Now that the Final Destination series has pulled off its own trick of cheating death to keep motoring along at the box office, New Line is putting the pedal to the metal to churn out a fifth instalment. And, according to the Heat Vision Blog, the studio has locked in a director: Steven Quale.
Who he? Well, until he assembles a few more directing credits, he’s likely still to be known as “James Cameron’s protégé Steven Quale”, since he has spent several years rising through the ranks on Cameron’s movies.
Thrown into the deep end (fnarr) as a production assistant on The Abyss, he somehow survived the film to become second unit director on Titanic and then co-directed documentary** Aliens of the Deep**. Most recently, he was second unit director and visual effects supervisor on a little movie called Avatar.
Which means he was the ideal candidate to handle a horror movie that is planned as the second in the franchise to shoot in 3D. Oh, and having James Cameron call up the studio and recommend him probably didn’t hurt either.
But Quale still had to fight for the job. Rumour had it that he was dropped into a gladiatorial pit with Let Me In second unit/visual effects man Bradley Parker and Pirates Of The Caribbean VFX overseer Charles Gibson and forced to battle for the director’s chair while New Line executives jeered and howled from above. All right, so they were all just considered for the position in the usual way, but we wanted to make it sound more interesting.
Now he’ll be working from The Thing writer Eric Heisserer’s script, which will boast the usual set up of a group of teens who cheat death during a crisis thanks to a premonition from one of their number, and are then killed one by one in a variety of creative and bloody ways as the Grim Reaper takes his toll.
Quale will be getting things moving this September in Vancouver.