'Furious 7' filmmaker James Wan said the hardest part was to edit the last goodbye to Paul Walker at the end
The director James Wan was in a tight spot after Paul Walker's deadly accident during the period of Furious 7 shoot, which led him to even mull shelving the film for good.
During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the filmmaker aired his inner thoughts at that time, "It definitely was the hardest movie of my career. I've done technically challenging movies since then, but Furious 7 just hit on so many different levels, especially an emotional one."
"When the passing of Paul Walker happened, we were like, 'Do we just shut the movie down for good?' But we collectively felt like this movie needed to be Paul's legacy. So we wiped our tears away and sat around in editorial, going, 'All right, how do we do this?'. Wan said.
The director added the film was completed with Walker's brother, "Thankfully, I had shot certain stuff with Paul, like his ending action stuff, but there were still many bits missing in the film that needed Paul. I shot only half of what I needed from Paul before his passing, and then we worked with visual effects to salvage what we had.
Adding, "To complete that movie now, in today's world, with AI technology, it's so simple. But we did not have that kind of technology at our disposal. So we had to really dig deep into our bag of tricks to make it work, and one of them was having Paul's brothers [Caleb and Cody Walker] step in and shoot the other half of the movie. We then pulled different words that Paul had spoken all through the franchise to create sentences for us."
The 46-year-old also admitted the ending of the movie was the most emotional part for him, "The hardest part of that movie was editing the ending of the movie where we say farewell to Paul. It was very tearful. It was hard to watch the ending that we put together and not cry."
