Dennis McCarthy Loved 2 Dodge Chargers Towing Massive Safe in ‘Fast Five’

Dennis McCarthy has maybe the best job in the history of work. He gets to build and watch get blown up hundreds of cool cars as the lead car supervisor for the Fast & Furious franchise, now in its tenth installment as Fast X opens May 19.

He actually did some work on 2Fast 2Furious, toward the end of production of that first sequel, then came on full-time with Tokyo Drift, the third Fast movie made. He has worked on every one since, swapping in more LS engines in more cars than anyone since maybe Smokey Yunick. And he is having a blast doing it.

We got to talk to him when all the work on Fast X was done, but even then he was busy. Word is there’s another Fast movie coming after this. Maybe even another one after that, though no one seems to know for sure.

Autoweek: What cars do we see in the movie?

Dennis McCarthy: So you open up in this movie with a Dodge Charger Hellcat with Dom driving. Letty’s on a very highly modified Honda CRF 250R. We have Han in an Alfa Romeo 1600 GV. We have Roman in a Lamborghini Gallardo. We have Dante (Jason Momoa) on a Harley-Davidson Pan America—we did a lot of modifications, really stripped it down into the bare necessities. There’s some military stuff, some H2 Hummers that we’ve tried to modify to look more like something you haven’t seen before. It’s just a good platform for building stuff like that.

Moving on into Act II, you’re introduced into Dom’s ‘70 Charger. I tried to back it up a little bit, you know, a little more retro, not as crazy as Fast 9 or Fast 8 or Fast 7. But still, more in tune with the first movie, heavily modified and much better. He goes up against Dante in what is one of my favorite drag races from the franchise in a while—a four-car drag race with the Jason Momoa character, who was Dante, and he’s in a ‘66 Impala. That car is a big-tire drag car, 540-inch motor, all the good stuff. Also, in this race there’s a Porsche (997 911 GT3 RS) and a (Nissan) 240 Z. So that’s a pretty cool segment of the movie. The whole variety of cars is what makes it great.

AW: You covered all the bases there. Anybody who likes any particular kind of car is going to see something they like in this movie.

DM: That’s the goal. I tried to get everybody’s favorite in there one way or the other. Moving into Act III, Dante reappears in a ‘66 Ford Fairlane, another cool car. Jason Momoa was very involved in the styling, the colors, and everything else, which always makes it fun. That’s kind of the same with Vin—Vin always wants to know what he’s going to be driving. Dom’s Charger also returns for Act III. The other car that is introduced in Act III is a ‘67 El Camino driven by Dom’s brother Jacob (John Cena). He talks about how it’s heavily accessorized—the car’s got cannons everywhere.

AW: The Dodge Charger in the movie goes off a bridge, smashes into a wall, crashes down onto cement, and Dom continues driving it? How is that possible?

DM: They are the most durable cars in the world. They almost have, like, this superpower. I think once Vince gets behind the wheel, they become one with the car and they’re just ready for anything. So yeah, I would say in the history of car movies the Dodge Charger will go down as the most durable car ever.

AW: The budget for Fast X, I saw one reference at $340 million. The very first Fast & Furious movie had a $2 million budget for cars. Can you give us a ballpark figure for how much of this film’s budget was yours to play with?

DM: It’s really a very difficult question because there’s so many other elements that go into that. For instance, shipping, you know, we’ve put probably 60 cars on planes to get to different countries. So it’s easier for me to try to itemize just one car, like a ‘70 Dodge Charger that we build, if I just go material-only is probably $60,000. Labor is hard to judge too, because I’ve got guys working on cars, they might work on this car for three hours, that car for two hours. And the reason I have a lot of practice answering this question is because accounting departments asked me what’s invested in that car, but it’s just, every minute of every day is spent building cars. It’s not like I put four guys on one car.

AW: Could you make a ballpark guess for how big your budget was for cars in this movie.

DM: I don’t know, it’s probably $4 or $5 million for cars that were just built from scratch, cars that we built and modified.

AW: Is there typically one hero car and then from that hero car there’s a number of replica cars made that you can crash and blow up and chop up and do different things to? Is that how it is?

DM: It is. One thing I will say is that in Fast & Furious movies, it’s just a little bit different. Because we will usually start building cars so early, that maybe the script is not 100% settled. So we’ll build all the cars the same. For instance, for one ‘70 Charger we built 10 ‘70 Chargers with the same chassis, same Brembo brakes, same 525-horsepower LS motor, all the same parts and pieces, identical cars. Then later on, when we start really figuring out what we’re going to do, yeah, then I might build a shell car. Or I might buy a Charger and just leave a 318 motor because I only had to drive it off a cliff or whatever it is.

But Fast and Furious, more than any other franchise in the world, they’re all hero cars. And the good thing about our franchise is a hero car looks like a stunt car. So it’s not like we have to hide the rollcage. The cars have rollcage, harnesses, fuel cells—that’s how they are on screen.

AW: Do the actors get to choose their cars? Do you read the script and say, you know, this guy would be perfect for this car?

DM: I will get the script, I’ll read it, and I will try to put what I feel is the best car for the character, for the environment, into that place. I’ll work back and forth with the writer. This usually happens before production starts. Then as actors come along, they might have some requests, some input. At the end of the day, the production designer has to be happy—the director, obviously, has to be happy, Universal Studios needs to be happy. You can imagine that to try to make everybody happy isn’t always the easiest thing in the world. But I think we come really close and I feel that I’ve been doing this franchise for so long that I have a sense of what car the character would drive. If you walked into my shop it would be obvious, ‘Oh, that’s got to be Roman’s car. That’s Letty's car,’ and so forth.