Sitting down with Daniel Casey, writer of 'Fast 9'

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What’s it’s like to step into the writer’s chair on one of the most popular, and longest-running movie franchises in Hollywood? That’s exactly what we had the opportunity to ask Daniel Casey, the seasoned screenwriter who collaborated with Justin Lin on building the ballet of automotive chaos and emotional family ties that is the ninth instalment in the Fast and the Furious series, Fast 9 .

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With a storyline that spans almost the entire Fast and Furious chronology and a number of key plot points and casting decisions not set in stone until shooting began, F9 presented very specific challenges in terms of story, character, and of course the panoply of stunts, locations, and cars bundled into the entire package. Casey offered us an inside look at how he came to shape the first of the final three movies that will close out the Fast & Furious journey for Dominic Toretto and his family.

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Sitting down with Daniel Casey, writer of 'Fast 9' Back to video

(Note: This interview has been edited for length)

Driving.ca: The first thing I wanted to ask you is what was it like for you to walk into a franchise that was approaching 20 years on the screen? You’ve mentioned that director Justin Lin had sketched out a bunch of elements of the story beforehand, but you still had to take those bones and put sinew on them. Fast and Furious is so different from some of your past projects like Kin and 10 Cloverfield Lane which occupied a smaller, more contained universe. What was that experience like?

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Daniel Casey: I’ll tell you, it was intimidating. First of all, because I think the thing that I was aware of going into Fast 9 was the fact that all of these characters more or less are kind of, they’re living creatures on their own, you know? The character of Dom goes all the way back to the first Fast film release in 2001, which was my first year in college. It’s interesting to have watched all of the films as a fan and then, like you say, all of a sudden you’re writing one of the movies. You come into it keenly aware of the fact that the characters of Dom, Letty and Brian O’Conner, even though he’s obviously not in the movie, these are characters that have existed since 2001.

In order to prepare for that, I spent a lot of time watching movies one through nine, if you count the Hobbs and Shaw spin-off, and just trying to become familiar with not just movies, but with the characters and the world, and also with things like their cadence and their disposition and their dialogues. Just to be about as aware of these things as I could possibly be going into the script so that you can kind of match what’s come before and add everything that you’re bringing along with yourself as a new writer.

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Driving.ca: I find that fascinating, because with 20 years of back-story, the themes of the films have changed so much. You went from car culture to a crime and heist caper feel in the later half of the movies. When you look at those characters, and when you were doing your research, did you have a hard stop on how far back you wanted to go, influence-wise, for each individual character, where you were kind of like, “Okay, they’ve gone into this stage of their lives now, I don’t have to worry so much about films X through Y, but I do need to focus on what came after that?”

Dan Casey: I think that with working on the Fast and Furious films, to be honest with you, I went all the way back in terms of inspiration. That’s clear when you see Fast 9 that there are so many narrative threads that actually connect the ninth film to the first film. That’s kind of how it has to work for the Fast and Furious movies.

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It’s the tricky balancing act, in terms of the writing, is that these are characters, given that they go back 20 years, there’s no part of their back-story or their mythology that you get to ignore, especially with this movie, it jumps around in time. You actually meet Dom Toretto about seven, eight years before the start of the first film.

So I had to be super, super aware of and I had to have extensive knowledge of the first film, to the point where specific lines in the first film actually turn up in some of the flashback scenes in the ninth one that I wrote. So yeah, actually to your question, I’m kind of hyper aware of all of the movies if anything, because Fast 9 connects back to films one through eight in so many different ways. We wrap up some stuff from Tokyo Drift , we’re setting up some stuff for the very first Fast and Furious movie. There’s a lot of connective tissue that goes back to what has already taken place in previous films.

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Driving.ca: There are so many different characters in this franchise. How do you make the fans, who came to watch their favourite character do something cool, feel like they got a fair shake? There are two dozen personalities at least who’ve had recurring roles in this franchise, so that must have been tough.

Dan Casey: If I’m being 100% honest, you walk away never really feeling entirely satisfied. It was really, really great to bring Han back, but I think even now as I see the film, I would have liked to have written more Han scenes, it’s just that the movie’s already two hours… I think it’s like two hours and 20 minutes long as is, it’s the longest Fast and Furious movie. There is (only) so much that you can do. It becomes this process of just establishing and figuring out the economy. How many scenes can I give to Han? How many scenes can I give to Letty? Dom is obviously the lead of the movie, and in normal cases, your lead character is in every, single scene, but that can’t be the case with Fast and Furious because of the ensemble component, you know?

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We try to proceed as organically as possible. It usually shakes out in a pretty fair way, but that’s not to say that there was no work involved. You’re always kind of feeling like, “It would have been great to have another scene with Letty. It would have been great to have another scene with Roman and Tej.” Even as a writer, you’re always left wanting to do more, but it’s a matter of packing everything in to that run-space and also making sure that there’s enough action, as well. It’s a balancing act and you kind of land these things as best as you possibly can.

Driving.ca: I know you went on a really long, almost a year tour with Justin Lin checking out locations, setting up the story, but I’ve also read that the decision to add Han into the movie, for example, only cemented about three months before shooting began and that there were a lot of details of the film that were shifting right up to the time filming started. As a writer, how do you handle something like that, especially when you’re looking at a movie that’s also setting up two additional films?

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Dan Casey: You don’t sleep. That happens a lot. Working on the Fast movies, especially as you get close to production, it just results in a lot of nights where you just don’t get as much sleep as you would normally. I had quite a few four-hour nights on Fast . And yeah, things are shifting all the way in to production, to be honest with you. You’re still making dialogue adjustments sometimes on the day [of shooting]. That’s just the nature of the way that these big movies work,

Directly to your question, we were always going to have Han appear in the film, but the decision to actually bring him back fully to life, that was made, like you say, very late in the process. Where that comes from, the hesitation to kind of bring Han back, and this might even surprise some people, but Justin [Lin] was reluctant about just arbitrarily bringing characters back from the dead. He’d already done it once with Michelle Rodriguez’s character, Letty, in that she died in the fourth Fast and Furious film and then she came back in the sixth.

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Justin, he was nervous. He was rightfully nervous about how we were going to pull it off, if we were ever going to pull it off, and I think that for a majority of the early scripting process, I think he was resistant to it because he was thinking about the fans and he was thinking about the world. He really wanted these stories to have stakes. It was a decision that we really, really thought out, and by the time that we arrived on, “Yes, we’re definitely going to bring Han back,” we were 100% committed to it.

Driving.ca: That kind of leads me to something else I wanted to ask you about in terms of characters getting screen time. You’ve talked about wanting to give female actors in  Fast and Furious a larger role, specifically Michelle Rodriguez, but can you tell me why that was important to you?

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Dan Casey: While watching the eighth movie, I remember watching the barbecue scene that takes place at the end of the film, and it’s a really nice scene. It takes place on top of a loft building in New York City. I had this feeling when Vin’s character walked up to Michelle and kind of introduced her to his baby son that this was inherently a kind of a conversation that should have been very complicated. They moved really quickly through it, and I remember going, “In real life, this could be a very interesting character moment for Letty.” Obviously, again, you have to get these movies done within a certain amount of time, and so I think that basically what you wound up with in eight, is they were looking to wrap everything up, and so they just kind of did the scene very quickly.

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I remember bringing that up to Justin when I pitched, that scene specifically, the barbecue at the end of eight. I was like, “I just think that if we were going to do a version of that scene in movie nine, that I would write it differently.” It all kind of began there. Then, obviously, the credit should go to Michelle Rodriguez because she’s been advocating on behalf of the female characters of the Fast and Furious universe, she’s been advocating for these characters forever. When I came in, it was really just about doing the best job that I could and supporting Michelle in what she was advocating for.

I don’t know if you saw this in the press over the years, but Michelle went to Universal and she asked to have a female writer brought in. Michelle brought in someone to work on the dialogue for the female characters for about two weeks. It was really, really great to see. It was neat to share the script like that, and to really give Michelle the onus and the ownership over the characters a little bit, and the way that they interacted with each other. Then, once those scenes had been written, just making sure that you kind of protect them within the narrative and build out the characters in all the other supportive ways just so that the female characters feel very lived-in in the movie.

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Driving.ca: I can’t not ask about cars. Given that you’re from Michigan and you’ve previously written a lot of movies that have taken place in the Detroit area, are you a gearhead? Is this something that’s near and dear to you?

Dan Casey: I’m a gearhead as much as the working screenwriter can be a gearhead, which is to say screenwriters generally know a very little bit about a lot of things. For a project, I tend to kind of bounce around and do as much research as possible, but with Fast and with cars, my dad worked, he’s retired now, he worked at American Axle in Hamtramck (Michigan), and I have three uncles that work for Chrysler, two of which were engineers.

My cousin works over at Ford, he’s an engineer. He actually works on the Mustang, and for that reason, I was driving a Mustang. just as my car, when I got the job on Fast and the Furious . When it came time to pick a car for the character Jacob Toretto to go driving around, I actually advocated for Mustangs since we hadn’t really seen them in the series yet. Lo and behold, I think that Justin and Dennis McCarthy (vehicle builder for the franchise) heard me out on that one and sure enough, in the movie, Jacob Toretto, John Cena’s character, is driving, I think it’s a 2017 or 2018 Mustang. So I’m kind of a casual gearhead in that I was surrounded growing up by people who worked for the Big Three. I’m sure that in some way, shape or form that that’s rubbed off on Fast 9 .

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Driving.ca: This is going to sound crazy, but when the first one came out back in 2001, I went to see it 13 times in the theatre. It was the first time I had seen people on a movie screen doing what I was doing every night with my friends, and I had never had that kind of experience before. I never thought that 20 years later the franchise would be where it is now.

Dan Casey: The trajectory of these films and the wild, pun intended, the wild ride they’ve been on, it’s wholly singular. There’s nothing else like Fast out there in the world. For that reason, I think that there’s almost a cultural imperative to kind of continue making these movies and continue making them in interesting ways. Nine movies in, sure, they’re not necessarily the same creature that they were in 2001. That’s kind of impossible with the way that movies have changed overall, but the heart of the franchise is still there.