CWA Spotlight Interview with Writer & Cast of

The Final Destination in 3-D

Blockbuster movies in 3-D are big business: not only do they intensify the storylines, the audience walks out having had an out of this world cinematic sensory experience. With the success of horror film franchise The Final Destination I met up with the writer Eric Bress and the cast of the latest instalment: The Final Destination…In 3-D.

ERIC BRESS, Writer

In The Final Destination franchise you wrote the second movie and now the fourth. How difficult is it to get something to appeal to the fans?

Eric: It's about maintaining what makes a movie work as a formula, and then adding something different to it. So for this one it's trying to find out the order in which people died. Not to mention the distinguishing characteristic is that it's also in 3-D.

Tell us about working in 3-D as a writer…

Eric: We'd been talking for a couple of years about making the fourth movie 3-D and when we were finally given the go-ahead we thought of all the possibilities that would make 3-D. So for example I'd write about things like street signs falling and chopping people's heads in two: as a 3-D experience you'd see someone's head split in half with one eye going one way and the other the other way. You don't want to just rely on objects blowing up and hurtling towards the audience. You want to strategically place things so the audience is emerged into the actual atmosphere and world of the movie: being present to the surroundings is what makes it really creepy. There's an escalator scene where she gets sucked into the machine and the reason we wrote that in there is because people will most likely get onto an escalator when they leave the cinema. The trick is to make the deaths come from what can happen in real life. It's all about accessible venues and locations being filled with malevolent content.

It's a movie about the paranormal. Do you have any knowledge or experience of the paranormal yourself?

Eric: In the early 1990s my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He has the same name as me. So I put his medical records on my fridge and every morning while eating breakfast I'd look at it. Then I'd wait five minutes and imagine a horrible debilitating frail like ending and death. Everyday I'd root for my own death and walk around thinking about what would take the pain away. I did this for about a year. I actually lived in this bubble of dread that I put myself in intentionally so I didn't miss anything. 

One time, after discussing the-death-by-carwash scene for the movie, I went through one. The goal was to see what could actually go wrong in a carwash. I have a bike rack on my car and it suddenly just jerked up and came off the rail and I couldn’t see what was happening. I had nowhere to go and there was nothing I could do and it took a while before the attendants came out and had to shut it all down. I called the producer straight away and said 'we have to do the carwash scene! It happened to me!"

Why is there never any answer in this franchise as to why the characters have feelings of the paranormal?

Eric: The trick is if you explain it then no one else can have it: if you don't explain it the possibility that you might have a moment like this is something that is open to possibility. We wanted to make sure that everyone who walks out of that theatre might just have a chance at something like a big déjà vu moment where you could even see your own death.

Another reason why this franchise works is whether or not we actually have any control over our destiny. This franchise works in any culture because every culture has an examination of death.

*Teen heartthrobs Shantel Van Santen, Bobby Campo, Haley Webb and Nick Zano talk about what it was actually like to film a 3-D horror.

Q: How was it filming such a scary movie? It's pretty full on.

Shantel: It was so exciting. I watched it last night in the back row and even though I knew what was going to happen and what was going to be flying at us I still got scared and jumped. I had such a big adrenalin rush when I walked out.

Q: What's your own personal experience with death?

Bobby: Oh I've had so many. Once I was on a freeway and my tire blew up I almost had an accident. When we were filming the pool scene there was a light stand that just fell over and broke. It just snapped and broke as I was pulling people out of the pool. It missed me by inches. When I was two years old I actually fell off a bed, broke my neck and actually died. I only found out about this when I had a car accident and they had to go through all my medical records. It changed my whole feeling of how I looked at things – it's made me not fear any of these things even though the film has a great way of bringing all these everyday fears out.

Shantel: When I found out I got the movie I jumped into my car, backed out and someone drove into me. People had heard I'd had an accident and were calling the ambulances and stuff and I thought 'maybe I shouldn't do this movie'. I laugh about it now but at the time I was so freaked out to be doing a movie all about death.

Haley: Well it was while we were filming. I was walking across the street and for some reason the light was green but I checked anyway and I stepped out onto the street and just looked over and this car was headed straight for me…thank goodness I looked…

Nick: one time I was 13 and I was surfing and nearly died – I surfed without a leash during a thunderstorm – I lost the board – it was raining and I was drifting away and a guy on the beach came out with a boogie board…

Q: Do you believe in circumstances being pre-destined, like in the movie?

Shantel: On set I'd always try looking for things and think 'what would happen if that fell' because that's what the movie is based on. I had to stop thinking about death everyday because I believe you bring it to you.

Bobby: Our film is about the supernatural and the great thing about that is that none of us really have a grasp on it. The reason these films do so well is because you never see anything in that same way again, like the car wash scene and the elevator scene.

Q: What's it like being an actor in a hit 3D movie?

Nick: We had this really great time and didn't get killed. We'd pass each other in the lobby and say 'oh I'm dying tomorrow' and they're like 'you're dying tomorrow?' Come watch us die!

Haley: Yeah and you get the genuine – 'great job dying! Well done!'

Q: Nick, how was that scene where you were suctioned through a pipe? It looked pretty gruesome..

Nick: Yeah that was a week and a half of preparation working with the stunt guys. The longest I was under water was for an hour and a half straight, taking breaths through an oxygen mask. I was being directed with a speaker underneath. You have to exhale all the water before you take a breath. I had to learn not to take giant panic breaths'.

Q: Has this film influenced how you feel about the paranormal?

Haley: I've always been really interested in it but I do believe in faith and things can happen in strange ways beyond our control.

Nick: I have a belief and not because we've been talking about it for three months before filming then three months of filming. But I wouldn't know how to react to someone if they came up to me and said 'hey I think you're gonna die' like he does to me in the movie. If your close friend said that you'd be like 'yeah right'.