"We're going to make this as bloody as we possibly can" - 'Final Destination Bloodlines' Directors on the Thrills and Challenges of Their First Studio Horror Film

David chats with Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky about their new entry in the 'Final Destination' franchise.

The Final Destination films have always held a special place in my heart. At the core of each movie is the idea that Death can be temporarily evaded, but that once Death has its sights set on you, it will go to extraordinary, exquisite and frankly ingenious lengths to terminate you. The kills are gleeful Rube Goldberg machines designed to toy with the victim and the audience alike.

After 14 long years without any new Final Destination films, I’m delighted to say that Final Destination Bloodlines (out in theaters this weekend) is a return to form for the franchise. Directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky not only honor the five films that came before but also play with audience expectations of the franchise itself in fresh ways.

And of course, the kills are absolute genius.

There were moments while watching this movie that I started spontaneously applauding at the screen, cackling with glee at how the filmmakers endeavored to make the audience as uncomfortable as humanly possible as Death’s design inched toward completion. This is definitely a movie to watch with an audience.

I was thrilled to be able to speak with Adam and Zach about their experience making the film and to share our conversation with Decoding Everything. Our interview had so many insights that I’m splitting it into two parts. Part 2, out next week, will be a more spoiler-filled look at specific scenes in the movie. This interview (Part 1) contains some basic plot elements of Final Destination Bloodlines and details revealed in the trailer, but is otherwise spoiler-free.

We discussed Adam and Zach’s favorite kills from the Final Destination franchise, the ways they wanted to reinvent the series’ template, how audiences have changed in the 14 years since the last Final Destination movie was released, and what they learned from making their first big studio film. This interview has been condensed for brevity and clarity.

David Chen: What made you want to tackle the Final Destination franchise?

Adam Stein: Our indie movie Freaks was well-reviewed and people found it on streaming. And it definitely exceeded our expectations, but it didn't exactly lead to people wanting to throw millions of dollars at us. It was a long process of trying to find our next job. And it wasn't until a few years ago when we heard they were making another Final Destination that we forced our way into the room and made them pay attention to us and listen to what we would do with the movie.

Zach Lipovsky: Yeah. Most people probably don't know that like actors, directors basically audition to direct movies, especially big movies. And so they started with hundreds of directors on a list, and they met with people and they whittle it down. And there's different levels of meetings, and eventually it gets down to the final few, and you're trying to convince more and more important people to pay attention to as you go through. We were obviously big fans of that world. And especially as filmmakers, Final Destination is really unique as a cinematic craft, because death is never really personified. Death is essentially the filmmaking.

Adam: That's why we're such big fans of it, and I think that's why it's so popular with film people is because of the craft that goes into creating the Rube Goldberg kills. It's really death by insert shot.

That's right. When somebody's watching a movie, typically that experience is mediated by a lot of things, like the actor. But with Final Destination, it's just you watching what the director wants you to see, basically. And there's nothing to distract you from, ‘This is what the director is showing me.’ It's the director that's driving this action.

Adam: And there's such joy to it too. What people love about Final Destination is that Death is so clever with the way he comes to kill people. And it's really us being Death, that we get to plant things that we hide from the audience, misdirect, surprise them, and then bring things back later to ultimately kill the characters.

What is your favorite Final Destination kill, and why?

Zach: Of all time? For me, I think there's a few that I would put at the very top. I've always loved the little kid who gets crushed to death in FD2, I believe. As we tried to homage in our film, there's a kid that we crushed to death.

And then to me, there's what we call the spaghetti death, which is in FD2 as well. There's a character who throws spaghetti out the window and you can completely forget about the spaghetti. And all these other horrible things happen to him. His hand gets stuck in a [sink disposal], his kitchen gets lit on fire. And then he finally escapes it all and what gets him is the spaghetti. The callback nature of that, which is so much fun, is something that I've always loved and we tried to do in our film as well.

Adam: For me, the screw on the balance beam sticks out as just masterful levels of suspense. You're watching this tiny little screw, and you're watching feet miss the screw just for such a long time, and it builds such suspense. And the fact that you're squirming in your seat and covering your eyes as nothing is happening, it's just a testament to the masterful suspense building there. It was a bit of an inspiration when we started the shard of glass in the cup sequence. Create some small object that makes you cringe, but then the other masterful part of the screw on the balance beam is: it isn't what kills the character. It almost has nothing to do with what kills the character. It just trips the dominoes that lead to the character's death. That was another inspiration.

I'll just share my own, just for your knowledge. Final Destination 2. I'm a simple man with simple pleasures. Final Destination 2, log through guy's head.

Adam: Well, of course. The opening sequences are in their own category.

I didn't know we couldn't count those!

Adam: Once you're in the opening sequences, you can’t beat log.

Zach: When you say favorite death, it excludes all openings.

Oh, okay. Sorry, I didn't know the rules for my question! [laughter] But okay, let's talk about Final Destination Bloodlines. One of the things I appreciated is that this movie tries to add to the mythos of the franchise. Can you talk about what you wanted to add to the lore of Final Destination and how that drove the story?

Zach: Yeah, we approached it in several different ways. One of the biggest obstacles with a Final Destination movie is, to some degree, there's a template that the audience is expecting, which make the movies great. But at the same time, you want the movie to be unpredictable. We love the feeling where you have no idea where the movie's going next. And all the previous Final Destination movies fit a very specific order of events. What we were really excited to do was find a way of changing the formula in ways that didn't break the canon. We mess with how the premonition works, where it comes out of someone else's eye… We still have an order, but it's a slightly different way of the order working because everyone's related.

And all of those were different ways of allowing fans of the franchise to have an experience of being delighted by not knowing what's going to happen. Even down to the point of having set pieces where you don't know which character is going to die, which is quite unique. Most of the other franchise entries, it'll cut to one person in a room and that person's going to die. And even the one time that we do that, there's a surprise. We're always looking at how to take what's come before and honor it, but also twist it in a way so that it's unpredictable.

And then the other main thing that we wanted to do was elaborate more on Bludworth's backstory and give a lot more of a beginning to his character as well as an end. Working really closely with Tony Todd to explore how to progress his character a little bit into the new age of horror that we're in and away from some of the tropes that he's been a part of in the past — that was really powerful and really exciting to do with him.

Very cool. I want to rewind a little bit, actually. There've been multiple reports of different versions of this movie. At one point, Tony Todd said they were going to film the next two back to back, but that was 20 years ago when he said that. There was supposed to be one that was supposed to be about EMS, first responders, and stuff like that. When you came onto the project, was any of that in play, or did you start from scratch?

Adam: We got involved after all of that. But we know a little bit about it, so we can shine some light on it. The first responders concept was an interesting one that they were really close to filming, but it was right before COVID. And I think when COVID happened, the idea of a bunch of first responders being marked for death put a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

Can't imagine why. Yeah.

Zach: Basically killed that concept.

Adam: But then this concept came from Jon Watts, who did the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, and many other things. And he is a big FD fan. He basically met with New Line and said, "If I were to ever do anything with you guys, it would be Final Destination. And here's how I think it should go." And he came up with the idea of starting it in the past, having it all based around a family with one older character who had survived for decades, and death coming after the family tree. And with that essential seed is where the new iteration was born. And Jon's focus, which we really loved and are very grateful for, is basing it around a family, makes it a lot more emotional and a lot more grounded than the previous versions of the franchise.

Which are mostly an assortment of strangers brought together.

Adam: Exactly, exactly. A bunch of strangers or a bunch of teenage friends, or whatever.

Zach: There's something that happens in the previous movies that we called the “Who’s Next?” issue. Which was someone would die horribly and then they just turn to each other and say, "Who's Next?" And have no care for the previous person that had just died.

Adam: Except — and one of the things that really attracted us to this idea — is in Final Destination 3 with Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Amanda Cruz, characters who are sisters in the movie. I always found that relationship and those deaths to be a lot more gripping because they're sisters and they care so much about each other. And they're not really getting along, but she still wants to save her life. You saw how powerful that could be. Now, with the whole family, and this was Jon's insight, the stakes are just way higher. And you start to be able to have characters that have more dimension to them.

This is probably the biggest production you've worked on in terms of budget and scale. Can you tell me something you've learned during this process that you didn't know before? I'm asking from both the film production standpoint and also everything that's happened after the film has been finished.

Adam: From a filmmaking perspective, as a director, having more money to make a film makes everything easier except for one thing. Everything that it makes easier is: you have more time, you have more time to prep, you have more experienced crew that really knows their stuff that you can collaborate with. You have the pick of anyone you want to work with. You've got everything you can dream of in terms of tools and all that stuff.

The thing that is very, very difficult, and it takes up more than half your time, is dealing with the stress of the machine, especially of the people who are spending the money. Because they're spending tons of money on the movie, and so they feel this immense pressure for everything to go perfectly. And as you're proceeding, if there's anything that they sense might not be perfect right away, they get very nervous and start second-guessing or jumping into fear mode. And so it becomes the job of the director, besides making the movie. There's a lot of managing up.

Zach: I would say that when you're making a tiny movie all of your stress is, can we even achieve filming this movie and hiring people that even know what they're doing? Because you have so little money. But no stress as far as everyone who is there is there just because they love making movies and they love supporting you and because they're-

And you are the ultimate boss. You're the person you need to answer to.

Zach: No one's there for any reason other than to create something cool with your group. But then as money goes up, that dynamic changes and your dynamic becomes a lot of basically cheerleading upwards that things are going to be great, and that takes a lot of effort.

Adam: And selling your ideas. It becomes more of a process of, here's what we're thinking of doing. Here's why it's important. And you become more of a salesman of your ideas to the team. Now, all those people are good people. They were just a bit stressed out in this era of-

Because their employment may rely on whether you make the correct decision.

Adam: Absolutely.

Zach: I'll say, in the end on this film though, the final film we have, every frame of it we love and every frame of it we came to a beautiful place of everybody getting behind what the film was. And we were incredibly lucky through that process. A lot of directors get to the end of the process of making a big-budget movie and can't necessarily say that every frame in that film was their decision. And we've had a really, really blessed experience by the end of it.

Adam: I think we learned a lot about that process. And also about the testing process that happens in the studio world. As you're in post, testing it with audiences and getting scored and all that stuff.

Any big insight that came out of the testing for you?

Zach: Audiences specific to horror have changed a huge amount in the last 14 years. And one of the things [the studio executives] were nervous about when we went into the process of making the movie was the level of gore, which was really based on the testing processes from 14 years ago. Where apparently, 14 years ago, if any amount of blood, you held on it for too long, specifically the female audience would completely tank in the testing. And so they would cut back and cut back and cut back and cut away from everything to try and keep those female numbers up.

We were just like, “We're making Final Destination! We're going to make this movie as bloody as we possibly can.” That's why people are coming to this movie is to see blood on the big screen.

Adam: You don't buy a ticket to Final Destination to cut away.

Zach: And we did get a lot of [shots without gore for safety] in case that wasn't the case. And then in our director's cut we went full gore, we put all the goriness that we had in there. And when the testing came back, not only did everyone want all the gore that was in there, but specifically the female audience wanted even more gore.

Adam: They were out for blood!

Zach: And the movie tested 10% higher even with women just in general. And so, we then went in and added even more gore to the gore that we wanted. And the studio process, they were very surprised that taste had changed. And they're seeing that across all their movies. There's just a bloodlust that has happened in the last 14 years that we personally think.. is just that over that time because of the streaming and elevated television bubble — television shows like Game of Thrones, Squid Game, whatever it is — TV has become a lot gorier.

And much more accessible.

Zach: Right. I think audiences are used to that. To the point where if you're buying a ticket to Final Destination, it better be even more than that. It has to be even crazier than television. And so, we were really given the ability to make some of the deaths even more bloody.

Anything you learned after, like during the release process?

Adam: This is just so exciting. It's like a dream come true. The other day we had a meeting at Warner Brothers in the biggest conference room I've ever been in. 60 people around an enormous table with a presentation screen the size of a movie screen.

Zach: The entire room had been themed in Final Destination lore. Imagine a meeting that has production design. The table has skulls and peanut butter cups and pennies and-

Adam: Beyond the production design, the content that they're sharing is all the stuff that Warner Brothers worldwide is doing to market this movie in different countries, across social, across commercials, billboards, whatever. And we're like, I can't believe this is... If that's not a filmmaker's dream come true, I can't believe we have so many talented, creative people working on this movie.

Zach: Yeah, they've made a Final Destination bus that has all sorts of horrible things that happen if you go inside of it. They're doing all of these incredible stunts in England and in Paris and in Mexico City. And they said at one point, “There's rooms this big in every country of people figuring out how to get this movie out there.” Which was just crazy to imagine all the people that are helping get the word out that you don't even meet that are just as excited. And they told us, they screened the movie for all the exhibitors at CinemaCon, as well as they said yesterday in 30 or 40 other places across the US. And immediately all the exhibitors were just like, “We're ordering even more screens because we can't wait for people to see how crazy this is going to be.”

Adam: Yeah. I think Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy who run the Warner Brothers film group, I think they are extremely filmmaker friendly. Everything they did with Sinners, as an example. And they just want movies to succeed in theaters.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this interview next week.