Terry Leonard has been doing stunt work since 1963 and it showed as he limped around the set of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. The director of the film's second unit, the crew responsible for shooting the stunts and automotive action, is a big man and obviously still a strong one, but there are places a guy in his 60s would rather have been on this cold February night.
Leonard was standing in the derelict parking garage behind Southern California's long-shuttered Hawthorne Plaza Mall a few miles from Los Angeles International Airport. His job, as it had been for dozens of nights before, was to capture the automotive action that's the lifeblood of any movie carrying the Fast and Furious brand name.
After a few takes of a single-car, impact-free stunt, Leonard made his way over to the cluster of video monitors that will display what his movie cameras had seen, watched the playback, rubbed one of his big hands through his long gray hair, then shoved it into his down jacket and turned around. On his face was a yard-wide grin.
"I think we're at a cutting edge," he said. "We're going, I think, with this show, to display a whole new way of driving in the film industry." An amazing statement from someone who wasn't only the stunt coordinator and second unit director on 2 Fast 2 Furious in 2003 but held the same jobs on classics like 1979's Apocalypse Now and 1993's The Fugitive. No one has seen more movie stunts than Terry Leonard, and he's never seen stunts — namely drifting — like those in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
And the person dropping his jaw was Rhys Millen.
Real drifting in a fake Tokyo
A native of New Zealand, Rhys is the son of Rod Millen, whose rallying, racing and tuning exploits are the stuff of well-documented legend. At 33, Rhys is a veteran not only of North American and Kiwi rallying but the reigning Formula D drift series champion. And for the past 13 years, besides running his own teams, shop and aftermarket parts operation, he's been doing precision driving for commercials. He made his motion picture debut last year as the primary stunt driver of the General Lee 1969 Dodge Charger in The Dukes of Hazzard and quickly became Hollywood's go-to guy for drifting. He was hired for The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift even before Terry Leonard.
"[The producers] told me that they'd hired some professional drift drivers," recalled Leonard. "I said, 'Good…if they can get it done, that's fine.' Of course, then I found out who Rhys and Tanner and the rest of the guys are and, man, we got the best in the world, you know…. When I first started, when I saw what we're trying to accomplish I thought it would get pretty difficult. But these guys have made it so much easier because they're so precise and so good. If we didn't have these guys and if they weren't at this level of expertise, we'd be smacking these cars up right and left because they're only missing walls by 6 inches."
Coming into the film, Leonard expected many stunts would have to be done with mechanical contraptions substituting for driving talent. That included the deed done that night in Hawthorne-pretending-to-be-Tokyo: running a 350Z sideways up a spiral ramp not quite as wide as that Nissan was long.
"Originally they were going to tow it up the ramp," explains Millen. "But I measured out the car and estimated the slip angle and the speed, and saw that I'd have 6 or 7 inches on either side. It was just prior knowledge of speed slip angles and proximity. So I did it."
Millen makes it sound easy, but watching him was mind-boggling. Starting on the second floor a few yards behind the ramp's lip he'd have the engine screaming before dumping the clutch, and the gray Z was already sideways as it bottomed on the thin metal drain where the ramp and garage deck abut. A few loud moments later the Nissan would practically leap onto the top floor, Millen would hit the brakes and the turbos could be heard spooling down through their waste gates. Several cameras recorded the action from different angles.
Millen did this at least a dozen times while wearing a black wig instead of a helmet, and every time he got out of the car it looked as if his heart rate hadn't nudged up. He never put nose or tail into either wall and it seemed that the car was perfectly equidistant from them every run. It was a humility check for those of us who consider ourselves good drivers but know we couldn't do that without a talent transplant.
It takes a village of drifters
But while that spiral climb was an impressive solo by Millen and may wind up as Tokyo Drift's signature stunt, most drifting involved more than one car at a time. To accomplish that, Millen and Leonard recruited a squadron of top drifters, including 2004 Formula D champ Samuel Hubinette, Tanner Foust (who worked with Millen on Dukes), Rich Rutherford, Alex Pfeiffer, Calvin Wan and, for one night, even Rhys' father Rod.
"If you have to drift one car alone on a course, you can do anything," explained Rhys Millen. "But as soon as you pair up cars, now you have to drive off that other car. And it exposes the weaknesses of a particular vehicle. The difference between the Mustang and the 350Z was quite a lot."
The climactic drift battle is between the hero Sean Boswell in a 1967 Mustang fitted with a Nissan Skyline engine in the story — but in reality with a big V8 for stunts — and the "Drift King" in a twin-turbocharged Nissan 350Z along a narrow mountain road with precipitous, digitally enhanced drops at every turn. Even though the various Mustangs were modified to drift effectively along the roads of Los Angeles' Griffith Park where much of the scene was shot, it's virtually impossible for a big, nearly four-decade-old car's leaf-sprung, solid-rear-axle chassis to keep up with a smaller, more sophisticated, all-independently suspended Nissan — if both cars are being driven to the edge of their potential. So it was incumbent upon Foust, doubling for the Drift King in the 350Z, to keep his machine reined in enough to allow Millen in the Mustang to keep up in order to sell the story. "That's not to say the Mustang was a poor car," said Millen. "But it was a very tricky car to tandem drift."
Millen claims the drifting team "never destroyed a vehicle outside of what we'd been asked to do." That's amazing considering the challenge. But it's also true that the mass destruction was left to experienced Hollywood stuntmen — guys who know how to destroy machinery.
Mayhem beyond drifting
"We rolled a Monte Carlo with a cannon and that's real serious stuff," said Leonard. "And we wrecked some cars down on Wilshire Boulevard where the timing had to be good. My son Malosi drove the Mercedes-Benz into Han's car and it flips over, blows up and kills Han."
And for this film, where much of the action is done at high speed and many cars are relatively small, there were a lot of dangers for everyone involved. "It's like going from a motorcycle to a Mack truck," said Leonard. "What's more dangerous to wreck? A Mack truck or a motorcycle? Well, same thing with automobiles. The smaller they are, the more you're exposed to the wreck."
Don't expect the stuntmen to take the intrusion of all those drifters into their world without mounting a counterattack. "The stunt guys are just starting to practice this art," Leonard asserted. "And I look at drifting a little like horsebacking. You can't jump on a horse overnight and know how to do it. And you can't jump into a drift car or any car and just do it. But believe me, the stunt guys will learn it in a hurry."
Leonard was standing in the derelict parking garage behind Southern California's long-shuttered Hawthorne Plaza Mall a few miles from Los Angeles International Airport. His job, as it had been for dozens of nights before, was to capture the automotive action that's the lifeblood of any movie carrying the Fast and Furious brand name.
After a few takes of a single-car, impact-free stunt, Leonard made his way over to the cluster of video monitors that will display what his movie cameras had seen, watched the playback, rubbed one of his big hands through his long gray hair, then shoved it into his down jacket and turned around. On his face was a yard-wide grin.
"I think we're at a cutting edge," he said. "We're going, I think, with this show, to display a whole new way of driving in the film industry." An amazing statement from someone who wasn't only the stunt coordinator and second unit director on 2 Fast 2 Furious in 2003 but held the same jobs on classics like 1979's Apocalypse Now and 1993's The Fugitive. No one has seen more movie stunts than Terry Leonard, and he's never seen stunts — namely drifting — like those in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
And the person dropping his jaw was Rhys Millen.
Real drifting in a fake Tokyo
A native of New Zealand, Rhys is the son of Rod Millen, whose rallying, racing and tuning exploits are the stuff of well-documented legend. At 33, Rhys is a veteran not only of North American and Kiwi rallying but the reigning Formula D drift series champion. And for the past 13 years, besides running his own teams, shop and aftermarket parts operation, he's been doing precision driving for commercials. He made his motion picture debut last year as the primary stunt driver of the General Lee 1969 Dodge Charger in The Dukes of Hazzard and quickly became Hollywood's go-to guy for drifting. He was hired for The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift even before Terry Leonard.
"[The producers] told me that they'd hired some professional drift drivers," recalled Leonard. "I said, 'Good…if they can get it done, that's fine.' Of course, then I found out who Rhys and Tanner and the rest of the guys are and, man, we got the best in the world, you know…. When I first started, when I saw what we're trying to accomplish I thought it would get pretty difficult. But these guys have made it so much easier because they're so precise and so good. If we didn't have these guys and if they weren't at this level of expertise, we'd be smacking these cars up right and left because they're only missing walls by 6 inches."
Coming into the film, Leonard expected many stunts would have to be done with mechanical contraptions substituting for driving talent. That included the deed done that night in Hawthorne-pretending-to-be-Tokyo: running a 350Z sideways up a spiral ramp not quite as wide as that Nissan was long.
"Originally they were going to tow it up the ramp," explains Millen. "But I measured out the car and estimated the slip angle and the speed, and saw that I'd have 6 or 7 inches on either side. It was just prior knowledge of speed slip angles and proximity. So I did it."
Millen makes it sound easy, but watching him was mind-boggling. Starting on the second floor a few yards behind the ramp's lip he'd have the engine screaming before dumping the clutch, and the gray Z was already sideways as it bottomed on the thin metal drain where the ramp and garage deck abut. A few loud moments later the Nissan would practically leap onto the top floor, Millen would hit the brakes and the turbos could be heard spooling down through their waste gates. Several cameras recorded the action from different angles.
Millen did this at least a dozen times while wearing a black wig instead of a helmet, and every time he got out of the car it looked as if his heart rate hadn't nudged up. He never put nose or tail into either wall and it seemed that the car was perfectly equidistant from them every run. It was a humility check for those of us who consider ourselves good drivers but know we couldn't do that without a talent transplant.
It takes a village of drifters
But while that spiral climb was an impressive solo by Millen and may wind up as Tokyo Drift's signature stunt, most drifting involved more than one car at a time. To accomplish that, Millen and Leonard recruited a squadron of top drifters, including 2004 Formula D champ Samuel Hubinette, Tanner Foust (who worked with Millen on Dukes), Rich Rutherford, Alex Pfeiffer, Calvin Wan and, for one night, even Rhys' father Rod.
"If you have to drift one car alone on a course, you can do anything," explained Rhys Millen. "But as soon as you pair up cars, now you have to drive off that other car. And it exposes the weaknesses of a particular vehicle. The difference between the Mustang and the 350Z was quite a lot."
The climactic drift battle is between the hero Sean Boswell in a 1967 Mustang fitted with a Nissan Skyline engine in the story — but in reality with a big V8 for stunts — and the "Drift King" in a twin-turbocharged Nissan 350Z along a narrow mountain road with precipitous, digitally enhanced drops at every turn. Even though the various Mustangs were modified to drift effectively along the roads of Los Angeles' Griffith Park where much of the scene was shot, it's virtually impossible for a big, nearly four-decade-old car's leaf-sprung, solid-rear-axle chassis to keep up with a smaller, more sophisticated, all-independently suspended Nissan — if both cars are being driven to the edge of their potential. So it was incumbent upon Foust, doubling for the Drift King in the 350Z, to keep his machine reined in enough to allow Millen in the Mustang to keep up in order to sell the story. "That's not to say the Mustang was a poor car," said Millen. "But it was a very tricky car to tandem drift."
Millen claims the drifting team "never destroyed a vehicle outside of what we'd been asked to do." That's amazing considering the challenge. But it's also true that the mass destruction was left to experienced Hollywood stuntmen — guys who know how to destroy machinery.
Mayhem beyond drifting
"We rolled a Monte Carlo with a cannon and that's real serious stuff," said Leonard. "And we wrecked some cars down on Wilshire Boulevard where the timing had to be good. My son Malosi drove the Mercedes-Benz into Han's car and it flips over, blows up and kills Han."
And for this film, where much of the action is done at high speed and many cars are relatively small, there were a lot of dangers for everyone involved. "It's like going from a motorcycle to a Mack truck," said Leonard. "What's more dangerous to wreck? A Mack truck or a motorcycle? Well, same thing with automobiles. The smaller they are, the more you're exposed to the wreck."
Don't expect the stuntmen to take the intrusion of all those drifters into their world without mounting a counterattack. "The stunt guys are just starting to practice this art," Leonard asserted. "And I look at drifting a little like horsebacking. You can't jump on a horse overnight and know how to do it. And you can't jump into a drift car or any car and just do it. But believe me, the stunt guys will learn it in a hurry."
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