DETROIT — The Motor City has always been a key component of the "Fast and the Furious" movies, as Detroit muscle cars tend to be favored by Vin Diesel's Dom Toretto and his crew.
Friday's "F9" has a little more Detroit muscle than usual — it was penned by Dan Casey, who grew up calling metro Detroit home.
Casey, who was raised in Hamtramck and Royal Oak, began making movies locally before following his dream to Hollywood. His writing work on "10 Cloverfield Lane" — he was ultimately uncredited for his contribution to the 2016 thriller — led to relationships that opened the door to pitch director Justin Lin (returning after helming "Fasts" 3-6) his take on "F9: The Fast Saga," the latest entry in the 20-year-old franchise, which has brought in nearly $6 billion at the global box office.
The "Fast" franchise doesn't operate like normal movies, and Casey knew he was angling to come on board to a massive enterprise with hundreds of moving parts, not a project steered by his own personal vision. Lin liked his approach; they had similar ideas on where to take the movie and Casey got the job.
"I think (Lin) saw me as somebody who would hang on and survive the gauntlet that these movies are," says Casey, on the phone last week from his home in Los Angeles.
That gauntlet brought the 39-year-old Casey around the world; filming took place on multiple continents, from London to Thailand to Tbilisi, Georgia, where the film's climactic chase scene is set.
As a fan of the series — Casey watched and rewatched the "Fast" films in preparation for the job, and says he's particularly fond of 2009's "Fast & Furious," the series' fourth chapter — he found the entire experience thrilling, especially watching the way the actors work together on the set.
"I've seen these guys and I've adored them for however many movies straight," says Casey, who describes the dialogue process on the film as "collaborative." (He and Lin share credit on the final screenplay.) "It's an honor, because you know that you're going to feed them lines and dialogue and ideas, and sometimes they riff with you when you're sitting there on set, and they're taking things and making them their own. It's a wild process."
Casey, who attended Detroit's College for Creative Studies before heading to the American Film Institute, says "F9," which had a reported budget of more than $200 million, had a clear direction and certain checkpoints it had to cross (including a sequence set in outer space), and the experience was like keeping a speeding car in between the lines on the road.
"F9" is a far way away from shooting homemade stop-motion movies with his cousins when he was 9 years old, which is when Casey says he first fell in love with making movies, or his job at Royal Oak's Main Art Theatre, where he worked for several years beginning in 2002 (and where he saw Lin's first movie, "Better Luck Tomorrow"). He later returned to the now-shuttered arthouse theater to premiere his movie "The Death of Michael Smith" in 2007, and he says he was "heartbroken" to learn of the theater's closure earlier this month.
Casey is now focusing on screenwriting — he also wrote 2018's sci-fi adventure "Kin," with Myles Truitt and Zoe Kravitz — and he has a number of projects in the works, including an adaptation of "Battle of the Planets" with the Russo Brothers ("Avengers: Endgame"), an adaptation of the 1963 sci-fi novel "Way Station" with "Cloverfield" director Matt Reeves, a superhero project with DC Films that is still TBA, and an original script titled "The Pinkerton" that he sold to JJ Abrams' Bad Robot Productions.
Eventually, he'd like to get back to his first love, directing. He recently bought back the rights to "Jimmy Six," a script he wrote in 2009, a Michigan-set revenge story that centers around a wayward trip to the Upper Peninsula. Casey hopes "F9" creates a lane for him to get "Six" or one of several other directing projects he has in the works the green light.
"Directing is going to move back to the forefront again," Casey says, "and maybe I can even bring one of these things to Michigan."
Just like in the "Fast" movies, all roads eventually lead home.
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'F9: THE FAST SAGA'
Rated: PG-13 (for sequences of violence and action, and language)
Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes
Playing: In theaters Friday
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