James Wan is going off to shoot Fast and Furious 7 soon so he’s doing his publicity for Insidious: Chapter Two today. We’ll bring you the full Insidious interview with Wan in September when the film releases, but you’ll probably be seeing a lot of Fast 7 news breaks today so we wanted to bring you part of our exclusive chat with Wan.
When Wan was announced as the choice to replace Justin Lin, all his fans joked that he would make Fast 7 a horror movie. I feel like the only one who’s been rallying, “The director of Death Sentence is making another action movie!” Wan told me he will bring his gritty approach to action to the normally outrageous Fast and Furious movies.
“I love what I did in Death Sentence but that was a low budget action film,” Wan said. “Now I get the chance to do bigger stuff and I feel like I have the money to play with in a bigger sandbox, so I think my action will be pretty damn cool. At least I’m hoping to.”
The horror jokes might not be too far off. Wan does have a sense of fear he wants to inject in his car chases. “The stuff I’m designing, I want my action scenes to be intense. I wanted them to be suspenseful and scary in that respect. It’s not ghost scary but in the same way when you watch the first Die Hard, the action scenes were actually really tense and I know it doesn’t quite fully fit into the world of Fast and the Furious but I want to bring some of that flavor to this.”
The Fast and the Furious is a major franchise that already decided where the sequel was going to go at the end of Furious 6 when the Easter Egg scene addressed a moment from Tokyo Drift.
“Yeah, on a lot of my movies I’ve always had the chance to develop them much further but this is a different one. This is me coming in unto a world that is very established. It’s very much laid out from the last movie what the world is going to be, so I have to come into the sandbox and play this game with them, but hopefully at the same time I can put enough of my own input into it.”
Lastly, I asked Wan if there would be any faster, more furious movie than Fast 7 next year. That’s my thing. I say it about each Fast and the Furious movie. You won’t see a faster, more furious movie this year. “Come on, Fred,” Wan joked. “You know the answer to that question.” There you have it. You won’t see a faster, more furious movie in 2014!
Insidious: Chapter Two, Wan’s second horror movie this summer after The Conjuring, opens September 13.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
