James Wan Says Furious 7 Was the Hardest Movie Of His Career

James Wan has worked on a ton of big-budget films, and he has labeled Furious 7 as the hardest he’s ever done. Wan directed the seventh movie in the Fast & Furious franchise, which is the highest-grossing of the series to date with $1.515 billion worldwide and was hit with the passing of Paul Walker midway through production. Wan opened up about the production process in an interview with THR and you can see some highlights below:

On working on Furious 7: “It definitely was the hardest movie of my career. I’ve done technically challenging movies since then, but Furious 7 just hit on so many different levels, especially an emotional one. It was my first big-budget movie. I made The Conjuring for $20 million, and then Furious 7 was hundreds of millions.”

On embracing the challenges: “The size of the production did not turn me off; I actually embraced it. I really wanted to create a movie that had the look and smell of their franchise, but I wanted to design set pieces that were a bit more tense, suspenseful and scary. The first thing that I pitched to Universal’s Donna Langley in the room was the scene where the bus is going over the edge of the cliff, and Paul Walker’s character, Brian, has to climb onto the side of the bus and run to jump off. Two years later, that became one of the highlights of the trailer.”

On how Paul Walker passing affected the production: “When the passing of Paul Walker happened, we were like, ‘Do we just shut the movie down for good?’ But we collectively felt like this movie needed to be Paul’s legacy. Thankfully, I had shot certain stuff with Paul, like his ending action stuff, but there were still many bits missing in the film that needed Paul. I shot only half of what I needed from Paul before his passing, and then we worked with visual effects to salvage what we had.”

On the most emotional day of the production: “The hardest part of that movie was editing the ending of the movie where we say farewell to Paul. It was very tearful. It was hard to watch the ending that we put together and not cry.”