy a button and you say, Come in here and speed pitched the car sideways, hit the button that cannon fires, shoots the projectile out, hits the ground and makes this car flip like this.

So what?

This is is this is a two part process.

We were took the Chargers that Iran are real £9000 vault in depart cars, cable to the ground on big steel plates that they could move.

That gives us the most resistance and creates the crush factor that we want.

Then we went in and we took all the engines out of these cars and cut some of the cars up so that they crushed a little easier.

Then we got bored with it.

We thought, We're just not getting the kind of crush factor that we really want.

So what you see now is our third vault, and this is gonna be a little more difficult to understand is we took an entire semi truck.

We took the box off of it.

It's just the semi truck tractor, and we stuck it and built a vault around the front three sides of this semi truck and put huge steel Channel all around it so that a semi truck which weighs a lot of weight, can hit all these parked cars and crush them and drive away from it.

Now he's never being pulled by the Chargers, but we did have the two Chargers drive in front of him with no cables that he could pile, drive these parked cars and make them look like Matchbox.

We wrecked somewhere between 192 110 cars.

So this is 1 80 when Vin has to throw 1 80 get the vault to go by him so that he can then go the other direction to attack the bad guys.

If he throws it too late or too early, the vault then hits him, which is not a good thing.

So we rehearsed this with pylons to simulate exactly what the width of this street Waas.

And we got it down to a perfect line where he could actually throw it.

And you can see just how close the vault goes by his back end.

You wouldn't want to get hit by it.

Every single fast and furious.

We have to have a wheelie with Ben's car, Vince Charger or whatever been is in.

And so out here we decided, Well, how is he gonna wheelie with a £9000 vault behind him?

We figured well, that's the reason that will make it work is once he throws the 1 80 then has to go back after the bad guy.