Articles/Interviews: EW

 In "The Fast and the Furious," the illegal sport of street racing gets a glossy big screen paint job. Featuring hyper-accelerated special effects and a hipper-than-thou cast, including "Pitch Black"'s Vin Diesel and "Girlfight"'s Michelle Rodriguez, "Fast" gives teen audiences a need for speed. But it didn't do the trick for some of the stars: Several got nervous when it came time to get behind the wheel. "I don't like risking my life that much," says Jordana Brewster ("The Faculty"), who reluctantly attended racing school just one day after getting her driver's license. "My fastest street speed is 65 miles per hour." Even tough guy Diesel, who performed several of his own stunts, admitted, "I'm a New Yorker, and I don't think you can live in New York and be a car guy."
     Even the cast's most enthusiastic speed demons, Rodriguez and Paul Walker ("The Skulls"), had to leave the majority of their stunts to professionals. "Without the stunt people, we wouldn't have a movie," Rodriguez grumbles. "I was kind of disappointed. I only had one day of racing school. It was sickening in this beautiful way. It pissed me off I wasn't allowed to go more than 80 miles per hour. I can do that on the freeway, you know?"
     More disappointing were the actors' so-called high-speed chases, which clocked in well under the speed limit. "The tone I set was, 'We're not hot-dogging here,'" says director Rob Cohen ("Dragonheart," "The Rat Pack"), who took the added precaution of gathering the cast and crew in a silent prayer before filming began. "I told them, 'Sometimes you're going to be in front of green screen and going no miles an hour. And then you still might feel stupid going 50 miles per hour, but when the film comes out, it'll look like light speed."
     Ultimately Walker, who owned two race cars prior to joining the cast and imported another (a rare Japanese manufactured Nissan Skyline R33, which is also featured in the film) after production wrapped, was allowed to risk his neck. "I did 80 miles per hour standing on the door of a Supra going down the highway. That was intense," he says. But Cohen says there was only one injury during shooting, when a stuntman broke his leg.

     Though teens who are inspired to put pedal to the medal after seeing the movie could hurt more than their feelings, Cohen argues that the film should deter all but the dimmest daredevils. "Nobody cake-walks away from anything in this film," he says. "If you're stupid enough to try to outrun a train, you see what can happen in this film. There's a fairly spectacular crash; I don't think anyone would want to try to live through that." Cohen, who visited several illegal races in Southern California to do research, says the movie is merely reflecting a trend, not starting one. More than 1,500 Los Angeles area racers showed up in tricked-out Hondas and Nissans to be extras in the film. "Kids are already doing this all over this country, and banning the street racing phenomenon is akin to prohibition," says Cohen. "If you tell kids no, they want to do it twice as hard."