Final Destination Creator Jeffrey Reddick On Directing First Feature ‘Don’t Look Back’

Coming out this week in select theaters, digital platforms and video on demand from Kamikaze Dogfight and Gravitas Ventures is the horror thriller Don’t Look Back, written and directed by Final Destination creator Jeffrey Reddick. The pic serves as Reddick’s directorial debut.

Written and directed by Reddick, the film follows Caitlin Kramer (Kourtney Bell), a woman overcoming a tragic past, who is among several people who see a man being fatally assaulted. When the witnesses start dying mysteriously, she must unearth if they’re being targeted by a killer or something far more insidious.

BlackFilmandTV.com recently spoke with Reddick on his directorial debut and casting a Black lead for his film.

After creating final destination, why did you decide it was time to get behind the camera yourself?

Jeffrey Reddick: I've wanted to for a while now. When you write scripts, they don't turn out how you how you envision them. Even after now directing, I realized that, "Oh, well, sometimes even when you're directing, it doesn't turn out how you envisioned it." There's a lot of things that go into play, like budget and locations and things like that. Hollywood is one of those towns where you sit around waiting for other people to greenlight your stuff all the time. It’s a very arduous process. I wanted to have more control over my work, and just get something done on my own.

You had a good run with the Final Destination franchise. Are you implying that you weren't in control of your work as the creator?

Jeffrey Reddick: You're not really in control. I was in a very fortunate position, with Final Destination because I worked at the studio that produced it. So I did have a lot of input behind the scenes as far as creative choices and decisions like that. I also wrote the story for the second one and executive produced that one. I had control at the beginning of the franchise, and I'm actually happy with how that franchise has gone on with other people, because it's great to see other people and what they bring to the concept. But a lot of times as a writer in Hollywood and in TV, the writers are at the top of the food chain. But in film, the writers are at the bottom. People will buy your script, and then a lot of times, it's like “see you at the premiere," and then you don't know anything about it till the movie comes out. I've been fortunate that I've been friends with all the directors of my projects, and I got to go to set but once it's in the directors hands, you have to be respectful that they're bringing their vision to the project at that point. You don't want to start going in and trying to step on toes at that point.

What led you to tell this story?

Jeffrey Reddick: I've always been fascinated and somewhat troubled by the fact that people just don't seem to have empathy for one another. It's gotten worse today, I think probably this is one of the worst times it's ever been where people just don't care about people in general, like they used to. I've seen glimmers of it, after 911, I lived in New York and I saw the whole city in the world come together for a moment. I saw it for a little bit effort, with the George Floyd killing where people joined together for events and protest like that. But then as quickly as people come together, they start going back into their corners and fighting and just refuse to put themselves in someone else's shoes. That lack of empathy has always troubled me. And now especially with the cell phones, when people see something bad happening, they're more likely to pull out their phone and start filming it instead of calling 911 first and then filming it. I thought was just ripe for telling a story in the mystery, thriller, horror genre.

Is this the genre you feel best suited for?

Jeffrey Reddick: It’s the genre that I love the most. But I like sci-fi and action. I like comedy too. I have been working on a couple of Netflix animated YA shows, which is a lot different than the the dark stuff that I usually do. I'm having a lot of fun in that. Horror is my first film love. And so it's always going to be like, very special to me, and the genre. I'll never leave the horror genre.

One of the themes that's inside this movie that's similar to your previous work, as a creator, is the theme of karma and coincidence. What's the fascination with that?

Jeffrey Reddick: I've always had a fascination with spirituality. I'm a religious person, and a lot of my friends are friends of different faiths. It's interesting that we put all the elements together from all the different religions, they're all saying the same thin but they just say it in different ways. I've always just been interested in that. I've had enough stuff happen to me in my life where it's like, "this just can't be a coincidence.” I'm visiting another state and I just happen to walk around the corner, and there's somebody from my college standing there. I’ve had that happen to me. If I'd been there, like two minutes earlier, or 30 seconds earlier, I would have missed them. Or I'll be thinking about somebody and I'll be traveling and I'll bump into them on the plane. It's been I've had stuff like that happen to me so many times. It just fascinates me that there are karma and fate and destiny. I think they're there. I don't think our whole lives are like planned out for us like that. We don't have any freewill. I think we obviously have free will. But I think that we're all connected on this planet, and in a way that we don't necessarily see and understand. I've been fascinated with trying to explore that.

For this film, I wanted to play with the idea that, we're not sure if it's supernatural, or if it's a killer that's after them. Or if it's in her head a lot of these things that she's saying. I wanted to play with that throughout the film, and then hopefully deliver an ending that wrapped everything up in a smart way. 

Can you talk about your lead actress and having a black female as your star in the film?

Jeffrey Reddick: Hollywood is slow to catching up with the world and the world is slowly catching up. With me, being a person of color myself, I've always written diverse characters in my films and it started off with Final Destination. It's just a matter of reflecting the world. It wasn't about making some kind of political statement. Final Destination is set in New York, the most diverse city in the world, so the cast has to be diverse. And they're like, of course, they will be and then we shot it in Canada, and then all the kids were white. 've had that happen throughout my career. And the frustrating part for me is that I've seen so many wonderfully talented black, Latino actors and actresses on tape that were submitted, and they're phenomenal. They just always pass them over. The thing that they'll say, even when they cast white actors in roles that are written for ethnic characters, "well, we just picked the best person." That's bullshit. They don't look. 

I've been on the other side of a lot of my films where I've been in the room, and they're casting. Whenever somebody reads a script, or reads a book, unless somebody spells out that the character is a person of color, the default in everybody's head is automatically white. That happens in the casting industry, because we will send out a breakdown, and say that we're looking for all ethnicities, and 99% of the submissions will be white. So then we have to send this specific breakdown saying, we are looking for black actresses. For me when I directed my first film, that was important, and that's why I'm glad I got to do it independently, because if I had done it with the studio, I wouldn't have had a black actress. I've had some friends who work on studio films, and if they were lucky enough to get one, they had to fight like hell for it. When we did so independently, I said, "Let me find the best actress, but I'm gonna be looking at black actresses." And also she's a beautiful, dark skinned black actress, which is important to me, just because I'm biracial. So I definitely understand colorism in the business, I've certainly benefited from it in many ways, but so it was important for me to find the right person, but I definitely found the best actress. 

I saw her. I went to our her website actually. She put up a website with all these shorts she had been in and, and in every short she was completely different. I knew this is Caitlin, the character.  My producers were 100% behind me casting who I wanted. People may say, "Oh, you just cast her because she's black." Not even. It's not just because she's black. It's because she was the best actress. And when people again when they say we looked at all the actresses, they didn't look at all the actresses. They looked at all the white actresses and they may have got to a couple of black and Latino and Asian and different different races coming in but no they didn’t. It's very easy to find the many talented, wonderfully talented black men and women out there who are acting, but you have to look for them.

With so many options from theaters and TV through different platforms, what would get audiences to see Don't Look Back?

Jeffrey Reddick: It’s October so people are starting to get in that in the Halloween mood. What sets this movie apart is that I think it's a real mystery thriller. And just for the logline of it, some people witness somebody being assaulted in a park, and no one helps the victim and the victim dies. And the victim's brother outs the witnesses to the public and something starts coming after them. You're not sure if it’s a killer of if it's something supernatural. So it's a different kind of film. It's not hardcore horror. Anybody who's squeamish about horror is not going to be afraid to see it. But it really deals with resonant issues about how we do that. We see things happening, and we film it, and this movie deals with the worst case scenario of the repercussions of doing that. So hopefully, it'll make people think. It touches on elements of karma and faith, which you don't see a lot of in horror films or genre films. So I think it's really a movie for for everybody.