Hollywood tough guys have struck deals with film producers to ensure they do not lose on-screen fights with their co-stars, it was revealed today.
Vin Diesel, Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson have elaborate ways of making sure they look good when they come to blows in the Fast and the Furious films, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Some sequences are given a totally different ending just so the leading men feel like they have not lost.
According to the Journal, Diesel is so concerned about looking weak that his younger sister polices his fight scenes.
Johnson is said to enlist producers, editors and fight coordinators to make sure he does not come out looking bad.
And Statham is even reported to have managed to negotiate an agreement with the studio that limits how badly he can be beaten up on screen.
According to Michael Fottrell, a producer on five of the “Fast & Furious” films, the fights are carefully choreographed so that nobody comes out looking like a loser.
Asked if vanity played a role in the decision he said: “No comment...of course it does!”
No point is too small to quibble for the muscle-bound hulks on screen, the Journal reported, citing producers who worked on the films in question.
During the filming of “The Fate of the Furious” there was one scene that required Johnson to by lying on the floor at Diesel’s feet. But Johnson insisted he should be standing up instead.
Diesel’s sister gives her opinion about edits, rehearsals and shots and once said of her brother during a practice fight: “He’s falling down there. Is he going to get his licks back in?”
In other cases producers have gone to extraordinary lengths to assuage the egos of their alpha male stars including inventing scenarios so that the fights are a draw.
In “Furious 7” Statham and Diesel are stopped from tearing each other apart when a helicopter fires a missile at the car park they are standing on that splits the ground beneath them.
In “The Fate of the Furious” a prison riot breaks out and distracts them.
Sometimes the competition between male stars spills off screen such as in 2016 when Johnson, a former wrestler, wrote on Instagram that some of his co-stars were “candy a****”.
He later said he was referring to Diesel who commented in an interview, saying: “It’s not always easy being an alpha. And it’s two alphas.”
A Universal Pictures spokesman said that fights ensure “every character has their moment, and that all are seen as formidable opponents”.
“Each ‘Fast’ character is a hero to someone watching, and we never forget that,” he added.
The three stars have so far declined to comment.
