Wong Time Coming
Glen Morgan and James Wong talk Final Destination, The Others and the loaned Gunmen.
      by Sarah Kendzior

Filmmakers James Wong (left) and Glen Morgan on the set of Final Destination.

When reading The 11th Hour's first interview with Glen Morgan and James Wong, one cannot help but notice a recurrent theme. The seminal genre television writers -- speaking from the set of their first major film production, Flight 180 -- comment freely about the status of their latest projects, including their new pilot The Wonder Cabinet ("It's dead"), their adaptation of The Mark ("I think it's pretty much dead"), and their possible remake of Fantastic Voyage ("I don't know"). (The project is currently, well, dead.) Morgan and Wong devotees have long become accustomed to these twists of fate -- the writers are almost as well known for what didn't make it to the airwaves (The Notorious Seven, Skip Chasers) as for what did (The X-Files, Millennium, Space: Above and Beyond) -- but these developments seemed particularly discouraging. Luckily for fans of quality genre work, times have changed.

Now, nine months after The 11th Hour's inaugural issue, Flight 180 -- directed by Wong, produced by Morgan, and co-written by both -- is set to be released March 17 under the new title Final Destination. Free from their contract with Fox, the pair have signed a lucrative deal with Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks company to produce and write episodes of NBC's new supernatural series The Others, which airs Saturdays at 9:00 EST. Even indirectly, the creations of Morgan and Wong have a new lease on life; Chris Carter's 1013 Productions is currently shooting a pilot based on The Lone Gunmen, the trio of conspiracy theorists who first appeared in the duo's X-Files episode "E.B.E."

The crew prepares a dummy so that death can claim another victim in Final Destination.

But, of course, this is a Morgan and Wong story, and while the Foxed-up days of premature cancellation have reached their end, the filmmakers have nonetheless encountered several obstacles along the way. To begin with, there is Final Destination, a supernatural thriller following a teenager (Devon Sawa) haunted by the premonition that the flight he is about to take will end in tragedy. He and a few of his classmates (Kerr Smith, Ali Larter) manage to elude death, only to find that death is coming for them, one by one.

"They had a treatment that neither Jim and I liked very much," Morgan recalls of the original screenplay, written by Jeffrey Reddick. "And our agent said, 'Well you've got to meet with them and tell them how you would do it.' And so we went in and said, 'We would never see the killer', and to our surprise, they said okay." The resulting rewrite included so many alterations that, according to Wong, "Everything except for the set-up was changed. It's pretty much a different screenplay. In the treatment, death was like a slasher kind of guy. Once we started to change that, it became really exciting for us to do."

Less excited at the prospect was Reddick. "I don't know what his reaction was, but I heard rumors that he was unhappy with it," reveals Wong. "He's never said anything to us directly. He came to the set in Vancouver one day to be in the movie. We a shot a scene that we ultimately cut out that he was in. I hadn't heard anything, the only thing I heard was that during the process he had emailed notes to the executives, which they didn't pass on to us."

Despite Reddick's alleged objections, Morgan and Wong's changes remained. Final Destination takes a distinct departure from the Scream-fueled teen slasher genre, conveying death not as a distinct persona but, says Wong, "as manifested in forces all around us. I like the idea of someone trying to escape death, if it was his time and he had a window open to see it, and stepped away from that. I think it's kind of cool, and kind of scary because everyone comes in contact with these things. You don't know when it's going to happen to you. You don't know what event precipitates that," he adds. "That was interesting."

Morgan agrees: "I'm happy with the filmmaking aspect in that the sequences are built up, that the suspense and the tension are hopefully created. When I see Scream, there's no Hitchcockian-type material. It's just the guy pops out, he runs around, they fall down the stairs, and when it's time for the character to get killed, he knifes them. This has some build up, although it also has some shocking moments and stuff, and I don't see that much in movies nowadays."

Final Destination's Billy (Seann William Scott), Clear (Ali Larter) and Alex (Devon Sawa).

Morgan and Wong's deference to older genre films is evident in the names of Final Destination's characters, almost all of which were chosen with a classic horror director in mind, including Tod Browning, Robert Wiene, Alfred Hitchcock, and Val Lewton. Inspirations for the remaining characters, however, were drawn from disparate sources. "Clear is actually our assistant," says Wong, referring to the character played by Larter. "She just has the greatest name ever, and we thought it would be cool to use that name. We have a character named Carter Horton, as a reference to Chris and Ken who we worked with on X-Files," he continues, referring to a particularly noxious teenager played by Smith. "We thought it would be fun to have their names in there. It's just paying homage to friends and some of those great directors from before."

The recent move in horror towards intelligent, subtle films like The Sixth Sense is a positive one, says Wong, "I think we have a great opportunity to make very smart, exciting and scary movies without resorting to another psycho stabbing people in the back. I think audiences are ready to have that kind of thrilling experience without having to have just blood and guts." Adds Morgan, "I'm sounding like Stephen Cannell sounded to me when I started, but... I don't think it's a crime to say that you should have a well-constructed plot that develops your characters in a scene. I saw the trailer for Stigmata and went, 'Wow, what a great idea!' And then you go in there and go, 'Wow, this really isn't doing anything!' And I see that over and over. That's why I appreciate a movie like Sixth Sense."

However, this return to a more restrained style was never fully realized in Final Destination. Over the course of the film's two-year history, Morgan and Wong found themselves repeatedly battling studio and marketing heads for creative control of the project. "I wish -- some of today's stuff is kind of pushed upon you by the studio," notes Wong. "And when we were doing this thing, sometimes they would say, 'Where's this part? Where's the special FX moment, where's the death mask thing?' They're asking for more in your face stuff too; they don't want to be as subtle as they were in movies before."

Morgan elaborates: "In our experience, for two years, it's been Craig [Perry] and Warren [Zide, executive producers] and Jim and I and the executives at New Line, you're developing the movie and you're like, 'It's not that, let's not do that thing -- it's been done so many times' and then basically you just give it over to the marketing guys who start presenting your movie like the things you were avoiding for years. I imagine it's an inevitability, because there are people I know who are in much higher positions than I am, and experience the same frustrations."

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