It's the sixth installment of the high-octane action series, [The] Fast & the Furious,
and once again Hollywood muscle man Vin Diesel takes on the character of hard-talking street racer and ex-con Dominic Toretto.
It's a silver screen series that highlighted Diesel's strength in playing the tough guy role.
And after the original raked in a cool 40 million [dollars] at the box office in its first weekend in 2001,
The Fast & the Furious franchise sees Vin Diesel step firmly into the limelight to become one of Tinseltown's A-listers.
This week on Talk Asia, we're in Seoul to catch up with Vin Diesel and find out who he really is.
Thank you so much for spending a few minutes of your time. You have a very busy schedule. Congratulations on Fast & Furious 6.
You've taken ownership over this franchise as well, producing these movies.
What have you learned about the process and of dealing with studios in Hollywood?
Being a producer allowed me to be more accountable for the overall picture.
When you see Fast & Furious 6, you see that played out in its fullest, in the sense that all of our characters shine so well.
That's a testament to wanting everyone in the cast to shine, wanting the director to be the best that he...
I like walking away from a film and everyone in the film being applauded for doing their best work.
When you directed... wrote, directed, produced your first short film, Multi-Facial,
I remember watching it and seeing this guy, the character, Mike... this very open, very honest, very accessible, very real guy.
This small short film that cost, what, $3,000 to make, lands in the lap of a really big-time Hollywood director.
Tell me about that.
Well, I had just come back from the Sundance Film Festival with Strays, and I thought that I would sell it then, and I didn't sell it.
And then one Saturday morning, I get a call from my agent and she says, "You're not gonna believe this but Steven Spielberg saw your short film."
I just started jumping up and down. And I remember I jumped on my bed. I was jumping up and down on my bed like a kid at Christmas.
And the agent said, "Can you shut up for a second, Vin? I have more to tell you.
He wants to write a role for you in Saving Private Ryan."
How did that change you?
How did it change me?
It... I guess the fact that my colleagues... it really changed my colleagues, my colleagues had changed.
It was no longer the thespian that would, you know, be rehearsing with me at the park, it was now Steven Spielberg.
And he said, "You know, I want you to meet Tom." And I said, "Tom who?"
And he started laughing, and said -- and looked at me, like, "You don't know what you're here for?"
Kind of like, "Are you... do you know anything about this industry?" -- "Tom Hanks."
And I said, "Oh!" and I was so... I felt so, at that moment, embarrassed, and he said, "No, no, no, that's a good thing. Don't lose that."
He was speaking to keeping that New York integrity, or keeping that integrity, period.
So I would go to the set early and I would talk to him and I would talk to him.
I remember one day he said -- I was talking to him about something in the third act about Tom Hanks' character,
and he looked at me with the most puzzled look on his face, like, this guy is crazy --
"Vinny, you die in the first act. You're not even in the third act!"
But he was so encouraging that when I wasn't shooting he even let me operate a 35-millimeter camera.
You couldn't buy better education than that.
I couldn't. I used to say all the time, and I would say to anybody, to take this advice.
I would have brought him coffee every day and he didn't even... he wouldn't have had to pay me.
That access to working professionals was what I was longing for.
I just wanted to be around them. I just wanted to see what they do and learn from what they do.
And because it was all foreign to me.
If you could talk to your younger self, knowing what you know in those days when you thought maybe it's not gonna happen,
what would you tell yourself?
Play it cool. I'd say... I'd say, play it cool and learn as much as you can because everything you learn you're gonna need.
You won't have enough time to learn. Everything is an education.