How The Fate of the Furious’ Raining Cars Stunt Was Pulled Off

This is how the “Raining Cars” stunt in The Fate of the Furious was shot. The Fast & The Furious franchise is no stranger to crazy car stunts. Ever since Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) first met, every new installment has only gotten more and more outrageous. From a simple double race against a speeding train up to a trip to space, Dom and his friends have continuously raised the bar inside the story and behind the cameras. The “Raining Cars” AKA “Zombie Cars” sequence in The Fate of the Furious may not be as flashy as Fast Five‘s sequence where the team drags huge safe vault across Rio de Janeiro or Furious 7‘s sequence where Dom and Brian drive across skyscrapers, but it certainly required lots of real-life mayhem.

After defeating Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) in Furious 7 and giving his last goodbye to Brian, Dom celebrates his honeymoon with Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) in Havana. As expected, their peace doesn’t last long when the cyberterrorist Cipher (Charlize Theron) shows up to manipulate Dom into betraying his team in order to launch a worldwide nuclear war. She helps Dom retrieve the nuclear launch codes in New York by hacking into all the self-driving cars in the city and remotely driving them toward the motorcade of the Russian Minister of Defense. Her plan works in the most spectacular fashion: an army of cars start raining from a parking garage on top of the minister’s convoy.

The sequence looks incredibly realistic from every single one of its many angles – and that’s because it is real. The Fast & Furious series has destroyed lots of cars over its history and in this case, the production crew gathered several real cars – many of them high-end models – and carefully arranged them near the windows of various floors of a parking garage. Each car was placed on a ramp and tied to a weight drop that was set up to release the car with a slight delay in relation to the rest. They then proceeded to release all the weight drops, causing the cars to drop off the edge and onto the motorcade below. Every falling car was aimed at a particular target on the ground and was carefully timed to drop in a sequence that prevented it from obscuring the others. Some of them were dropped from a crane that stood way higher than the parking garage. The franchise has no issues using CG for scenes – and it was notably used for completing Paul Walker’s scenes in Furious 7 – but it was kept to a minimum here. Coupled with pyrotechnics and several extras running around the area, the ensuing explosion didn’t need much digital help to become one of the most visually stunning sequences in the franchise.

As if it weren’t enough, Director F. Gary Gray, stunt coordinator Andy Gill, and special effects supervisor J.D. Schwalm shot a pile of cars on the street to enhance the chaos (it was also carefully arranged for safety purposes, of course). Since they had to make the stunt worth the risk, they installed multiple cameras on strategic locations to get as much coverage as possible. Some of them were mounted on the cars, some of them were suspended on special wires that were hanging from the building, at least one of them was attached on a flying drone, and others were on the ground near the site of the explosions.

The most breathtaking part of The Fate of the Furious included a race against a nuclear submarine in a frozen Russian lake. Yet, the movie’s commitment to realism in the “Zombie Cars” sequence makes a rain of vehicles a more engaging sight to behold. The franchise is often criticized for jumping the shark with every new installment – hacking self-driving cars is not that easy, anyway – but nobody can deny the quality of the production or the commitment behind the scenes of all the Fast and Furious series’ craziest stunts.

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