Production Notes Chapter 3 Lucas Black and Nathalie Kelley in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Hello, Ladies: Drifting Hot Wheels in Tokyo Drift The Fast and the Furious allowed film audiences their first entrée into illegal street racing, and 2 Fast 2 Furious gave a whole new glimpse into the world of hot cars and explosive tempers. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift follows suit with its exposé of the bone-jarring sport of drifting.  Drifting originated on the multiple mountains and canyons of rural Japan when young drivers, usually driving late at night, sped along the dark roads with the tail ends of their cars sliding through cliffside turns. Word of the endorphin rush felt by drifting aficionados soon escaped into the local street racing scene and, eventually, the progressive driving style was exported outside the island nation, and seeded throughout the United States and Europe to become the next trend in sport driving. Almost 15 years ago, Keiichi Tsuchiya, the drifto emeritus of Japan's racing community and the supervising technical consultant on The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift was the first to incorporate and perfect drifting into his driving style on Japan's race circuit. Subsequently, he earned back-to-back championship titles and the enduring sobriquet of Drift King. “We have the best tech people working on this,” says Moritz. “Our visual effects guys are the same from the first two films. They all know that we have a code for this series: We don't want the cars to do anything they can't do naturally. The team has just done a terrific job lending the credibility we needed.” Beyond the physics of drifting, it was up to Hayama, whose roots lay deeply imbedded in Japan's street racing culture, to advise the filmmakers on a multitude of arenas of Japanese culture. From car selections to driving slang to music, the racer comments, “I'm a car guy at heart.  It's an exciting time…everything about the drifting culture is still evolving. To me, drifting is taking a car-whether it's a Japanese, American, German sports car or four door-and breaking all the rules about what it's supposed to do.  You're building it so it loses traction on the rear tires, then driving sideways into turns at speeds up to 100 mph, with those tires spinning and smoking… it's incredible.” While driver skill surely plays an important part in drifting, how the car is built is equally as vital to the drift.  The racecar is basically rebuilt to enhance a driver's style and technique, creating a perfect balance between man (or Neela) and machine. When coming into a turn at incredibly high speeds with tires smoking and rpm's revving, it's essential that a drifting car is fine-tuned to its handler, so every specification can be pushed to the limit. When it came to finding the team to translate the mind-blowing moves from the set to the camera, the filmmakers went to internationally-known pro drift drivers Millen, Foust and Samuel “The Crazy Swede” Hubinette, along with top-ranked Japanese drifter Nobushige Kumakubo and Tsuchiya. While filming on the mountains outside of Tokyo, Tsuchiya got behind the wheel of a car to choreograph a stunning cliffside two-car tandem drift sequence with Kumakubo. Filming the drivers in action proved to be more exciting than expected for both Lin and director of photography Stephen Windon. They employed a number of specialized rigs (a mobile camera-rigged Porsche Cayenne and Mini Coopers) but also capitalized on the ability of Millen, Foust and Hubinette to repeatedly hit their marks-while handling over 3,000 lbs. of skidding and screeching metal.  For Lin and Windon, they now had the luxury of designing precise and complicated camera shots. “Drifting is a very cinematic sport,” relates the director.  “It's exciting to do something that's never been done before on film. It's amazing to me how we've found new angles and new camera moves to capture the action. These drivers are so good and so precise, we were able to come up with new ideas on how best to capture it.” “It was fantastic,” recalls Black. “A couple of times I'd sneak off and drive between shots. Just don't tell anybody,” he laughs. It was up to the 50-man crew-all with their own specialties-to maintain every aspect of upkeep for the cars.  From gassing them to replacing a burnt-out clutch on a moment's notice to ensuring that every car would exceed expectations, the crew accomplished whatever Lin and his cadre of drivers envisioned. Accustomed to seeing the pricey modifieds cut graceful, smoky arcs, Hayama cringed at the destruction inflicted upon his racers-particularly for one of the first and more visually challenging drift races held inside a multi-level parking garage structure. He grimaces, “It broke my heart to see those Silvia S-15s (Sean Boswell's introduction to drifting car) crashing, but it's all in the name of great drifting action, right?” The result, however, was an eye-popping race sequence, which unfortunately demolished a total of seven Nissan Silvia's-Hayama's drifting ride of choice. For Dennis McCarthy, who oversaw all aspects of maintaining every car featured in the film, it was necessary to carve up many of the cars to secure intricate camera angles-resulting in in-your-face action for the audience. “We literally cut up 25 cars and destroyed over 80. The cars we cut were either chopped in half, had their roofs taken off or had one of the sides sliced,” says McCarthy. The filmmakers wanted to raise the stakes when it came to their new cast of cars. Not wanting to duplicate the hundreds of dazzling and unique automobiles showcased in The Fast and the Furious and 2 Fast 2 Furious, they utilized the tried-and-true method of an open casting call.  Once again, the event boasted a record turnout of proud owners showcasing the next generation of customized eye candy for the filmmakers (and other race enthusiasts) to admire. Import tuner cars and all cars fast and furious remained in the mix, but the producers now focused their attention on the fantastic rear-wheel modifieds that would initiate newbies to drifting. When all was said and done, close to 250 vehicles were used throughout filming in the U.S. and Japan. A sizable chunk of the film's budget went toward assembling a selection of right-side driving Japanese imports for the film's principal cast to roll with. Modified by some of Japan's top tuners, each of the main vehicles required multiples (from three to eleven per car) to handle the filming needs-plus the punishment that the drivers were meting out on a daily basis. The red Mitsubishi Evolution 9-universally known as the EVO-was converted for drifting, courtesy of Millen and his team of mechanics who helped modify a number of cars to accommodate the needs for the drifting sequences. The car of choice for D.K. and his cohorts (aptly named the Tea-Hairs for their bleached tea-colored hair), the '02 Nissan Fairlady 350Z, channeled the style and substance needed for Tokyo's top thug drifters. Whether decked out in one-of-a-kind graphics-an intricate scarab for D.K.'s gray-on-black model or the tribal design emblazoned on Morimoto's black-on-gold Z-the model surpassed everyone's expectations when it came to performing.  D.K.'s 350Z, decked out with a mind-blowing twin-turbo engine, along with its 12 sisters, took the brunt of the action over the course of filming. From drifting in most of the film's balls-to-the-wall race sequences to speeding full-throttle through the streets of Tokyo, it held up to the rigors of what the filmmakers envisioned. The result was original, highly stylized action. No car defines its owner more than the orange/black '94 VeilSide Mazda RX-7 driven by Han, the drifting patron to the ingénue Sean.  With a customized body kit by VeilSide, a top Japan-based car customizer, the showpiece-along with its five identical clones-offered a much more sophisticated take on the high-performance tuner cars of the film. She also melded perfectly with Han's casually hip persona. Kelley felt her character's car was the perfect complement to her character, a gaijin with a singular style. “Neela's car is an Mazda RX-8, and you definitely wouldn't expect a girl to drive it.  It's a serious car that can do some serious drifting,” the actor reflects. “We didn't want something that was too obvious for her, because a drifter's car is a true reflection of the driver and Neela is not a prissy girl.  She races with the boys and can hold her own in the car and out of it.” Rounding out the supporting roles of the film-comprising a who's who of drifting dream cars-were multiple models of Nissan Silvia S13s and S15s, a Toyota Chaser and a Nissan Skyline R33. Not to be outdone by the modified, super-charged imports, American muscle cars make their presence quite well-known in the film. From the classic beauty, a '69 Mustang-which houses an unorthodox choice of a Skyline GTR engine-to the newest looker on the block, an '05 Dodge Viper, America represents.  Beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder with Sean's two-toned, primer-covered '71 Chevy Monte Carlo, which masks a stunningly powerful engine under its hood.  The Chevy opens the film, and it is the reason he gets the boot from America. Also joining the elite group of cars in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is a German import: Volkswagen's newly released Touran van. Tokyo's underground car scene boasts multiple subcultures, all dedicated to every make and model of car, motorcycle, truck and van. The filmmakers, naturally, wanted to include a part of it in the film. The sleek van, driven by the comic-book-loving hustler Twinkie, was tricked inside and out into a hulking, pimped-out, party wagon with a bass-thumpin' state-of-the-art multimedia system. “This,” the Touran's driver Bow Wow points out, “is not your average van. The sound system alone probably weighs more than some of the cars we're using.  I always have the music blasting in this thing.”  Next Page: Post-Modern Western: Design of the Film