SS: Interesting to see the Drift King, Keiichi Tsuchiya, playing a cameo (Fisherman #1).
TH: Keiichi has a tendency to join movies, then drop out. That's what happened with Initial D and any other B-flick he's been cast in. But Universal bent over backwards for him, so he said the least he could do was lend his name to the film. He wasn't even supposed to do any of the driving but he does perform in a few sequences. The guy sitting next to him is Mr. Watakura, one of the most acclaimed film directors/producers in Japan. And by the way, did you notice the MC Hammer references?
SS: No, tell us about Hammer!
TH: Before Justin made Better Luck Tomorrow, he was at the Sundance Film Festival without money when he spotted Hammer. A friend of his encouraged him to go up to Hammer for sponsorship, so he just walked up, introduced himself and asked him to fund his movie. Hammer turned around and cut him a check for $10,000, saying "One day when you're big, you can pay me back." Low and behold, Justin finished FATF3, so he paid his debt back and asked Hammer to come into the studio to do some poses. You'll see him everywhere in the background hawking everything from cell phones to laptops. It's Justin's own inside joke.
SS: The product placement in the movie was fairly subtle compared to the first two. Did you have any say in which companies were to be used?
TH: I had to incorporate a lot of Universal's corporate sponsors into the script but I did have a list of companies I wanted to use and to make sure were portrayed correctly. Like NOS-nobody squeezes while they're drifting, so we saved it for the straight-away scenes. Borla-great. But if you keep citing references like they did in part one, it looks dumb, so we counter-balanced it by saying, "Oh, so you can read the catalog." We just tried to work it into the script so that it didn't sound dumb.
SS: How do you think American audiences will react to this film and drifting overall?
TH: Drifting's been around in one form or another. It's going to catapult it, just like the tuner market. Once the influx of inquiries come in from the movie, I want to be sure that it's going to be channeled to the right people and segments. When the first movie came out, tuning became big and kids wanted to build their cars. But the infrastructure of dealers, information, distribution of products, proper installation, tuning and maintenance of cars wasn't there. There's no direction and no collective force for the new kids coming in. Nobody's saying "this is the proper way to build your cars." One thing it won't stop is the kids who will try to drift in parking lots. It is exciting. You can't help it. Maybe the question should be, "What will this movie do for drifting while drifting is in the limelight?" For now it won't go away but once it settles down, it'll be up to the hardcore drifters to decide what happens and shape its direction. Maybe in 20 years we'll look back at this article and ask ourselves, "Are we still into this?" We'll just have to wait and see.