‘Would I be more valuable dead?’

Speaking to news.com.au over the weekend, Vin Diesel was clearly conflicted about the decision to continue filming Fast and Furious 7 after Walker died in a car accident, by including him with the use of CGI and his lookalike brothers.

“The debate is pixels versus people,” an emotional Diesel said.

“It is so f**king profound. Nobody has any idea where it’s going to go and because of my unique and horrible experience, losing a best friend, I have this strange insight on what the future will be, and how dangerous a conversation that is.

“Right after the tragedy, we stopped shooting for five months. It was a very, very, very dark time for me.”

It seems that watching his friend on screen, resurrected thanks to technological trickery, only added to the darkness.

“I was seeing something that no actor in Hollywood that you have ever talked to has seen or even thought about, let alone be forced to consider.”

Clearly, Diesel is still grieving on many levels. He can barely keep still while discussing such a difficult subject, and gets up and paces around the room.

“I already gave power to pixels versus people, just by completing Fast 7, right? We shot a third of it without the person, with only the pixels. And once you do that, where does it end?” he says, raising his voice.

“How bad is it going to get? Would a corporation rather have me dead? At what point would I be more valuable dead? This is scary s**t!

“At the time, I fought it and fought it and fought it, and there was a [Universal Studios] executive who said to me, ‘Some day in the future, in the Fast universe, the audience is going to want to see Brian O’Connor come back.’ He said that, based on the evidence, it could be done because we finished Fast 7. And that made me feel weird.” He pauses.
“So now I am compliant by having finished the movie, but I was in a situation where I didn’t know what to do. I could have not finished Fast 7 and given Universal back the insurance money but then there would be no Furious 7 and then the fans wouldn’t get their last beautiful Furious 7 movie: A movie that celebrates the brotherhood of our millennium.” He hesitates again, clearly conflicted.

“But in doing so, I also proved that you don’t need Vin Diesel in the flesh. It’s a very, very freaky thing.
“It’s a heavy topic and you are starting to make me sad again, not intentionally I know, but it’s a heavy one. Pixels versus people. Nobody else has this story! No one else has ever said it although artificial intelligence is close to it. You just got the real s**t that only somebody in my position, that is of flesh and bone, could see coming and could be sensitive to,” he says.
“This is a dangerous conversation and it is something that I was adamant against. But what about the potential consequences of something like that?”

As unsure as he was about the ethics of the situation in employing technology to replace his friend in Fast and Furious 7, what made him finally consent?

“If I had walked off Furious 7, or decided not to come back, you would have never known it was pixels versus people. It would have just been written, ‘Vin thinks he’s too good for Furious 7 and doesn’t want to finish it,’ and no one would have really known.”

Diesel is currently promoting his upcoming war movie, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk in which he stars opposite Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedland and newcomer Joe Alwyn.

He plays a heroic sergeant with a heart of gold, and inevitably, perhaps, the subject of heroes brings him right back to Paul Walker.

“He was a hero. He was a guy that came to Haiti with me after the earthquake. I called everyone in Hollywood to come with me and the only person that came was Paul Walker. He went to an orphanage the next day. To me, there was something beautifully heroic about that.”