20 things you probably didn't know about 'The Fast and the Furious' franchise

"At the time, it wasn't called 'Fast and Furious.' It was called 'Redline' and it was pitched as a movie about street racing," Jordana Brewster, who played Mia Toretto in the first film and several sequels, recently recalled to Insider while discussing a partnership with Clearblue.

"The Fast and the Furious" producer Neal H. Moritz told Entertainment Weekly some of the other early titles included "Race Wars," "Street Wars," and "Racer X."

"They were all cheesy," Moritz said. "I went to watch a documentary on [producer] Roger Corman, who I've known since I was a kid, and there was a little section on a movie he'd made called 'The Fast and the Furious.' I thought, 'That's the title of this movie!'"

Moritz said Universal made a deal with Corman to give him the use of some stock footage in exchange for the rights to the title.

"The studio said, 'If you get Timothy Olyphant to play the role of Dominic Toretto, the movie's greenlit.' We went to Tim and he passed, and we wondered if we were going to get to make it," Moritz told EW.

"The Fast and the Furious" was inspired by Kenneth Li's 1998 article in Vibe titled, "Racer X," about a Dominican street racer, Rafael Estevez, who started drag racing.

Li told EW he thought the call from Universal about making it a movie "was a prank."

On the 2001 film's special features, stunt coordinator Mic Rodgers said both Brewster and Rodriguez didn't have licenses before filming.

"I didn't drive," Brewster told Insider.

The actress recalled director Rob Cohen instructing her to "watch a bunch of Anna Magnani movies."

"I was this preppy Upper East Side girl. Cohen was like, you need to drop all of that and you need to just be in your body. I had to do a lot of research," she told Insider.

Brewster told VH1 Celebrity in 2013 she didn't have a license before the original film because she took the subway, taxis, or the bus everywhere.

"If I didn't get my license, I wasn't going to be able to get insured for the movie," Brewster said. "Within a week of taking my driving test, we were flown to Las Vegas for this special driving class. So I had to pass or I wouldn't have been in the movie."

An over two-minute alternate ending to the 2001 film appears as a bonus feature on the home release's extras.

In the scene, Brian quits being a cop and gets dropped off at the Toretto household by his former boss to patch things up with Mia. The Toretto house is for sale as Mia's seen packing up the garage, her trust in Brian visibly shaken.

Brian tells Mia, "I want another chance, with you."

"It's not gonna be that easy," she says.

The film ends with Brian saying they have time. When asked about the alternate ending, Brewster told Insider she didn't recall it.

"I do remember we're on a car and we're making out," Brewster added of a deleted scene with Walker. "Of course I remember that. I don't remember the alternate ending. I have to go back and look at that."

This ending likely didn't make the cut since Walker returned for a sequel where he's on the run from the cops after letting Dominic Toretto escape at the end of the first movie. You can view the alternate ending here.

You may have seen all of the "Fast and Furious" movies, but there are also two additional short films in the franchise.

Kelly appears in a bonus feature, called "The Turbo Charged Prelude for 2 Fast 2 Furious," included on the home release of the first film.

The six-minute short shows Kelly help an on-the-run Brian Conner (Paul Walker) evade the cops on his journey from Los Angeles to Miami, Florida. She's aware he's wanted by the police and doesn't seem bothered by it.

Vin Diesel told IGN he turned down a huge payday in "2 Fast" to work on 2004's "The Chronicles of Riddick," a sequel to his original 2000 film, "Pitch Black."

"I remember turning down '2 Fast 2 Furious' and a whole lot of money," Diesel said. "Instead of doing that movie for the year, I took a WGA writers' polish deal for 'Chronicles' for $50,000."

"It was so obvious to everyone around me — even my agents and managers — that I really cared about this property because $20 million to $50,000 is not really the right way to be thinking about your estate planning," he added. "'Pitch Black' is one of the best experiences I've ever had making a movie."

In other interviews, it was reported that Diesel turned down $25 million. Diesel told the Los Angeles Times he wasn't happy with the script he read for "2 Fast."

"I always get afraid of being pigeonholed," Diesel said. "The real reason why I didn't return to the characters is the scripts hadn't been right. The characters haven't been right. It's not like I ever said I wouldn't be there."

"2 Fast 2 Furious" director John Singleton told Grantland's Thomas Golianopoulos that Ja Rule "got too big for himself" and turned down a role in the sequel after Vin Diesel turned down the sequel too.

"He turned down a half a million dollars," Singleton told Grantland. "He got 15 grand to be in the first movie."

"He was acting like he was too big to be in the sequel," he added. "He wouldn't return calls. I went to the studio to go see him — that's just my mantra, I deal with a lot of music people. He was kinda playing me to the side and I was like, 'What? What is this sh--?'"

Ja Rule would have played a version of Tej's character with his own car shop. As a result, Singleton reached out to Ludacris, who he had never met, to see if he was interested in a role in the film.

"Luda was all humble, excited to meet me. I said, 'I'm doing this movie and I'm wondering if you want to be a part of it,'" Singleton said. "He goes, 'What? Yeah! Anything you do I want to be a part of.' That's how Ludacris got in '2 Fast 2 Furious,' and the rest is history."

In April 2020, Chrissy Teigen shared on Twitter that she has a small cameo in "Tokyo Drift." According to Teigen, she was picked out of a crowd in Los Angeles, California, to be a girl getting out of a car.

"My boobs are in fast and the furious Tokyo drift," Teigen tweeted.

"I sat on the floor with 200 people in a parking garage in downtown la. They pulled me to be 'girl getting out of car' and the shot ended up cutting off at my face as they panned up my body," she added.

The scene occurs near the film's very end when the main theme song, "Tokyo Drift" by the Teriyaki Boyz, plays.

You can see Teigen's head, but only the back of it. The camera's focal point is on a shot of Teigen from her neck down as she gets out of a car.

According to a 2013 interview in TheWrap, the franchise stalled creatively after the second film in the series, "2 Fast 2 Furious."

"The talk internally was that the franchise was played out," Jeffrey Kirschenbaum, Universal Pictures copresident of production, told TheWrap in 2013. "At that point we were weighing whether to go straight to video or not for future sequels. We weren't sure what we were going to do."

In an interview with Insider's Jason Guerrasio in 2019, screenwriter Chris Morgan, who has been with the Fast team since "Tokyo Drift," said, "My pitch was bring back the crew."

"Dominic Toretto heard that someone he loves got killed in Japan and now he had to learn a new style of racing — drifting — and gain the trust of the racers to figure out what happened to his friend," Morgan added.

But getting Vin Diesel back on board to the franchise wouldn't be that simple.

Diesel wasn't paid for his "Tokyo Drift" appearance. According to an interview in The Huffington Post with "Riddick" director David Twohy, in return for an appearance, Diesel received the rights to the "Riddick" franchise.

After seeing the enthusiastic audience response to Diesel's cameo in "Tokyo Drift," the studio decided to hand a large amount of creative control over to the actor.

Spanish for "The Outlaws," "Los Bandoleros" was written and directed by Diesel. It's a precursor to the fourth "Fast and Furious" film and sets up the oil heist at the film's start.

The 20-minute prologue feels like two mini-episodes. The first half shows Dom hiding out with family in the Dominican Republic while Han (Sung Kang), from "Tokyo Drift," arrives and notes that he's never been to Japan at that point. Han had always said he met Dom in Mexico, so it's clear this movie takes place a bit in the past.

The latter half of the short focuses on Dom's relationship with Letty after she turns up in the DR. There, she says she wants to join in on whatever adventure Dom's planning. Though you never see the two get married, in "Furious 7" we finally learn the two were married when they were in the Dominican Republic.

When you rewatch the short, you see Letty waving around and wrapping a white veil around her neck as she and Dom drive down the road in a white car. They were likely married right before that.

You can watch the short here.

Oqwe Lin plays the child on the bus looking at the bank heist in Rio at the end of "Fast Five."

You can also spot him on the bus in London. He watches Dom and Letty as they race by.

"I got excited when we decided to bring everybody back and I realized right there that we needed an antagonist who's bigger than life who can stand up to Vin and to be that opposing force," Lin said on the "Fast 6" commentary. "The Rock was my first choice and I didn't know if we were going to get him."

Later on the commentary, Lin said part of the appeal of getting The Rock and Diesel in a movie together was because it was two actors you just wanted to see share a moment in a movie together.

"I never thought I'd see The Rock and Vin in the same scene because I grew up in the '80s and my dream was to see Stallone and Schwarzenegger together in one scene and that never happened," Lin said. "To be able to have these two, kind of, action icons in one movie, sharing a scene — that's definitely part of the appeal, part of the fun for me and for everybody."

Pataky and Hemsworth have been married since 2010 and have three children together.

"When we were shooting this, Chris would be hanging out and it was just surreal," Lin said on the "Fast 6" commentary. "You were just walking around and you're like, Thor is walking around set. He's walking around Puerto Rico."

"Thor" came out the same year "Fast Five" did.

According to the "Fast 6" commentary, director Justin Lin's original plan was to call the final two films in the franchise "The Fast" and then "The Furious."

The giant tank sequence on the highway was going to be the end of "The Fast." The airplane sequence with the giant never-ending runway was considered for the end of "Fast Five."

After Paul Walker's death in 2013, production on "Furious 7" shut down.

When the cast and crew returned to complete the film, the entire third act was rewritten to send off Walker's character.

"Fast Saga" screenwriter Chris Morgan told Collider the original ending would have been "happier" with the group "going more outlaw."

"The core issue for Brian, Paul's character, was this kind of 'Who am I?' sort of question," Morgan said. "He's a guy who used to be a cop and in the thick of the action and a racer, and all this stuff, and now he has an amazing wife, a kid, and another one on the way."

"Then he starts to look at his life and it's not a midlife crisis but to say — we said it in the movie, 'I miss the bullets, I miss the action' and the point of the adventure was to show by the end of it that the thing that's truly important to him is his family and being there," Morgan added.

He continued: "It wouldn't mean that he has to stop those adventures or those things, but the context is just a little bit different, he has a different understanding of who he is at his core and what's most important in life."

"Fate" director F. Gary Gray said on the film's commentary that Theron "had some thoughts about how she wanted to shape her character."

"The first thing she said is, 'Hey, what do you think about me trying dreads?'" Gray said. "And, at first, I'm kind of like, 'Dreads? Hm. I wonder how that would look.' She said, 'Just give me a shot at taking a look at what that looks like.'"

Gray said her hair stylist put together the look.

"We thought, 'Wow, this is unique,'" Gray said after seeing it. "We wanted her to be cool because the hacking thing is so current and I said, 'You know, let's go with it.'"

The look didn't go over well, with fans citing cultural appropriation.

Theron rocks a new bowl cut in "F9."

Lin, who previously directed four films in the franchise (three through six), told Insider he really didn't plan on coming back to the franchise after 2013's "Fast 6."

"I really did mean it when I left," Lin said. "Han [played by Sung Kang] and I left. We were not coming back. The studio has always been really gracious in always checking in to see how I was feeling. I, very much, I didn't want to come back unless it was for the right reason."

When he heard the idea for "F9," he agreed to come back. Lin said once he signed on for "F9," Diesel wouldn't let him go.

"Once I kind of agreed, Vin kind of pulled me aside and he said, 'You're not leaving,'" Lin said, laughing. "We're finishing this thing up."

"We were in London for a week, and I had my son Oqwe with me, and the only way we could hang out was that he would come to the meetings with me," Lin told Empire.

"We were talking about the ravine [set-piece] and I said, 'Alright... Jakob needs to get to the other side – how does he get there?' And Oqwe just picked it up and pitched the idea of the plane and everything," he continued.

"After us spending hundreds of hours on planning, I guess he was paying attention, and he understood the characters," Lin added.