Producers Craig Perry and Warren Zide read a lot of scripts. "Even though Final Destination came to us as a treatment - it stood out," says Perry. "On an immediate level I responded to how universal the themes are -- the feeling when you take a plane that you're placing your destiny in someone else's hands -- then taking that idea forward to question how fate interacts with our lives at every stop light, every street corner."
The original treatment for Final Destination was written by Jeffrey Reddick. "We worked with Jeff to develop the treatment," Perry explains. "The story went through several incarnations. Initially, the characters who get off the plane had no immediate connection and only sought each other out after the tragic incident. We changed that, logically and organically creating a situation where a class of high school kids are at the center of the story, but the ideas and themes of the story permeate well beyond that particular demographic."
New Line purchased the treatment with Reddick writing the first draft script. "We always wanted to work with Glen Morgan and James Wong," Perry recalls, "but they weren't immediately available." After about a year, Morgan and Wong finally had a chance to review the project and loved the premise. "Glen and James know how to generate an atmosphere of dread - to create suspense out of things that are ordinary. That's what their work on "The X Files" and "Millenium" is all about," Perry concludes.
The cornerstone of the story for Morgan and Wong was a fascination with life and death and the workings of fate. "I believe that at one time or another we've all experienced a sense of prescience. We have a hunch, a feeling, and then that hunch proves true," says Wong. Do we become momentarily aware of our fate -- a brief glimpse at the script for the movie we're enacting -- and if so, who's the director?
"Once we had a basic story," says Morgan, "I started cataloguing the strange coincidences in my own life. For example, I was in the Vancouver airport waiting for a flight when John Denver came on over the loudspeaker.
I remember thinking to myself - Hey, he just died in a plane crash -- that's a little weird. We wrote a version of that experience into the script."
Among their many credits, Morgan and Wong were the creators of the cult series "Space: Above and Beyond". They were Co-Executive Producers for two seasons on the Emmy nominated and Golden Globe Award winning series "The X-Files". "We want to do for planes and air travel what Jaws did for sharks and swimming," quips Wong. Morgan and Wong's second draft script got the green light from New Line Cinema.
"There have been a lot of plane crashes done in the movies over the years," Perry admits. "This is probably the first one in which the audience experiences the entirety of the crash from the perspective of the person sitting in the cabin. There are no cut-aways -- it's all very claustrophobic and very real because you're experiencing it first-hand, in the same way the character is."
Movie Database
In Theaters
