Scott Waugh isn’t your typical Hollywood director. On the set of the DreamWorks Pictures movie in Detroit last year, he could be found hanging off the side of a helicopter as it chased the Ford Mustang driven by Aaron Paul around the Comerica Park. The stuntman-turned director likes to do all of his own shooting, regardless of how dangerous it might be. It’s that perspective that turned his $12 million first feature film, Act of Valor, into an $81 million hit.

With Need for Speed, Waugh is going retro with an old school (think 60s and 70s) racing movie that puts the cars front and center. It’s this unique angle — and the fact that the majority of the Need for Speed games have no plot — that could help the Steven Spielberg-produced movie break the box office curse that has plagued most video game flicks. The director talks about gaming and wrecking super cars in this exclusive interview.

How did you end up directing a video game movie?

I had finished up Act of Valor when I personally just wanted to do a car movie. It was just serendipitous how I had that energy out there in the world and then Stacy (Snider) and Steven (Spielberg) called me and said, ‘Hey, we would love for you to direct Need for Speed.’ I was like, ‘This is perfect timing. Yeah.’

What are the challenges of taking something that started as a video game and bringing it to the big screen?

Live up to the video game. The video game is one of the greatest car racing games out there and we just wanting to pay homage to that game, but also make sure that the film has its respect for that game and that it really lives up to the expectations of the audience. So for me that’s the biggest challenge of all. All those gamers have such an expectation for the film that I’m hoping I can bring my training and background to the big screen, so that they get the thrill ride that they’re looking for.

What was it that attracted you to the Need for Speed game franchise?

I personally have always wanted to do a car racing movie. I’m a motocross racer, myself. We still quote Bullitt and French Connection. Those movies were made in the ’70s. We should be able to outdo that nowadays, and I just feel like I want to be the guy that makes the next authentic racing film. That’s my goal. It’s so great to be part of that Need for Speed franchise, because I think they do a great job on authentic racing.

Is there a specific game you focused on?

No, because they’ve done so many games, it’s going to be a mesh of all of them. We’re going to try to pay a tribute and respect to a lot of the games they’ve done.

It seems like Aaron Paul is channeling Steve McQueen a bit in this film.

Oh, yeah. Because it’s not like here comes the music montage; right Those old movies barely had any music in them. It was just motor noise and dialogue. If you watch Bullitt, it’s just awesome because there’s a very ambient score underneath it, but there’s just loud motor noise and stuff. And that’s what we’re bringing back, so it’s not here comes the new song and we go into a Baywatch montage. 

How are you connecting with younger gamers who never saw Bullitt?

It’s interesting because a lot of these movies are targeted towards older people, and obviously the video game generation is younger. One thing that we really paid particular attention to — because I personally love great love stories — was how do we ingest a great love story into this visceral action movie so that the women want to come see this movie as well. And I think there is a beautiful love story in this film that’s a wonderful arc to the movie.

How did the video game relationship help with working with the European car manufacturers on this film?

With the video games, which are wonderful, they have such a great relationship with all the super car manufacturers because the game wants to get it authentic and right and so do the manufacturers. They want to make sure that their cars in the game look exactly the way they do in real life. So with that came a great relationship. When we had to go to these manufactures and ask for their CAD (computer-aided design) files, which are like the Holy Grail for each car because it’s exactly how they build these cars, you just don’t hand that over to anybody. But because they knew it was for the movie based on the game, they knew that we wanted to do it accurately. There were a lot of NDAs that had to be signed and everything, and we worked with a great company that was able to build the super cars that we wanted. Because these are super cars that I didn’t want to wreck.

We had one of three Lamborghini Elementos in the world and I didn’t want to narrow that down to two! It’s disrespectful. They’re art pieces. Those cars are not designed to flip and wreck. They’re designed to go fast and stay upright. We wanted to make sure that they were extremely safe for our stuntmen that were going to wreck them, so we needed to get those CAD files to build a race car that we’d put them on top of and build the proper roll cage and the flipping devices — whether it was a cannon roll or a flipper to get these cars to flip the way we needed. With filmmaking you don’t want to be foolish. Why wreck a $2.5 million Bugatti That’s stupid when you can build something a lot cheaper that looks just like it.