While the feud between Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson has reportedly been put in the past, the battle between the two that culminated during the production of The Fate of the Furious is well known at this point. It’s been confirmed that scenes in that movie that include both Johnson and Diesel were shot separately because the two avoided being on set together. However, it turns out a shot from back in Fast & Furious 6 that many fans believed had been composited together actually wasn’t.
Justin Lin, who directed several Fast & Furious movies, recently appeared on Happy Sad Confused and the topic of the infamous scene came up. It’s a sequence at the end of the movie where Johnson’s Luke Hobbs and Diesel’s Dominic Toretto are talking in front of the barn/garage at Dom’s house. The two are talking to each other, but don’t appear to be looking at each other, giving the impression to many that perhaps the scene was shot with each actor separately, and then cut together. But Lin says that’s not the case. Both actors were there, and the weird framing comes from the fact the ground wasn’t even. He explained…
Oh, at the garage? They were there. I’m telling you, it’s the craziest thing. That house is actually divided into four properties. So when they did the first Fast and Furious, they had to get all four properties to give them permission. Then they built the barn. The barn’s actually not real. And we had to rebuild that for [Fast 6]. I got there and there were four different properties and nothing was even. It was playing with my head. So when Vin was standing there, it was kind of this forced perspective that was happening. It was actually because, if you look at the ground, it was four different properties intersecting.
This may blow the minds of fans who believed that the pair were never on set together. It wouldn’t be the first time that camera tricks were used to put two people in a shot that never filmed together. And knowing what we know now, it would have made sense if the actors had tried to avoid each other. It turns out Justin Lin didn’t even realize that the shot was going to look the way it did until he sat down in the editing room. He continued…
I was like why does Vin’s head look so much smaller? At that lens, everything was distorting. I thought I was going crazy but then I realized, ‘Oh, it’s the ground.
Whenever the “beef” between Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel started, it does appear to be over now. Johnson is returning to the Fast & Furious franchise, we saw him in the Fast X mid-credits scene, for a new spinoff movie that will bridge Fast X with its planned conclusion. Whether we’ll actually see the pair in a shot together in an upcoming movie, we still don’t know. But hopefully, if it happens it will be on something flat.