David Ayer still seems kind of furious about not getting more credit for The Fast And The Furious

David Ayer has opened up about his complicated feelings over The Fast And Furious franchise, Variety reports, with the Suicide Squad director—who is also one of three credited screenwriters on 2001 franchise launcher The Fast And The Furious—going on Jon Bernthal’s Real Ones podcast this week to express his ire.

“Biggest franchise in Hollywood, and I don’t have any of it,” Ayer stated about the multi-billion dollar films, adding that, “I got nothing to show for it, nothing, because of the way the business works.” Ayer (who’s also had his own private battles with Warner Bros. over his personal preferred cut of Suicide Squad) went on to assert that he was responsible for some of the original TFATF’s most iconic elements—including moving the movie from New York to L.A.’s underground street racing scene, and incorporating real elements of street racing into it. Ayer: “I’m like, ‘Bro, I’m not gonna take it unless I can set it in L.A. and make it look like the people I know in L.A., right?’ So then I started, like, writing in people of color, and writing in the street stuff, and writing in the culture, and no one knew shit about street racing at the time.”

In Ayer’s telling, he’s been cut out of the narrative surrounding the franchise by unnamed “people,” saying, “The narrative is, I didn’t do shit, right? It’s like people hijack narratives, control narratives, create narratives to empower themselves, right? And because I was always an outsider and because, like, I don’t go to the fucking parties. I don’t go to the meals, I don’t do any of that stuff. The people that did were able to control and manage narratives because they’re socialized in that part of the problem. I was never socialized in that part of the problem so I was always like the dark, creative dude, beware.”

Of course, you could argue that there are few film franchises that have less in common, at this point, with their original movies than Fast And Furious, which has gone from a sort of high-speed Point Break riff into being the automotive world’s answers to the James Bond franchise. Still, you can’t deny that there are at least a handful of aspects of Dom Toretto that have survived from Ayers’ draft down to the characters’ present version—or that it’d be hard to imagine the franchise’s current success without the original’s low-budget, high-profit returns convincing executives to give it a chance to grow, evolve, and shoot Ludacris into space.

In any case, Ayer is trying to take a more self-directed approach to the issue, telling Bernthal, “Fuck all the middlemen, right? I get it. It’s up to me, I gotta self-rescue, right?I can fucking whine about getting shot at and all the rounds I’ve taken over my career—I’ve gotta self-rescue, and I’ve gotta create an ecology where it’s safe for me to be creative, and that’s it. And that’s what I’m doing now.”

[via EW]