The newest chapter in New Line Cinema’s bloody successful franchise takes audiences back to the very beginning of Death’s twisted sense of justice with Final Destination Bloodlines.
Returning audiences to death’s twisted, often blackly comic design are directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky, who knew that after over a decade since the last Final Destination film that they’d have their work cut out for them.
Talking to Peter Gray ahead of the film’s release (you can read our review here), the duo noted the challenges of surprising savvy audiences after all this time, serving as movie magicians as they crafted physical thrills for the film’s grand set pieces.
I just want to quickly say thank you so much for bringing the series back after 14 very long years. I love these films so much, and hearing your pitch story where you “killed yourselves” during the meeting…I thought that was so great and I knew I was in good hands. It made me think how do you choreograph these big, tense death scenes when the audience knows something bad is going to happen? How do you still come up with a way to surprise audiences?
Adam Stein: That is exactly the hardest part, and it’s the thing that kept us up at night. We wanted to make sure that every sequence felt surprising, even though you know that the characters are going to die. So how do you do it? It’s an incredible challenge. Sometimes we thought of it like a magic trick. A magician is about to do something wild, and you’re watching their every move, but then they still manage to surprise you. So we learned a lot from the other movies by studying the details of how they did it. A lot of it has to do, like magic, with misdirection. Where you make the audience think that something else is going to happen, and then you surprise them with this other thing that was also set up. It’s an incredible challenge and an incredible joy to figure it out, and (to) make the audience keep guessing.
And obviously there’s a particular set piece in the middle of the film. When you read that in the script, did you know how it was exactly going to play out? Was it something that more presented itself to you? In the best way possible I mean this, but that scene is disgusting! I loved it!
Zach Lipovsky: I think these movies in particular are highly iterative over the course of a very long time. So, you know, your audience might think that a finished script appears, the director opens it and then just figures out how to shoot it. But this is a very different process. This is years of people (asking), “What would be a great set piece?”, and then, together, the writers and producers start researching all the things that could go wrong. Figuring out how all those things could be within a great geography of each other. How they’re lined up? Where are the doors? Why are there metal objects inside a room that shouldn’t have metal inside of it? Why are (these characters) there in the first place? What are they talking about? Where’s the clipboard? It just goes on and on, and it takes years of it not working for a very long time.
You write a bad version of the scene, and then you show that to people (and) you get feedback. You meet with people that are in charge of making objects move around the room, and you realise that they have really good ideas that are different than what’s in the script. And you change the script, and you do storyboards, and it just goes around and around and around for years. It’s not something that just kind of is written in its final form. It takes a huge amount of effort from hundreds of artists to continuously figure it out. And even some of the details on the day were come up with when we realised we needed extra little moments once we saw it all kind of taking place. But a big part of it, as well, was the physicality of it. A lot of the things that you see in that scene we did practically. We had people flying through the air. Even someone being bent in half was done practically by getting two people to be the different parts of the body.
Adam Stein: Old fashioned magic trick with a double decker apparatus.
Zach Lipovsky: Just trying to figure out all the different ways that we could do these things for real, so that it felt as visceral as possible.
I mean, visceral is the right word. Everything was just dialed up to 11, and you didn’t think you were going to see everything you did…this movie was absolutely worth the wait. It’s the reason we love these movies, but you’ve done it in a way that subverted expectation in a lot of ways. And there’s so much emotion in this film as well, which is a really nice thing to have, obviously with Tony Todd’s appearance. I’m just so stoked for every fan to see this film.
Final Destination Bloodlines is screening in Australian theatres from May 15th, 2025, before opening in the United States on May 16th.
