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The Fast & Furious franchise has been heavily informed by the creative decisions of director Justin Lin, who helmed five separate installments of this saga starting with Tokyo Drift in 2006. However, he’s not the only person to have directed entries in the Fast & Furious universe. Rob Cohen kicked the saga off with The Fast and the Furious in 2001 while notable auteurs James Wan and John Singleton each directed a feature. With Fast X, another name has been added to the limited roster of Fast & Furious filmmakers: Louis Leterrier, a director who got his start in the European film scene (Leterrier is from France) before transitioning to American films.
Leterrier isn’t a household name as a director, which isn’t necessarily an insult or commentary on his skills or personality. He’s just so often been associated with franchises or projects much bigger than one director, including Fast X, which saw him taking the directorial reins from Lin just a week into filming. Working with so many major brand names means Leterrier isn’t immediately recognizable as a name to audiences like Christopher Nolan or James Gunn, but he’s still done plenty of notable work over the years long before he got behind the wheel of Fast X.
The Earliest Days of Louis Leterrier as a Director
Like nearly all directors who are helming $300+ million budgeted movies in 2023, Louis Leterrier started out his directorial career doing significantly smaller, more grounded works. His directorial debut came with the 2005 Jet Li action movie called Unleashed, which established a handful of core ideas that would reverberate throughout Leterrier’s work. Li’s protagonist in Unleashed, Danny, established how Leterrier has a soft spot for lead characters who have some sort of quarrel or unresolved business with their past. This would manifest in wildly different ways throughout his career in subsequent movies ranging from The Incredible Hulk to The Brothers Grimsby, to even Fast X villain Dante’s unresolved anger over the murder of his father. The missing pieces of our past weigh heavily on the key characters of Leterrier’s work.
This feature also established that Leterrier had an eye for action sequences, and the hand-to-hand combat work gave him an in to direct The Transporter 2 as his next motion picture. However, these initial projects did heavily depart from Leterrier’s later works in some key areas. Most notably, Unleashed is a feature close to the ground relying heavily on Li’s natural skills with fight choreography. By the time he was helming The Incredible Hulk in 2008, though, Leterrier was directing motion pictures that had moved away from flesh-and-blood people and were instead focusing heavily on CG beings punching one another.
While Unleashed put Leterrier on the map as a filmmaker of note, The Incredible Hulk, despite not being an Iron Man-sized hit, seemed to establish a trait Hollywood liked to see: a director who was comfortable handling green-screen work and CG characters. These qualities were ramped up even further for the 2010 film Clash of the Titans, which was packed to the gills with digital beasties. Even Leterrier’s 2013 motion picture Now You See Me heavily employed CG to pull off the variety of elaborate magic tricks seen throughout the movie. Though he got his start with more grounded action movies, Leterrier quickly became a go-to figure in Hollywood to helm projects heavy on digital effects work.
Leterrier’s Shift to Television and an ‘Age of Resistance’
After the 2016 box office dud The Brothers Grimsby, Leterrier did an about-face and shifted over to the small screen. Television was a new frontier and could give him more exciting things to helm than Sacha Baron Cohen making gags out of the genitalia of elephants. After directing nine episodes of a program called Tycoon, Leterrier embarked on what may have been his biggest endeavor ever as a filmmaker: directing all ten episodes of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. On the surface, this didn’t seem like a huge new task for Leterrier. Doing The Transporter 2 as one of his first films established him as a reliable name to take over well-known film franchises, as he did with The Incredible Hulk reboot or the Clash of the Titans remake.
However, Age of Resistance was a far more satisfying and compelling creative endeavor compared to anything else Leterrier had directed before. Whereas the original The Dark Crystal movie was too dry and centered on forgettable Gelfling characters, the heroes of Age of Resistance were much more vividly realized. Meanwhile, occupying a time in the Dark Crystal continuity before the world became apocalyptic (like in the original movie) offered up a chance to realize such vividly colorful and detailed locations in this universe. This was no rehash of an older movie, but rather an expansion of its greatest qualities. Leterrier (along with the show’s writing staff and production crew) saw all the potential within the initial feature The Dark Crystal and embraced every inch of it.
Even better, Leterrier’s long-standing experience as an action movie director pushed the shooting style of Age of Resistance into new exciting places compared to other projects involving Jim Henson Company puppet characters. It was hard to discern during something like Now You See Me or Clash of the Titans what qualities Leterrier brought to the table as a filmmaker. On Age of Resistance, his passion for creating real and engaging drama with elaborate puppet characters came through palpably. If there’s any project in his filmography that speaks to Leterrier’s passions and his filmmaking talent, it’s Age of Resistance.
Leterrier Revving Up His Filmmaking Engine
Leterrier’s work in television has proven so time-consuming (he also helmed a trio of episodes for the hit Netflix program Lupin) that he’s mostly been M.I.A. as a movie director since 2016’s The Brothers Grimsby. Naturally, then, his big return to feature-length filmmaking (save for his work directing the 2022 French film The Takedown) is a massive endeavor like Fast X, which required Leterrier to step in after principal photography had already begun. Even for a guy who spent years wrangling action sequences involving hordes of puppets, taking over this massive project must’ve been an overwhelming prospect.
Looking over the projects that led Louis Leterrier to Fast X, one can’t help but be a little frustrated. Leterrier’s career going almost immediately from grounded action cinema to CG-heavy tentpoles is emblematic of how Hollywood sees budding filmmakers from across the globe. New talent isn’t something to be cultivated and curated and given room to explore itself. Instead, fresh filmmaking voices are only as good as their ability to deliver CG-heavy sequences on time and within budget. All the excitement and energy Leterrier brought to a franchise directing gig like Age of Resistance suggests movies like Clash of the Titans didn’t need to be so disposable if he’d been given some creative breathing room.
Even with this discouraging reflection on the realities of Hollywood, Leterrier’s done good work carving out a career as a reliable journeyman in the world of big-budget entertainment, an often underrated and underappreciated style of filmmaker. Not everyone would be up to the task of helming the raunchy comedy of The Brothers Grimsby and then the fantastical narratives of Age of Resistance within just three years, but Leterrier’s ability to handle whatever Hollywood throws at him ensured he was up to that challenge. With Leterrier already set to helm an additional Fast & Furious movie after Fast X, this filmmaker will have plenty of future chances to further expand his eclectic and high-profile career.
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