The Final Destination franchise is filled with many memorable death scenes, though there are some that stand out as the most iconic of them all. Among them is the unforgettable bus hit in the first film, and it was thanks to a last-minute editing trick that it worked out so well.
Looking back at the film in honor of its 25th anniversary, director James Wong and co-writer Glen Morgan shared some behind-the-scenes stories about Final Destination in a new interview with Variety. They addressed the famous scene in which Terry (Amanda Detmer) tells the other survivors that they can “drop f***ing dead” just before she’s immediately smashed into by a speeding bus. Morgan shared how the scene was actually inspired by a close call he’d witnessed in real life that always stuck with him.
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“For the bus hit, I had been one summer to the Hollywood Bowl, and I was on Highland and waiting to go across to the parking lot,” he explained.”Hundreds of people are just waiting for the light to turn, and the guy next to me takes a step off the curb and the person behind him grabs him and pulls him back just as a bus goes by. Everybody gasped. It really was frightening and stuck in my head. And when Jim and I sat down and started thinking, we go, ‘You know what’d be great? To have that thing where a girl gets hit by a bus.’”
You know what’d be great? To have that thing where a girl gets hit by a bus.
Wong added of the reaction to the scene, “When we tested it, it worked so well that people didn’t even hear the next scene because people are still reacting to it.”
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In the theatrical cut, the scene clearly made a big impact on viewers, still highly memorable for many after 25 years. However, the problem at the time was that the expensive prosthetic human made for the scene just didn’t look right when the filmmakers saw the footage. If left as it was, the scene would have been underwhelming, but an editing trick along with a reaction shot of the other characters helped polish the moment to look much better.
The Bus Hit Almost Looked Bad
“But the bus hit, when we did it, it didn’t work,” Morgan said. “It was a $30,000 prosthetic Amanda, and it got hit by the bus and we were like, ‘Oh.’ So the editors, Logan and Jim Coblentz, came back and they used the bus as a wipe. We knew that you had to have some reactions, so we immediately went out and got Kristen [Cloke] and Devon [Sawa] and sprayed blood on them with a paintbrush. And I don’t know why, but Amanda has that line, ‘You can go f***ing drop dead.’ That has an importance to the effect of the bus hit too. I don’t know why, but I think it distracts people or something like that.”
The original Final Destination film is streaming on Max.
Source: Variety
Final Destination
- Release Date
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March 17, 2000
- Runtime
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98 minutes
- Director
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James Wong
