riting and producing partners James Wong and Glen Morgan, who co-created the Final Destination film franchise with Jeffrey Reddick, find themselves back where they started: creating Final Destination 3, the third installment in the hit horror franchise. For this one, Wong directs from a script by both, in partnership with longtime producing colleague Craig Perry.
The original Final Destination struck a chord with audiences in 2000 with its eerie tale of a group of young people who try to cheat death after escaping a fiery plane crash. In FD3, a group of high school students, including Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Kevin (Ryan Merriman), are about to ride a monstrous roller coaster when Wendy has a premonition of a horrible accident that will kill them all. They escape, only to find themselves stalked by an unseen force that wants them all dead. Final Destination 3 adds a new element: a digital camera that Wendy, Kevin and the other students use to figure out death's plan.
This Q&A is taken from interviews conducted last April on the movie's set in Vancouver, Canada, and last week in Los Angeles.
James Wong, you had to go back and shoot an entirely new ending featuring a subway crash?
Wong: Well, we tested the movie. And I really felt the audience was totally with us, totally with us, until the very end. The moment that the movie ended, you actually heard a couple of people go, "Oh." Like that. And you know, that's no good. But I mean, the fact, even before we tested it, as I was cutting the movie with Glen and Craig, we knew that [the ending] wasn't working. It was just too abrupt. ... You didn't know whether they actually escaped death or, you know, what was happening. ... It didn't have a closure. ... So, before we went to the test, we had a meeting with Craig and Glen and myself, and we talked about what we were going to do, and Craig had an idea where he wanted to bring in the two guys, the sheriff and the [character played by A.J. Cook in Final Destination 2], and they'd be driving somewhere, and they'd get stopped. He wanted to bring those guys in. I had an idea—I was actually in bed with my wife, and I said, "Hey! You know what we should do?" And she's going, "Will you please go to sleep?"
But I had an idea about the subway sequence, so Craig pitched his idea, I pitched my idea, and we talked it out, and we thought that the subway sequence would work. And in one incarnation of the subway sequence, the FD2 guys were ... also in the subway, and they were over here while Ryan and Mary were talking. So we somehow had that kind of thing going. And ultimately they, their schedules didn't work. ... After that meeting we tested the movie, and we knew the ending needed to be changed. So the next morning we went and met New Line. That's when everybody said, "Well, what are you going to do now?" And we had the answer, and we said, "Here's what I could do." ... They were ... great. They gave us all the resources that we needed to shoot it, and it wasn't cheap. So they were really behind us.
Glen Morgan, you guys said after the first Final Destination that you wouldn't do the sequel. It was eventually directed by David R. Ellis.
Morgan: When we went to the premiere of the second one, you went, "Someone made a sequel out of something we did." It was an honor. But ... we just don't want to take the audience or New Line's money if we really don't have anything to offer. When you think about a sequel, you're going, "What are we going to do now? A cruise ship? On a train?" ... We couldn't really think of the new thing. But when [executive producer Richard] Brener said "roller coaster," it really sparked off a lot of exciting [ideas]. ...
Wong: I should never say never. I don't remember saying I would never do [another] one, but maybe I did, and I was mistaken. I had a lot of fun doing this one. It was a lot of fun, and I was telling some of the guys that I really realized I wanted to do another one when, I think, I was doing The One, and I was going up the escalator, I think, in Woodland Hills, the theater there, the first time I saw the FD2 poster. And it was sort of like a shot, you know? The camera's craning up, and I'm on an escalator going up, and I see this poster come up in my view, and I walked up to it, and I saw all the names and the credits, and that's when I thought, "Aw, s--t."
Sort of like seeing an ex-girlfriend with another guy?
Wong: Yeah, exactly. Never had that feeling before, though. So I felt a little bit of a pang right there, and I thought, "Hmmm. Maybe I should." So I was really lucky that day they called and asked us to do this one.
What did you think of the second one?
Wong: I liked it. It was good. David did a great job, and he's a great guy.
In this one, what's the idea behind a roller coaster?
Morgan: [It's] really exciting, because that's really locking people in. You know? It's not even like a plane, where you can walk around. ... This, you're just strapped in. ... Along with that, ... the digital-camera stuff ... and what those images meant, we thought we had a new take on it, and we were happy to come back and do this. ...
I don't know if we ever successfully pull it off, but Jim and I like to have themes. And this one, for the Wendy character, is about loss of control. ... You got a roller coaster, psychologists will tell you that's why people hate 'em, why you're afraid of them. Or why you're afraid to fly. Because you have no control. And for me, ... when I'm going up any roller coaster, I just say, "I want out." But I'm not getting out. That's just torture. ... It's unbearable. I'm nervous talking about it. ... If you look at death, that's [the same thing,] you know what I mean? ... I feel that if it wants us, [it's going to get us]. I think that's why the franchise kind of works.
After the first Final Destination, you went to make The One with Jet Li and Willard with Crispin Glover. Both were disappointing at the box office.
Wong: I don't know. You know, I think Willard's a great movie. I think The One is a great movie. I like both. ... I think The One did OK. It wasn't a disaster or anything. Maybe just the timing. [The One came out only five months after Li's hit movie Kiss of the Dragon.] ... Maybe people are like, "Oh, another Jet Li film." Who knows? And when you talk about a movie, it's about the loss of control: when you market it, how you market it.
Are there any returning characters in FD 3?
Wong: In the first one, Devon [Sawa as Alex] ... died. ... [Ali Larter's Clear] died in the second one. And then ... A.J. [Cook as Kimberly] survived. But we wanted to ... sort of do it over again with somebody new.
Are there lessons you've learned from directing the first movie that you're applying in the third?
Wong: You would think so. Everything adds to your experience, and hopefully you do better next time. But you find out as you start the movie, you go, "Wow, I'm doing the same things, making the same mistakes, again." ... Always at the beginning of the day you feel like you can do anything, and the end of the day you're just rushing, ... just [working] on that kind of time-management thing. But yeah, there's a lot of great lessons to be learned. A lot of times, you think about what to shoot. You know, just know that it's not going to work. Cameras don't do that. It's not like an animation film. There's a lot of things like that.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, were you familiar with the Final Destination movies when you signed on?
Winstead: I had seen the first one a few times, and ... I remember auditioning for the second one, but I was a little too young for it at that time. But, yeah, I got into it that time as well and watched the first one again as well. Yeah, I was very excited when I heard they were doing a third one. Second chance to be in it. ...
[I] tried to just start from scratch, you know? I don't want to look at the other films and the other characters who have the same sort of premonition, similar story, and be like, "How did they do it? I want to do it similarly." I don't want to get in that rut. So just try to start from scratch. It helps seeing the other two as far as knowing the sort of feel of the film and how it's going to go and what it's going to be like, but as far as the acting goes, I try not to think about it.
What about you, Ryan Merriman?
Merriman: I play Kevin. It's my girlfriend and my best friend ... and her boyfriend [who] initially crash in the beginning. So we kind of [all] end up getting in this wild ride together. Because of that, and also because of the fact that she has this vision that brings us together, we solve it.
What appealed to you about this film?
Merriman: It's ... the fact that it's not some demon from the dead of the night or some guy with a chainsaw. It's like realistic things that can actually happen. Like, you hear about those weird things, like a truck's driving with telephone poles and one thing gets loose, and it bounces and decapitates somebody. ... When I was reading the script, this happens, this triggers this, you just keep reading. I think that's what the audience is going to do. They're just going to be, like, "What's happening next? How is this happening?" And then when it does happen, like, "Oh, s--t, man!" It's just cool.
You're both pretty young. Did this film make you contemplate your own mortality more than you might have? Do you see death everywhere now?
Winstead: I think while we were filming it, like, for me at least, I thought about death all the time, because I was in that constant emotional state of "My boyfriend's died! My best friend's died!" I thought about that all the time, just imagining in my head that my boyfriend was dead, my best friend was dead, and my family was dead, everyone was dead. So I was in that constant sort of depressed and emotional state while we were filming. And so I'd have to go out afterwards and try to have as much fun as possible.
Merriman: It definitely brings your awareness up a little bit, doing a movie like this. Like, whenever you get on a plane, you know, when you're in a home improvement store, like whatever. You really do, you think, like, "Wow, that's so true." Because if you think about it, those are all situations where, especially in these type of films, they put you in situations where you're not in control, where, like, ... the accidents that happen, they don't happen because you screwed up. It's death finding a way to get to you. So that definitely brought my awareness up. But I wasn't, like, walking on eggshells, I guess you could say.
Ryan, you did research for the role?
Merriman: Well, yeah, ... I wanted to have some smart topics to talk about it as far as freak accidents that have happened. Like, ... growing up, I knew a guy whose dad was driving on the highway behind a pipe truck, and one of the pipes actually broke loose. He hit a thing and it swiveled out, ... the pipe bounced, and it bounced just right, came through the windshield and decapitated him, cut his head off. And you know, that sounds like a total FD3 scene, but it's true. Stuff like that happens all the time. You know, birds flying into planes. Weird things. It's amazing.
In the opening scene, you ride the roller coaster. Was shooting it pretty intense?
Winstead: It was pretty grueling, yeah. We rode it, like, 20 times, conceivably, in a row, and thought that our heads were going to explode by the end of it. ... But we didn't actually get too nauseous, though. We kind of all were expecting nausea and vomiting.
Merriman: Yeah, it wasn't all that bad. The worst part was the upside-down [shots], for sure: Whenever we'd get actually stuck upside down. Because there were two different rigs. There was one where it was an actual, like, nine cars that they built on, like, a hydraulic thing, and they would roll us over.
Winstead: We were harnessed, but they left the harness loose, so we still had to actually hold ourselves in to make it look more [realistic]. So we're all ... trying to pull our entire body weight up with our arms, and then the part like cutting into our knees.
Have you ridden a roller coaster since then?
Merriman: No, I have not.
Winstead: Not yet, not yet.
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