16. Paul Walker And Matt Schulze's Fight Was Improvised
The likes of Dragon: The Bruce Lee story obviously involved a lot of carefully choreographed fight scenes, and that was an approach director Rob Cohen carried over to The Fast And The Furious. For the most part all the action takes place in cars (obviously), but there are a couple of fist fights in the film including one which went off-script when Vin Diesel actually broke a stuntman's nose. Woops. The other major fight scene in the film comes between Paul Walker's undercover cop Brian O'Conner and Matt Schulze's Vince, a member of Dominic Torreto's crew. The two come to blows after Brian flirts with Mia, Dominic's sister, and Vince feels like he has to defend her and his boss's honour. Which is all part of the plan. And in fact Walker and Schulaze had carefully choreographed the fight scene outside the grocery store, promising to produce another of those almost balletic scraps that Cohen featured in his Bruce Lee film. When it came down to it, though, they felt that it didn't feel right for a scrappy street fight that was to be quickly broken up, so they just improvised. So that scene is essentially the two actors having an actual fight.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
