Looking for another reason to love your 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD collection? Special features like commentaries featuring filmmakers, critics, and other film fans. After living for more than a decade elsewhere on the internet, Commentary Commentary has been reborn here at Dread Central—and as is fitting for its return from the dead, it’s now all about the horror.
The Final Destination franchise kicked off in 2000 with an engaging cast, some fun kills, and an irresistible premise. Four sequels followed over the next decade before Death decided to take a break, but now, a quarter century after that first film, a new sequel has arrived to resurrect the series.
Final Destination: Bloodlines brings Death roaring back to life with some of the franchise’s best kills and its biggest box office to date, and they’ve already announced plans for a seventh entry. It’s a highly entertaining film blending big laughs, gory deaths, and a fun approach to the franchise mythology. The filmmakers are clearly fans themselves, and that love for the entire concept is evident from start to finish.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
Commentators: Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky (co-directors)
1. The film opens on the train tracks, as they knew from the start that they wanted the film to “go full circle.” They see it as a perfect metaphor for death in that we’re all on these tracks towards our demise that we can’t escape… or can we?
2. “We love the legacy of Final Destination using music to provide omens,” says Stein as John Fogerty’s “Bad Moon Rising” shifts into Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.”
3. Stein says there’s a deeply buried Easter Egg somewhere in the lobby scene around the three-minute mark, but he doesn’t reveal it. “The true Final Destination detectives out there” might be able to figure it out.
4. Numerous sets were used to bring the Skyview tower restaurant to life, with the key one being over one hundred feet wide and surrounded by custom-made LED Volume screens that wrap around outside the windows. They repeatedly praise this tech over something like traditional blue screens, and the difference is noticeable.
5. The set used for the floor collapse was about thirty feet off the ground, so the stunt performers could literally fall through the floor.
6. The woman running on fire is Yvette Ferguson, a veteran stunt performer, who set a world record here as “the oldest person on fire in a movie.” Several members of Ferguson’s family are also in the business, and everyone but her had done a fire gag. So she stepped up with this fantastic stunt.
7. The burning guy who collapses against the bar by Iris (Brec Bassinger) is Dustin Brooks, one of this film’s stunt coordinators. His first job in movies was at 17 when he played one of the students being pulled off the plane in the original Final Destination.
8. Little nods and lifts to other films abound, including Titanic, Star Trek, Society of the Snow, American Beauty, Jaws, and the work of legendary cinematographer Dean Cundey.
9. A stunt performer accidentally pulls off Iris’ shoe at 16:37 as she’s sliding towards the window, but they liked the beat so much they kept it in and just left her with one shoe for the rest of her scenes.
10. The kid getting squashed by the piano is a great kill, and they dropped a real piano from 80 feet to get the effect of its destruction. They don’t clarify if they dropped it on a real kid, though. Either way, it’s the scene that always got the biggest reaction from test audiences.
11. Regarding Easter Eggs, they asked the art department to add several throughout the film, and the team didn’t always tell the directors they had done it. The result is that they’re still noticing little details like license plates referencing cars in past entries of the Final Destination franchise.
12. Mortal Kombat II was being produced at New Line Cinema at the same time as this film, so when they needed a clip from a violent video game, they were able to walk across the hall and easily snag the rights.
13. Like most of the films in the series, Bloodlines was filmed in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Old Iris’ (Gabrielle Rose) compound in the woods was built from the ground up just outside of the city.
14. The camera pulls out of Iris’ eye at 36:22, and the Skyview can still be seen in the reflection. “The whole reason the Skyview dancefloor is round is for that shot,” says Lipovsky. “And, of course, that’s also why she’s named Iris,” adds Stein.
15. The funeral scene around the 40-minute mark was filmed in a real cemetery. Visual effects were used to replace people’s real names on headstones and replace them with in-jokes, references, and members of the production.
16. When movies were made on film, they were shot in reels—the physical length of the film equalling about 20 minutes. They were visible in the early days thanks to the “cigarette burns” in the upper right corner of the screen. The need for “reels” ended with the advent of shooting digitally, but they still use them as a reference and edit/discuss film sections as reel one, reel two, etc.
17. The idea of a piece of glass in a cup filled with ice was originally conceived for an earlier Final Destination film, but it never made it onto the screen. They loved the idea after hearing about it and made sure to include it here.
18. Lipovsky shares a screenwriting tip involving rejecting the call and accepting the call. The former is where you have the characters reject their situation and not believe the details of the threat, and the latter comes after consequences have forced them to accept the truth.
19. Close-ups of characters shot behind their backs are called “French overs” or “back overs,” and it works to create a feeling of distance or hidden thoughts.
20. Producer Craig Perry spent almost a week “with a mannequin head, a nose ring, and a chain” trying to find a way to attach them together for the scene where Erik (Richard Harmon) faces death at the tattoo shop without actually endangering the actor. They settled on a safety setup involving magnets.
21. It goes too fast to read, but the truck that just misses hitting Erik at 1:02:34 says “Red Fish Delivery” on its side as a joke about red herrings.
22. “A lot of people think of reshoots as sort of a bad word, but really, it’s additional photography.” They point out several inserts and shots that they grabbed months after principal production ended, and rather than being shots replacing or fixing sequences, they’re little beats meant to strengthen a scene.
23. There’s an ominous feel to the introduction of the revolving glass door at 1:13:40, and it’s because they originally had plans for an elaborate death involving it. The kill—it would have been Darlene—was scrapped, but they kept the setup for the tension it adds. “Everyday things are still scary to these characters.”
24. They knew Tony Todd was ill when he was cast to return to the franchise in the morgue scene, so “it was very, very, very special to shoot this.” They asked him to speak from the heart when it came to the end of the scene, so the message is very much what the legendary actor chose to say. “It really brought us all to tears while filming it.”
25. They did their research when it comes to MRI machines and discovered that ones exist featuring extremely high magnetic strengths, although they’re used exclusively for research purposes. Normal MRI machines operate within the one to three tesla range, but the special ones can reach upward of seven teslas.
26. Owen Patrick Joyner plays Bobby, and he actually has a peanut allergy like his character and is eating a sesame buttercup in the scene. His has lessened over the years, so he improvised the line after eating the candy that “maybe I grew out of it.”
27. Erik’s piercings are glued on via prosthetics and attached to fishing line so they could be physically yanked away from him. The physical approach looks and works better, and it aided Harmon in his performance, too.
28. The shot of Erik’s stomach being ruptured by the wheelchair at 1:27:35 is an homage to the poster from Final Destination 5.
29. They point out the push-in at 1:32:36 and mention that it’s one of many throughout the film. For IMAX screenings, that’s where the film would move from a regular aspect ratio to IMAX. The team behind IMAX was excited to see it used as a creative tool, as its appearance here is always used to signify that Death has arrived at the scene.
30. The big sequence involving Iris’ cabin exploding and the RV flipping was done practically, and filmgoers should be immensely grateful. The stunt team responsible was thrilled as they hadn’t done an explosion this big in years, thanks to Hollywood’s sad preference for CGI. That goes for the burning cabin, too, as it’s a real fire that took twenty-four hours to fully extinguish after filming.
31. They referred frequently to a good news/bad news structure in the scenes. “The bad news is your sister is drowning, the good news is you find a knife to cut her out, the bad news is you drop the knife, the good news is you get the knife, the bad news is it cuts your finger…” They see it as a way to ping pong between hope and fear for characters and viewers alike.
32. Dr. Reddick (Matty Finochio), the guy who explains to Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) that she didn’t actually die in the water, is named in honor of Jeffrey Reddick, who wrote the original Final Destination.
33. The end credits use Stefani’s big newspaper map as a background, and they suggest that fans of Easter Eggs be sure to pause throughout to read the various articles.
34. Lipovsky and Stein worked on the film for three years, and they ended by giving praise and credit to their whole crew. “A lot of the time, the directors get credit for having made the film and having made all the decisions, but it’s an incredible collaboration.”
Quotes Without Context
“This is our Tony Scott shot.”
“We really wanted [the ring] to be super romantic when it’s put on, and extremely graphic and gory when it’s taken off.”
“There are a lot of circles in this movie. The dance floor, the tambourine, the Skyview itself, the creme brulee, the MRI machine… circles kill.”
“We love the Tweety Bird element here of the piano going right into her face.”
“It was kind of special shooting in an actual cemetery surrounded by actual dead people as you’re shooting a Final Destination movie.”
“It was important to us when [we] first came onto the project, we were like ‘we really want to do an actual Rube Goldberg, where you see object hit object hit object.’”
“All the actors were really dedicated to their death scenes; they each wanted theirs to be the best.”
“When you work on an FD movie, the first thing people say to you is ‘logging truck!’”
“One of the really challenging things about a Final Destination movie is how to end it.”
“We really like describing that they get spread across the road like raspberry jam on toast.”
Final Destination: Bloodlines brought the franchise back to life both creatively and financially as the biggest hit of the series so far. It’s a fun, gory time, and the commentary track shows that the directors were wholly invested in making it the best it could be. Their love for (and knowledge of) the franchise is clear, and that energy comes through. They also point out several tips and techniques in both screenwriting and filmmaking that offer practical help to the next generation of filmmakers, and it’s a nice touch, seeing as they mention how they grew up listening to commentary tracks.
https://ift.tt/2aLwzPo https://ift.tt/5w4XHeW
No comments:
Post a Comment