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BYETHAN SACKS

NEWYORK DAILYNEWS

MOST movie-goers will like-ly find “Furious 7” an action-packed thrill-ride — but for di-rector James Wan, it’s also atearjerker.

“Every time I screen thefilm for people, when the end-ing comes, it still hits me sohard,” Wan told The DailyNews.

“And always before thecredits roll, I have to walkaway. I just have to get out ofthereas quickas I can.

“It’s still so hard to watch,”said the 38-year-old filmmak-er, who has become a hotHollywood property afterscaring up major box officehits with the horror flicks,“Insidious” (2012) and “TheConjuring” (2013).

In the wake of the tragicdeath of lead actor PaulWalker during a break infilming, finishing the projecttook an emotional toll onWan, thecast and thecrewofthe seventh installment ofthehit franchise.

“You can imagine how wefelt when we had pore throughso many hours of footage andjust watching Paul every day (toedit the movie); watching theshots I’d done and call cut andseeingPaul laughat the camera,”Wansaid.

That “Furious 7” is openingFriday at all is an unprecedentedfeatofmoviemakingwill.

In the days after the fiery Nov.30, 2013 car crash that claimedthe lives of Walker, 40, and hisfriend, no one was sure theywantedto continue.

Wan and company, though,began to be revitalized during avisit the crash site to pay their re-spects—only to find theyweren’talone in their grief.

“Just seeing all the fans whocame back to put candles andflowers, it was so touching,” saidWan. “We finally realized wehad to finish this movie. Oneway or another we had to finishthismovie forPaul.”

Stars like Vin Diesel, DwayneJohnson and Michelle Rodrigu-ez juggled their schedules to al-low for the necessary rewrites —andto emotionally regroup.

The filmmakers ultimately en-listed Walker’s brothers, Codyand Caleb, and CGI program-mers to help finish the late ac-tor’s scenes.

“Furious 7” would have beena daunting project even if Wanhadn’t been forced into unchart-ed territory. In just a few shortyears since he co-wrote anddirected the 2004 upstarthorror hit, “Saw,” the Aus-tralian filmmaker hasshown a flair for the dramat-ic helming relativelylow-budget horrormovies.

Going from

zero to 60 on a giant-scale moviewith a supposed budget in the$250-million range is an entirelydifferentmatter.

“I rememberwhenI first cameon board and I read that in the

treatment,” says Wan,laughing. “The firstthing that struck mewas, ‘Oh, we’re throw-ing cars out of a plane… Huh? Hmm, how

am I going to shootthis?’”

Here’show:Actually

toss expen-

sive sports cars out of a planeover the Arizona desert for themoney shot, but also have yourspecial effects team build giantcar rigs on gimbals firmly plant-ed on the ground tofilm the actors.Then move the rigsaround for thecamera to make

the actors appear as if they’re ac-tually in freefall — and edit theimage into the footage of the realcars later.

That sounded great in theory.“Itwasdangerouseven for the

skydivers chasing after the vehi-cles (to film the scene) as they’refalling through the air and tryingto get out of its way,” said the di-rector. “Because you have noidea what these heavy tumbling

cars would do in the sky asthey’replummeting right to

theearth.”Spoiler alert: It

all worked out

justas scripted.But the kernel of truth for a

great popcorn movie is that thecamera must focus not on thecars, but on the people behindthewheel,hesaid.

“If you can ground your char-acters with human emotions

then the vehicles thatthey’re drivingin do not haveto be groundedas they’re soar-ing throughthe air,” he

said.

Tyrese Gibson, Michelle Rodriguez, Walker and Chris

(Ludacris) Bridges (l.-r.) appear in ilm. Walker’s broth-

ers stood in for him in some scenes shot after his death.

Director works through grief over Walker death

DRIVEN TO TEARS

Cars will be soaring again in ‘Furi-

ous 7,” directed by James Wan (l.

with Vin Diesel). Cast and family

attend memorial (below) in 2013

for actor Paul Walker, whose death

cast pall on Wan and the ilm.

UNIV

ERSAL PIC

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COTT G

ARFIELD, S

PLASH N

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DAILY NEWSNYDailyNews.com Sunday, March 29, 2015 23

It was 38 degrees and a stiff gale was blowing off the Atlantic when a lefthanded freshman named Chase Denison threw the irst pitch of the irst NYU

home baseball game in 42 years. The time was 12:08 p.m. Saturday afternoon, and the conditions were as brutal as the trafic on the Belt Parkway, but history waits for no man, or baseball-friendly weather.

There were 102 fans at MCU Park, home for now to both the

Cyclones of Brooklyn and the Vio-lets of NYU. The occasion includ-ed no bunting, no ceremonial irst pitch, nothing but a Div. III double-header by the sea against Brandeis University.

The pitch from Denison, of Apex, N.C., was high and away to Brandeis leadoff man Liam O’Connor, and with that, NYU was back in the intercollegiate baseball business in the ive bor-oughs after a four-decade hiatus. Moments later, O’Connor bounced out to shortstop Jonathan Iaione,

and NYU had its irst out since it inished off an 8-5 victory over Le-high on May 7, 1973, even if the ul-timate result at Coney Island was not what the home team was look-ing for, NYU dropping a 4-2 deci-sion after a seventh-inning rally fell one hit short in the opener, and los-ing the second game, 11-8.

“It’s an honor to be out there throwing the irst game,” Denison said. “I wish the result had been different, (but) we have a good group of guys and when we get things all in synch, we’re going to do some special things.”

Denison’s catcher, CJ Picerni, the NYU cleanup hitter, had two hits and just got under a pitch in the bottom of the seventh inning, when NYU had four stolen bases and had the tying runs in scoring position.

“We’ve got to have the aggres-siveness the whole game, not just at the end, and then we’ll win some of these close games (we’ve been los-ing),” Picerni said. He was asked how it felt to be part of a renais-sance at NYU, which has reinsti-tuted both baseball and softball this spring, and to be wearing his No. 6 white and purple uniform for, at last, a home game.

“It’s huge,” Picerni said. “It’s a privilege to be a part of.”

In its Division I heyday, NYU baseball made two trips to the College World Series, and pro-duced such noted big-leaguers as Ralph Branca, Eddie Yost and Sam Mele. When the school sold its Washington Heights campus in 1973, the team had no place to play, and after an 0-14 season the following year — every game was played on the road — the baseball program disbanded altogether, even as the school’s whole athletic menu was shifted to Division III. After NYU’s merger last year with Brooklyn Poly, a school that had both baseball and softball, the idea to bring back bats, balls and gloves got a major push.

“Even with the weather in the Northeast, these are great college

sports, and there was a hole there without them,” said Christo-pher Bledsoe, the NYU athletic director.

You’d expect a startup varsity team to be inexperienced, and you would be right. NYU coach Doug Kimbler has what most certainly is the youngest team in the country, with 22 freshmen, six sophomores and one graybeard junior, inield-er Sy Cohen. The team has started the season 5-11, but Kimbler likes the makeup of his team, the core of players who hunger to get better. The entire team spent the whole doubleheader at the dugout rail-ing at MCU Park, cheering and/or agitating, depending on what was going on. There was the base-path daring at the end of Game 1,

including an alert double-steal by freshman third baseman Christian Bloom and freshman center ielder Michael Vokulich, who caught the Brandeis infielders not minding their bases.

Earlier, Vokulich had driven in Adrian Spitz, the left ielder, for the irst run at home since the waning days of the Nixon Administration. In the second game, NYU fought back from a 6-1 deicit to take a 7-6 lead, fell behind, 8-7, then tied it up on a bases-loaded walk by fresh-man pinch-hitter Sam Raskin, only to fall behind again.

“When you irst start a program, you try not to put too many expec-tations,” said Kimbler, 45, a former minor-league inielder. “(But) we now have a sense of who we are as a group. We went out and got the best possible kids we could get to start a program.”

There were things to build on, for sure. Denison, a 6-2, 175-pounder, retired 11 straight batters in the opener and pitched his best

game of the season, and easily could’ve won. There were come-backs in both games. Kimbler wants to believe something good, something lasting, is taking root. After 42 years, it was good to have a home.

WAYNECOFFEY

NYU’s 42-year journey homeNYU's plays first home games

since 1973. KEVIN C. DOWNS/FOR

DAILY NEWS

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