Fast & Furious with Alumnus Barry Hertz

Award-winning Globe and Mail film editor, Barry Hertz (external link)  ‘06, recently released his first-ever book, “Welcome to the Family: The Explosive Story Behind Fast & Furious, the Blockbusters that Supercharged the World (external link) .”

Hertz said he spoke with almost 200 people who worked on the films to understand the franchise’s journey beyond the newspaper clippings and to dig deep into previously untold drama.

His love for Fast and Furious started while working at a movie theatre in high school. When the first movie came out in the summer of 2001, Hertz remembers being an usher or a projectionist and recalled seeing bits and pieces of the film several dozen times as he was working.

“I remember being quite enthralled by it,” he said. “I thought it was really fun and summery and sexy and cool, but with a very good sense of character at its heart.”

Ever since, he has followed the franchise and was always surprised by its evolution.

The creators “stitch(ing) together several different films and canons of storytelling to become a cinematic universe before that was really a thing with Marvel or DC,” Hertz explained.

At the end of 2023, he thought more deeply about the franchise when looking for something new to write about.

“Not only do I appreciate them as a product, but they have something very interesting to say about the evolution of Hollywood,” he said. “You can trace the past 25 years of the film industry by looking at the past 25 years of Fast.”

We sat down with Hertz to learn more about the creative and logistical process behind his first book.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How was the process of editing when you're a film critic, but also a fan of the movies?

It's very tricky. I would say the most fun part of this whole process was the research and interviewing. Then the part every writer I feel dreads is the writing part.

Having to sit down and filter all that information and thousands of hours of interviews and thousands of clippings and research material into a single document is very frustrating.

I have a lot of experience writing and editing on a much more short form level. It was daunting.

I had a great editor, and I was sending in chapters as I was writing them rather than kind of waiting for the whole thing to land. So, that helped. 

It also helped that very early on, I decided to structure this chronologically. One chapter per film with these little mini bonus chapters, as I call them, that were in between, exploring thematic elements that existed for the franchise as a whole.

What did your research process look like?

It started with going through various newspapers and public library databases, and reading everything that was written.

The trade magazines, Variety and Hollywood Reporter, a lot of their stuff from the very beginning, from 2000, 2001, is not online. You have to go through clippings. It’s always a little bit of a thrill to find something that people forgot existed.

Then it was reaching out to as many people involved in the making of these films, to see who would talk. That was a monumental challenge. I know people who work in film today, and I have connections with publicists on the Canadian side of things, but on the American side of things, it's kind of a different story.

Whenever you found an email address, it would be a huge victory. If they replied, that would be another huge victory. If they then replied saying they would agree to talk, then it would be a third victory. It's all these little steps for every single interview.

You try to paint the fullest picture that you can. It was always whenever I would complete an interview and find a nugget of information, or a perspective, or context or detail, it'd be a great feeling.

Was there an interview moment that caught you off guard?

Probably too many to count.

A huge interview I was able to get after a long time of trying was with the director of the first movie, Rob Cohen, who I had been trying to track down. I'd spoken to a couple of people who had worked with him. I guess one of those interviews went well, and that person passed my name along to an email I would have never been able to find through public records.

It was that kind of connection, one interview leading to another leading to another leading to another.

Once I interviewed him, I felt that unlocked a lot of other people. Once you say you've talked to this person, they’re like, ‘okay, this guy's not a crazy person off the street, or there's some credibility there.’

For fans of the franchise, what will they appreciate about your book?

I do go into a lot of granular detail with a lot of this stuff. At the same time, I try to take a more macro view.

For anyone following the franchise, there are a lot of unanswered questions out there right now. For instance, why are Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson so mad at each other? What was the beef there? I feel I uncovered that to a degree.

Director Justin Lin left production of the 10th movie a few days into shooting, which was kind of a big scandal and an unprecedented thing at the time. I get into the real reason behind that. 

What would you like readers to take away from your book?

You can get lost in the story because it's not only about the very specific mechanics of making these films, but it is the way of understanding how films are made within the mainstream Hollywood system for the past quarter century. 

The [franchise] was based on an article in a Vibe magazine (external link)  feature from 1998, but almost nobody remembers that today.

So, as studios became more geared toward known properties, franchises like “Star Wars” or comic books, anything based on something with a following, you can see how Hollywood has shifted, how audience sensibilities have shifted, how financing models have shifted.

I feel it paints a portrait of that industry and culture at large, while through the prism of some really fun movies.