Death pays a visit to a group of wayward teens in supernatural thriller Final Destination, the feature debut of genre vets Glen Morgan and James Wong

Shards of light break through the thick foliage of a densely wooded residential area north of Vancouver, British Columbia. A wayward leaf flits upon a gentle breeze, and the nearby bubbling of a small stream provides a calming soundtrack to the relaxing scene. It's easy to get lost in the natural tranquility of such a moment - until the leaf stops dead in the air just before reaching the ground. A loud voice interrupts the serenity, yelling , "It needs more magic." The sound is disorienting, like a broken stare. "It needs that supernatural edge. Let's do it again."
Suddenly, dozens of people appear from the peripgery, each seeming to tackle some grossly unappreciated task in 10 seconds or less. One of the men, frustrated, yanks the leaf by a string back onto its tree branch perch. The actibity is all part of the set of Final Destination, the feature film debut of genre duo Glen Morgan and James Wong, who was looking to eboke a feeling of dread - not serenity - from the scene. After all, the moment is meant to announce the presence of a quite dissatisfied Death eager to reclaim renegade souls.
In Final Destination, high school student Alex (Devon Sawa) has a premonition when boarding a flight to France that the plane will explode and he and his classmates will die. He causes a scene and is escorted from the doomed craft along with six others caught in the melee. It turns out he was right. The plane blows up soon after takeoff, but the survivors quickly learn that Death doesn't take kindly to being cheated.
While it might sound like a setup for faceless fishhook-wielding maniacs and young starlets wearing low-cut T-shirts, Final Destination is intended to be something much more. In fact, executives at New Line Cinema called upon the talented team of Morgan and Wong to revise the original script, which featured an actually Grim Reaper figure slicing and dicing his way through a teen cast - something they felt was way too 1996. Morgan and Wong, best known for penning some of the The X-Files' most creative episodes, reworked the material, hoping to raise the bar for teen horror stories with a fresh take on slaughter how-to.
"I don't feel respect is paid to people, young people, in those films," Morgan says.
"We said, 'If we do this, we think death can't be personified by anything,'" Wongs adds.
"It just has to be a presence, and the way people die has to be sort of these Rube Goldberg-esque things that happen - howone thing affects another, sort of like a mousetrap idea.'"
Seeking to create what some might consider a Hollywood anomaly - an inventive, frightening teen thriller - the pair produced a revision that featured Death only as an unseen force rather than a guy with a cool costum. That shift in tone spawned a host of artistic concepts.
"I had the opportunity to do a little research on the seven religions and what they thought of death and what their differenct incarnations of death were. It was very interesting for us to try to put that information into play," says visual effects supervisor and producer Ariel Velasco Shaw. "What we're really looking to try to do in this show is try to get a base of the brain reaction, a sort of creepy feel, rather than the more obvious slasher killer type of thing. They way we're handling it basically is by trying to look at what culturally we're being brouht up with and what we're being told about death, and trying to play off of that."
Translating that research to the screen largely fell to the production design team, who often had to construct several versions of the same set to convey the impact Alex and his cohorts had made on their respective realities by thwarting Death. It was a challenge production designer John Willet relished.
"There are two realities to [the movie]. The beginning of the movie, before the plane crash, is the real world," Willet explains. "Through this bizarre circumstance of Alex's premonition, he pulled himself ans some of the kids off the plane, this weird progression of events because you can't really screw around with fate. Those kids were supposed to die. So, one by one, sure enough, they do [begin to] die. The job for us was to try and give you a visual difference, some sort of visual setting for how this happens. So, what we found is any environment that exists in the normal world looks normal. The walls are all square at 90 degrees, the colors are all normal, everything is normal. Once Alex pulls the kids off the plane, you're in what we call the skewed world. Sets that you have already seen in the normal world, when you go back to them now, all the perspectives are forced, and nothing's at 90 degrees, roofs and ceilings come down at odd angeles, colors are all washed out and you never see blue."
The difference between the two worlds is not intended to be jarring; viewers should only notice the change on the subconscious level.
"When you look at it,it's a very subtle effect," Wongs says. "You're wondering if we're using too wide lens or something to make it look a little bit off. And that's the kind of subtle effect that we have in trying to create a difference creepy mood."
"What we're trying to do is give someone a feeling of unease witout being able to figure out why it is," Willet adds. "Because as with anything that makes you a bit uneasy, the second you can identify the cause, almost by definition the uneasiness leaves you."

Evoking the unique, creepy feeling means perfecting every scene. So, the aforementioned leaf falls again and is returned to its treetop home, ad naruseam. Enter Sawa, who's supposed to walk underneath the leaf at just the right moment so it lands perfectly in his hand. After what seems like 20 takes, Sawa's stride and the leaf's descent finally coincide. "The kid can catch a leaf," the actor yells exuberantly.
Wong, however, is still dissatisfied. Sawa's double is sent in to walk toward the lead, which now falls at the man's feet. At least a dozen more takes are attempted, none of which pleases the director, who now begins to weigh the option of inserting a CGI leafs into the scene during post-production.
Undauted, Sawa prances around the set like leaf-catching is an untapped substitute for caffeine. The hyperactice actor does so far as to place a handheld, battery-operated fan into his mouth, spread his arms wide and re-enact the crash of Final Destination's flight 180 (the films original title). It must be his mom's cooking.
"It's good to be home," says the Vancouver-born Sawa. "My mom does my laundry, home-cooked meals. That's fun. I love it."
For good or bad, Sawa's antics are not contagious. Ali Larter, who plays the film's female lead Clear, retreats to the set of her character's sanctuary, a makeshift artist's studio in the family garage. Pacing and chain-smoking, she tries to psych up for her big day of dialogue with Sawa, all the while surrounded by Clear's sketches, sculptures, mammoth collection of junky knickknacks and the all-important Hole poster.
"We're shooting like 16-hour days, everyday, five days a week - six days a week this week. So, I'm ready for a break," says Larter, who recently ejoyed her first starring role in House on Haunted Hill and Varsity Bles. The career-conscious actress says the script's ambitious appeoach to the teen thriller arracted her to the role.
"I had a pile of teen scripts, and everything I read, it seemed like I'd read before," Larter says. "I didn't think there was anything unique about them. Then I read Final Destination. I just thought that it had a really cool concept about it. It kind of inbolbed love and drama, and it asks a lot of questions. It doesn't really take the easy road out that I think a lot of movies do to try to appease the audience or appease the studios. I think this is kind of riskier film, and I was just excited by it.
"I think that it tackled some issues and it's not fluff," Larter adds. "It's not just kids running around. I think this film is definitely different."
Larter's co-stars are quick to echo her sentiments. "It's challenging as an actor," Sawa says. "[Alex] is definitely a developing character. He starts out at this sort of shy, non-talkative kid in school, and he becomes this crazy lunatic by the end."
"Glen Morgan said, 'I want people who have seen this movie to look both ways before they cross the street and think about each little moment in their lives a little bit differently and appreciate life a little more,'" says Sean William Scott, who played jock jerk Stifler in American Pie. "Some movies you walk away and you kow it's just a sit down and laugh kind of movie, but this is one I think people will be thinking about for a couple of days afterwards."
According to producers Warren Zide and Craig Perry, the team behind hit teen comedy American Pie, that's exactly the reaction Final Destination should elicit. "I think what makes this mobie different is the fact that everybody has sort of had that moment, " Perry explains. "How often do people get on a plane and not take into account, 'My god, do I realize that I'm entrusting my life, and so are maybe 260 other people, to one guy who's sitting there in the cockpit who may be drunk right now?' Seriously, if you think about it, that's one of the very few times in out lives that we are completely abdicating control, we're giving it all up, and allowing somebody else to have control over whether we live or die."
Of course, the behind-the-scenes team maintains that the film is different from other recent teen fare in yet aother way: They insist it's not a horror film. Yes, teens are stalked by an unseen murderous force and, one by one, succumb to death in inventive ways. But like most other genre filmmakers these days, Final Destination's creators prefer the politically correct tag "supernatural thriller" - as if the Ed Wood Manual for Hollywood PR was their new bible. Perry, however, takes pride in years of horror fandom and says he wanted to break into the genre to put a fresh spin on outdated material.
"I wouldn't say it's horror, and there's one specific reason," he says. "I think horror as a label has been reduced to people in slickers and rain hats hacking up people. Personally, I believe tha tkind of movie is more of a thriller because it doesn't have any supernatural elements. It's just a guy trying to kill you, and that's not otherworldly. A trye horror movie in my opinion has elements of the supernatural. If anything, I would call this a supernatural thriller because I don't think it has the more base elements of the horror genre. It is a thriller because it's smarter and it does have the supernatural elements. It's a weird hybrid between the two."
Or as Sawa says, "There's no bad demons running around."