Directors Zach Lipovsky & Adam Stein (Freaks) wanted to helm Final Destination Bloodlines so badly that they faked Stein’s death in a pitch meeting over Zoom, to demonstrate their keen understanding of the horror franchise centered around elaborate, graphic deaths.
Lipovsky explained why in a chat with Bloody Disgusting ahead of the sequel’s release in theaters on May 16.
“The idea to fake our deaths came from the idea of how to communicate tone in a directing pitch. You’re always trying to express what the movie’s going to be like when you watch it. And it’s really difficult to just say, ‘It’s going to be surprising, it’s going to be gory, it’s going to be funny.’ How do you actually make them feel that?”
“Show, don’t tell,” Stein adds.
“Show, don’t tell,” Lipovsky affirms. “We decided, well, let’s actually have this surprise sequence happen to them over Zoom and have Adam’s head chopped off mid-pitch. That really communicated tone to them because they got to experience that.”
The filmmaking duo’s affection for the Final Destination films wasn’t the only reason they were drawn to Bloodlines, either. There’s clear parallels between Bloodlines and their previous genre thriller, Freaks, which centered around a family unit facing grave external threats. The family patriarch tries to protect his daughter by forcing an extreme, reclusive life inside their isolated little house. Not unlike Bloodlines‘ matriarch.
Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
“We definitely gravitate towards stories about families and the stakes that can bring,” Stein explains. “The relationships under strain, under insane circumstances. And when we heard about John Watts’s concept for this movie, we were really excited about that aspect, because it felt like it opened so many doors to explore new Final Destination delight in making it about a family and all the big stakes and big emotions that could bring to the franchise.”
Bloodlines succeeds at bringing massive, ultra-violent stakes for its family, bringing no shortage of creative carnage. Designing each kill takes a lot of thought, planning, and trial and error. Lipovsky breaks down just how much goes into Death’s design and each death sequence.
“It’s an incredibly iterative process that takes hundreds of people over many years. It’s not something a writer just writes down, they hand it to the director, and then we just go shoot it. It goes around and around and around and around through huge amounts of brainstorming and round tables, going to the location, and actually physically holding all the objects that might be involved in realizing they don’t do what the script says they do.
“You have to completely change that and throw that out and go back to the script and change it, and then storyboard it, and then go to the location again. You just go around and around constantly trying to figure out ways that it can be both always surprising so that the audience is never ahead of how these set pieces build, but also relatable and believable. They have to be things that you’ve experienced in your everyday life, and they have to behave in ways that the physics actually kind of makes sense.“
Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
That early teased scene involving Richard Harmon‘s character facing death thanks to a nose ring caught in a coiling chain? Stein reveals how long that took to test. “I remember the producer, Craig Perry, spent a week holed up in his office with a mannequin head that had a nose ring with a chain and different clasps of how it could fit the nose ring.” Lipovsky continues, “Trying to figure out how a nose ring could get caught but then not release? Trying to figure that out was very tricky.”
“We wanted to make the deaths the gnarliest deaths in Final Destination history, and also have it be the most fun experience for the audience,” Stein tells BD of their ultimate goal with Bloodlines. “Because people are buying a ticket to a Final Destination movie, they want to see something they’ve never seen before. They also want to have a great time with the crowd. That was really our focus, and it came from this feeling that Death has a sense of humor.
“The way that Death is getting these people, the reason for the Rube Goldbergs is because Death just loves this method of killing people. We tried to put ourselves into Death’s shoes as much as possible and figure out what would be the most fun, most ironic, most surprising way of killing people.”
(L-R) Director ADAM STEIN and Director ZACH LIPOVSKY in New Line Cinema’s “Final Destination Bloodlines,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
The post ‘Final Destination Bloodlines’ Directors Aimed to Deliver the Gnarliest Deaths in Franchise History [Interview] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
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