Need for Speed: Behind the Scenes Gallery & Set Visit

I was lucky enough to be invited down to an old airplane hangar in Inglewood to watch early footage from Disney’s upcoming potential car racing blockbuster Need For Speed, and talk with the director, writers and cast afterward. The star of the film is Aaron Paul, and while he’s currently shooting a Biblical film with Ridley Scott (Exodus, co-starring Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton) – this will be audiences’ first glimpse of him after Breaking Bad.

Maybe, like many, I’d just been too immersed in Breaking Bad, too invested in Jesse Pinkman’s potential escape, but watching selections from Need for Speed, it was impossible to not feel like this film is a fantastical pick-up point for where we left Jesse. That speaks to the power of Paul’s five-season stint on the show.

In fact that’s how Paul got the gig. According to writing/producing brothers John and George Gatins: Steven Spielberg (who was involved in the formation of the project at DreamWorks) watched Paul accept a Best Supporting Actor Emmy. After his speech, Spielberg said, “That’s the guy.”

And Spielberg being the booming voice on high, so it came to be.

Need For Speed is an adaptation of the Electronic Arts video game. Which is to say, since there is no story in the game, it’s a film that was to use certain cars licensed for the game. John Gatins notes many have never been used in film before. The game is essentially a driving simulator: locations and cars change. That element will be in the film. As you can see in the trailer, it’s a chase across North America that shifts between urban, wooded and desert terrains.

“My brother [co-writer/producer George Gatins] and I grew up trying to make junkie cars go faster, so we wanted to have a shop, a blue collar element to the story. But mostly,” John Gatins said, “we were like a lot of boys wanting to someday experience driving cars that we’d never be able to. That’s a video game thing. In Need for Speed [the game] you can drive a two million dollar car that you’ve never even seen exist and we wanted to have that excitement in the film version.”

The film wants the audience to feel like they are in fact in the car. Director Scott Waugh has utilized helmet-cam shots and, harkening back to the Steve McQueen Bullitt days, Paul does some of the driving himself.

Waugh, who comes from a family of stuntmen and motorcycle enthusiasts, wanted all the car action to be practical, not aided or generated by a computer later. He noted that because cars exist in our reality, and are not creatures, that sort of computer-generated addition is so much more apparent. The car stunts needed to be performed. As such, it will be real for audiences.

That left a lot of twisted metal across Georgia to Utah.

“We left skidmarks all over these cute little towns,” Paul said with a boyish grin. “It was a huge playground.”

“Early on, Scott said to me, ‘I want to shoot this movie where the actors are actually driving. It will not be done with computers and I want you to actually do this.’ So I went through a crash course. I was doing 360s on a skid pad and it was a total blast,” Paul said, again very excited about the physical immersion of Need for Speed.

The trailer above features a number of impressive stunts. But, what stood out the most for me was the now known Aaron Paul shock face – the trembling remorse we’ve grown to know from Breaking Bad – and seeing that become a story force for a big action movie.

Need for Speed will be pushing for a new racing film franchise, but it will also be positioning Aaron Paul as a potential movie star.

“I never thought of myself as being an action hero, but it’s a blast,” Paul said.

“I wanted to find someone who could be a new Steve McQueen and Aaron has that inherent raw quality,” Waugh told us after we viewed 30 minutes of his film. “[Aaron] is sexy without trying to be sexy, which is rare these days. Dudes love him and women love him and that’s not common.”

What do you think? Does Aaron Paul have franchise movie potential? After viewing the trailer, do you see Jesse Pinkman driving away from New Mexico and settling in small town, opening a garage and having to revenge a friend’s death? Or do just see some badass stunts, sexy flexed motors and a good high testosterone time? Let us know in the comments!

Need for Speed opens on March 14, 2014.