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Remember the epic train heist scene towards the beginning of Fast Five, the fifth installment of the Fast & Furious franchise? While a good portion of the cars were replicas and most of the stunts were rendered in CGI, it still cost Universal Studios a ton of cash to produce. It also involved an ultra-cool car-sized air cannon.
Craig Lieberman, a technical advisor for the first three Fast films, breaks down how the scene was put together in his latest YouTube video above. Universal set aside a massive $125 million budget for Fast Five, and a good portion was put to use right away with the train heist scene. Producers went as far as to build their own set of train tracks, and source their own train cars for the action scenes.
And the cars? Almost all replicas, obviously. The studio didn't want to spend money or break hearts wrecking real vintage metal, so they sourced shells and completed runners from various kit carmakers. The Corvette Roadster—or rather, 12 Corvette Roadsters—were purchased from replica builder Mongoose Motorsports for this sequence alone. Five of them were stunt cars, three of which were shot from the air cannon either off the cliff into the lake or out of the train. The other two uses Volkswagen Beetle chassis, and were modified for off-roading (outside of the train, the entire scene takes place off-road).
The expensive action scenes paid off—Fast Five pulled in $626 million in the box office, according to Lieberman—five times what it cost to make.
Road & Track staff writer with a taste for high-mileage, rusted-out projects and amateur endurance racing.
