How Fast & Furious 7 Is Shooting the Late Paul Walker's Role
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- May 27, 2014
By Danny F. Santos (doddleNEWS)
In November, Fast & Furious 7 lost one of its lead actors to a tragic and fatal car crash. Paul Walker’s untimely death put the production of the film on a four month hiatus until the creative team could figure out how to continue with the film.
A source with ties to the production has since said the screenplay hasn’t changed much at all. Paul Walker’s role will be played by his two younger brothers and a third actor. 36-year-old Caleb Walker’s mannerisms and body size are close enough to Paul while the youngest brother, Cody Walker, has Paul’s eyes. The as of yet unidentified actor’s job is to put on a similar performance as Paul Walker.
To pull this all together, Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital has been contracted to oversee the face replacement. Weta has brought in three cameras in addition to the four main unit cameras to capture the stand ins for the post effects. On top of that, every time Paul Walker is needed in a scene it has to be shot three times — one for each stand in.
If you think this sounds expensive, it is. The insurance coverage for the film is said to be approximately $50 million. It’s not just the face replacement, but screenwriter Chris Morgan needed to be brought back for rewrites, and all the stars needed to be paid more in order to hold them past the original wrap date. Of course, scrapping the film and starting all over would have been even more costly.
The last way director James Wan will bring Walker back to life for one more Fast & Furious film is by using unused footage from the past two films. Using some editing tricks, you can use what Walker said in those scenes and write around the dialogue. Mise-en-sc?ne 101!
Wan and the producers have stated that the intention is to retire Paul Walker’s character and not to kill him off. The film has become a tribute to the actor but Universal is already hard at work on an eighth installment of the Fast & Furious franchise. How the series will fare with Walker gone remains to be seen, but each successive film does bigger business at the box office, so while they may be retiring the character Brian O’Conner, you can expect more films in the future.
Fast & Furious 7 will hit movie theaters April 10, 2015, about a year after its planned release.
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