I t was 11pm on Thursday 28 April 2022 when director Louis Leterrier received the phone call that turbo-charged the next year of his life. Forty-eight hours prior, veteran Fast & Furious franchise filmmaker Justin Lin had abruptly resigned as the director of Fast X, days into production on the full-throttle family saga’s 10th mainline instalment. A replacement director was needed and, naturally, they were needed fast.
‘I got a phone call from [president of Universal Pictures] Peter Cramer on his cell phone - I really thought it was a butt dial!’ Leterrier tells TF over Zoom in early March. After all, late-night calls from the personal mobile phones of major studio heads are not the norm, even in Hollywood. ‘I learned then and there what was happening. He said, “Can you read a script by 5am, so we can have a meeting?’”
Leterrier had flirted with Fast in the past; he was in the conversation to direct Tokyo Drift, Fast & Furious 8 and Hobbs & Shaw. After staying up all night to read, and reread, the script for Fast X, he was asked a simple question: would you be interested? ‘I said no,’ Leterrier recalls. ‘I couldn’t fathom doing this. It’s just impossible. It’s just massive. Doing any movie, any TV show, anything without prep is crazy, let alone doing the biggest movie in the biggest action franchise of all time.’
But Leterrier, the 49-year-old French filmmaker who helped launch Jason Statham’s action career with The Transporter, helmed early MCU entry The Incredible Hulk and did some unspeakable things to Mark Strong inside an elephant’s vagina in Grimsby, soon realised that the opportunity to take the wheel of the ‘biggest action franchise of all time’ was simply too good to pass up. ‘So I accepted. I took a plane and landed. All this in the span of four days. It was crazy.’
Back on set, things were just as during a break from post-production ADR on the film. Third-party reports at the time cited a disagreement between Lin and Diesel as one of the driving factors behind the director’s decision to depart. ‘There still was traces of the pandemic, and all that pressure that was put on the production. Nothing but love for Justin, and nothing but gratitude for the work that he did to get us to that first week of filming… but sometimes you’ve got to find a way to get it done.’
