Production Companies New Line Cinema, Hard Eight Pictures, Kumar Mobiliengesellschaft mbH & Co. Projekt Nr. 1 KG, Matinee Pictures, Practical Pictures, Zide-Perry Productions
Final Destination 3 also brings a new element to the mix that has made the franchise so popular. “We wanted to make FD3 familiar, but different, something new for the audience,” James Wong says. “There has always been a discussion about, ‘If there’s death, is there a sort of opposing life force? If there’s evil is there good?’ ‘And how does that element assert itself?’ We came up with the idea of digital technology, in the form of digital photography. There are digital cameras everywhere – phones are now cameras! It’s not a chemical process, it’s electrical – so we decided to plant clues to how the characters will die in the photographs that Wendy takes the night of the coaster crash. You may take it as death sadistically playing with the characters, showing them how they will die, or you can interpret it as a benevolent life force helping the characters thwart fate and escape death.”
The digital photos also give the audience the opportunity to interpret clues along with the protagonists and attempt to ascertain whose death might be next. “As we go into a new sequence, the audience is armed with a bunch of clues so they can really engage in the movie in a way that they couldn’t with the first two,” comments Craig Perry.
Wendy and Kevin come together in an attempt to save lives – theirs, and those of the other coaster crash survivors – but they are an unlikely couple. “At the beginning of the story, Wendy sees Kevin as a sort of dumb jock,” Winstead quips. “They hang out simply because he’s her boyfriend’s best friend. But because of what they go through - losing people they love – and because they’re working together as a team, by the end they have become close friends.”
Merriman also noticed the arc of his character, Kevin. “I start off as the happy-go-lucky guy, the jokester. I play football with my boys, I got my girl,” Merriman says. “But then losing my sweetheart kind of makes me stop – I start wondering about life and why things happen the way they do.
“Wendy’s just angry at first, but the accident affects me in a way that makes me want to know what happened,” he continues “I’m the one who finds out about the Flight 180 disaster (the opening sequence plane crash from the first Final Destination), which starts the whole ball rolling of Wendy and I trying to interpret the clues in the photos.”
Craig Perry says that the filmmakers had very specific things in mind when it came to casting the film. “The qualities we were looking for in our two leads were people who had the charisma of movie stars, but weren’t so ridiculously rarified that you couldn’t feel like you might know them,” he says. “What we really wanted was normal people in extraordinary circumstances – so it would be like watching your friends go through the tortures of the damned.”
James Wong says he immediately knew that Merriman and Winstead, who previously had acted together in The Ring 2, were right for the roles. “The moment Ryan came in I thought he was the right guy to play Kevin,” says Wong. “Kevin needed to be the kind of guy you want to hang out with, your goofy best buddy, but also someone who could rise to the occasion and become a hero. He had to straddle that line, and also have an all-American, boy-next-door quality.”
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