Production Companies New Line Cinema, Hard Eight Pictures, Kumar Mobiliengesellschaft mbH & Co. Projekt Nr. 1 KG, Matinee Pictures, Practical Pictures, Zide-Perry Productions
“Mary brings a kind of soulfulness to her role as Wendy,” Wong continues. “She is deeply affected by the accident, but she’s strong, and fights to maintain control.”
One of the strengths of the ensemble cast was the range that they brought to the story. “The characters in the film are all very distinct and every single person in the cast is incredibly different,” Perry remarks. “It’s a testament to their character that they all get along so well, and at a young age are so adept at dealing with people who are very different from themselves.”
Eighteen-year-old Alexz Johnson, the youngest member of the cast, plays Erin, a Goth-girl who is a purposeful outsider along with her boyfriend Ian. “I read twice for the part of Julie, Wendy’s younger sister,” Johnson remembers. “I had this real rocker jacket on at the second reading, and I was in a real bad mood. As I was leaving, they called me back to read for Erin. Her dialogue in the scene was very sarcastic and I’ve got a pretty dry sense of humor, so I think the filmmakers picked up on that.”
Kris Lemche, who plays Ian, gets to deliver a lot of the best lines in the film. For example, standing in line for the coaster he points out that statistically the chance of dying on a coaster ride is one in 150 million… the natural conclusion being that you’ve got a better chance of dying in a car accident on the way to the amusement park than on the ride.
“He does spout some interesting facts that seem to be just right there on the tips of his fingers,” says Lemche. “And most of the weird stuff that I’ve talked about I have gone and researched. On the very first day of shooting I had a line about a concept called paradol, which is this human thing of seeing bizarre and, what we’d interpret as sort of prophetic images in very simple things - like seeing the Virgin Mary in a piece of burnt toast and how human beings seem to have this. The first day I had no idea, I had never heard of it before and it was just thrown in there in the script and it’s something I had to sort of ramble off. During the read- through I asked Glen Morgan about it and he wrote me notes on it, he gave me websites to look at and it’s been sort of an ongoing education, dealing with these random insertions of weird information.”
The Final Destination franchise has never fit easily into a genre classification. “I’d say that Final Destination 3 is a supernatural thriller,” says producer Craig Perry. “In my opinion, a straight horror movie has an element of the supernatural. But there’s an action component in the franchise, because of the way death deals out its vengeance. Therefore, Final Destination 3 is a supernatural thriller which combines the best of the horror genre by keeping it supernatural and otherworldly, with elements of the thriller - the action, suspense and close calls that we expect from that genre. It’s less of a synthesis than a sort of bastard offspring of two genres.”
Striking a balance between the genres presents its own set of challenges for the crew.
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