INTERVIEW: CRAIG PERRY (Producer) The Final Destination 4

QUESTION: Can you tell me the genesis of how The Final Destination came about. CRAIG PERRY: Final Destination 3 did substantially well, so much so that the studio said, ‘Hey, can you come up with a fourth one?’ And we were like, ‘No.’ But then we thought about it. The way we approach these films is to list the places that we might have a set piece, the places where we might actually be able to put one of these great sequences that people talk about. And that’s a place where you and I might frequent—because if it doesn’t have that sense of familiarity, it’s not going to have the same impact. You jump out of a plane; of course you’re cheating death. You’re taunting death. And then we say, ‘Okay, we like all these. What kind of characters would be in these environments and how do we get them there?’ And then we work backwards from there. Generally, once we put the characters together with the theme, where it’s going, there’s always a consistency of mortality and fate and how you live your life, which is sort of overarching for the franchise, but we do try to find little bits. What does it mean to be remembered? What does it mean to be a hero? Do you make your mark on the world while you’re here, or do people remember you after the fact as somebody who made their mark in passing? So you try and find those things to give you a little bit more something/something. And the more we figured it out, the more we thought this might actually work. So, we conscripted Eric Bress, who was the co-writer of Final Destination 2, and was familiar enough with how the franchise worked that the indoctrination wouldn’t take very long. He could leap right back into it. And his mind is incredibly twisted and insane, so he was very good at coming up with ways to go out. We went back to David Ellis, who directed the second film because we didn’t really want to have to educate somebody again on how this franchise works. It’s very specific. They’re incredibly hard to pull off. People don’t really realize that this little horror movie is technically the most challenging movie they will ever work on. Most of the department heads are like, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to be easy.’ But with that team collected together—the people who knew and understood the challenges and the pitfalls and the way to make things work—we came up with something. The studio said, ‘Yes, let’s go do it.’ And with very little time and money, as usual, we were off to the races in New Orleans, no pun intended, and we shot the movie. And I feel very confident that The Final Destination delivers everything the audience would want, from not just great kills and fun sequences, but a real thrill ride. It’s entertaining without being revolting. QUESTION: What was the technical side of shooting in 3-D like for you as a producer? CRAIG PERRY: Well, it was interesting. It’s not just 3-D, but it’s also HD. The challenge that we’re finding is that with 3-D, the cameras are very persnickety; they’re very fragile because of the way they’re designed. The 3-D was a challenge, but the HD component made it really hard because if you want to shoot something and there’s a glint off that building, everything blows out. So, you have all kinds of ways, cinematically, graphically, that you had to be mindful of that would impact the 3-D as well. But we put the cameras in places they’d never been before. Things were done, like there were steady cams, they were on scorpion heads. So, I feel that we were a real test run for how 3-D could be applied in a real-time environment and not a sort of CG takeaway. QUESTION: Can you tell talk about the story of The Final Destination? CRAIG PERRY: The Final Destination begins at a racetrack. It’s not a NASCAR track. It’s a modified stock car race. And the reason we chose that as our opening is that in the first three films, you had your characters in some kind of vehicle moving quickly through space. And since this film is 3-D, we said, ‘Well, let’s take the characters, isolate them, and make them not move, but hurl things at them so we could really take advantage of the 3-D technology.’ And what better way than one of the biggest sports in the world—car racing? So, we have all manner of delightful mayhem that happens to our characters, and of course it’s all a premonition. Our lead actor, played by Bobby Campo, comes to and realizes he has to get his friends out of that park. And in doing so, he actually brings a few more people who were stragglers, causing rifts in relationships because someone who was alive outside died, but their wife dies inside. And from that point forward, he starts to sense there’s something that he took with him. There’s something following him. There’s a presence in every room that he’s in that he can’t quite put his finger on. And he starts having these visions, which are like these flashes of imagery that he can’t understand. They don’t make much sense until he starts to realize that the survivors are dying in ways that call back these images that he’s seen in these spewed moments that are really disturbing and unsettling. Armed with that information, he seeks out who he thinks is going to be next on death’s list to try and get them to join forces to see if they can stop it. And then things get worse from there as he starts to realize he can’t remember exactly who is in what order, which leads to one of my favorite sequences where they don’t know who’s next. They die almost at the same time in his premonition, so they split up. And we intercut between two sequences and the audience likewise isn’t sure who’s going to get it first. So it’s an interesting way to sort of take them from being linear and stacking them, which is different, and we’ve never done that before. And it was surprisingly successful in generating the maximum tension on both sides. QUESTION: Can you tell me about the young cast of the movie? CRAIG PERRY: Well, the great thing about The Final Destination movies is that the lead is invisible, doesn’t have an agent, requires no makeup. And it provides a forum for young actors to be in a big, heavily promoted studio film who maybe don’t have the resume at this stage to not only be expensive, but also that the studio’s going to hang their hat on them in a way that’s overwhelming. So we lucked out by getting a lot of young, fresh faces. We have Bobby Campo. We have Shantel VanSanten. We have Haley Webb. We have Nick Zano. These are our four core leads. The one person who is known to people is Mykelti Williamson, who played Bubba in Forrest Gump. He really did a great job anchoring these young kids because he’s a seasoned pro, which is what we wanted in that character, not just for the on-screen, but off-screen as well. He really helped these young actors figure out how to make the connections amongst each other and provide a real serious center to get their game up. And it succeeded beyond our wildest dreams in terms of making the other kids step up and really deliver. QUESTION: Why do you think the notion of cheating death resonates with so many people? CRAIG PERRY: I think The Final Destination will resonate with fans of the first three films because you don’t see the monster. It’s a presence. It’s an idea. And it’s very sort of Buddhist how things come around—how you live your life might boomerang back at you. If someone hadn’t been selfish or self-centered then they wouldn’t have set in motion the dominoes that come back to get them. So they have these odd little morality tales that are not heavily hit upon, but they are there in terms of the characters and the things that they do that actually facilitate their own demise. And then, ultimately, I think everybody knows that death is all around them, but they choose not to think about it. So our fondest wish is that if you, for example, go to a car wash and you have a moment of ‘This could be no good for me at all.’ If we have done that and we get that reaction, we have achieved Nirvana.

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