The actor and producer of the Fast & Furious saga shares four videos with his 100 million followers to remember his beginnings and when he tried his hand at directing his short film Multi-Facial in 1994.
It won’t be the 390 million Dwayne Johnsondo not 100 million followers just reached on Instagram by Vin Diesel they are enough of an achievement for the actor to decide to share a thank you video. The star of the saga of Fast & Furious he was in New York for a meeting when, with four videos shot on the street, he started walking down the so-called “memory lane”. Diesel he grew up in the Big Apple and in those videos he shows us some points of the city that marked important stages for him in his life as a teenager and as an aspiring actor and filmmaker.
“Our page just reached 100 million” he says, explaining that he appeared on Instagram later, while for Facebook he was a pioneer (he was the first actor in 2016 to reach 100 million likes on his page). “The fact that there are 100 beautiful souls cheering me on and inspiring me means everything to me. I asked myself, what can I do to celebrate this with you? And I thought, maybe we can go together to some of the places that brought me to where I am today , to show you my humble first steps to becoming an actor.”
Vin Diesel’s youth and the short film that opened the door to Hollywood for him
Vin Diesel walks while he talks about when, as a boy, he was the leader of a gang that went to vandalize the shops in the basements of buildings and about that enlightened acting teacher named Crystal who one day found these intruders in her small theater and, instead of denounce them, invited them to attend lessons every day. That was the first performance on stage for the actor, who continues the story by moving to Washington Square Park. Here, the constant desire to perform led him as a teenager to breakdance in the street to raise some money.
At some point in his early 20s, Diesel he moved to Los Angeles but, within a year and a half, he couldn’t find an agent to represent him and was forced to return to New York to work as a bouncer. The actor explains that the ethnic mix of his physiognomy made it difficult for him to be classified by casting directors who did not know how to present him for a specific role. At that point the actor wrote, produced and directed a short film called Multi-Facial which in fact told his experience as a multicultural artist who couldn’t find work. In the video, Diesel shows the intersection of a neighborhood where he shot a scene of this short, way back in 1994, also saying that he cooked pasta for the other three members of the crew.
The short Multi-Facial it was included in a collateral section of the Cannes Film Festival. This allowed the short film to circulate and above all to be seen, among others, by Steven Spielberg. The director was busy preparing Save Private Ryan and asked the screenwriter Robert Rodat to include a character for him in the story, the one who later became the soldier Caparzo.
Below you can see the short film Multi-Faciallower the video of Vin Diesel’s story are Instagram.