One of the most memorable aspects of 1997 ”I know what you did last summer“Is its place, a fishing town in North Carolina called Southport where the vengeful killer tries to pick up the role members Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr.Ryan Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar one by one. Lively intended by production designer Gary Wissner, Southport provided a unique and richly detailed environment for the original film’s action, and its spirit remained central to the 1998 sequel “I still know what you did last summer“Although most of that movie moved the horror to an island in the Bahamas.
For the latest part of the franchise – also the title ”I know what you did last summer“-Mith writer and director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson Wanted to pay tribute to Southport’s role in the story while taking it in new directions. “The bedrock for this story is the gentrification of Southport, which underwent this glowing and is a completely different place now,” Robinson told IndieWire’s Filmmakers Toolkit Podcast. In Robinson’s fertilization, Southport had to invent himself after the murder spree on the original film – Which means that it is no longer a working class fishing society but an idyllic resort city.
This transformation plays a key role in getting the film’s villain to snap, and it also allows Robinson to come up with a new color palette for the film and replace the first film’s sometimes sad gray with eye -catching white, blues and pastels. This meant choosing a place other than the North Carolina cities where the first film shot. “I felt that going back to the same place 27 years later would only look the same,” Robinson said. “We wanted to convert the world and make it feel different from the original movie.”
With that in mind, the filmmakers chose to double North Carolina in Sydney, Australia, a decision that was partly made due to tax credits but mainly because of the area’s natural beauty. “It’s this idyllic, idealized coast on July 4,” Robinson said of Southport that was recreated in Sydney, “and Sydney was a really good double.” Robinson noted that even in the original film, a material in Northern California is managed, including the stage where the traffic accident that sets the story in motion.
“Nothing looks like in North Carolina,” Robinson said. “But Sydney looks like the intersection between Northern California and North Carolina, so there are some ways that made it more difficult and some ways that made it much easier to marry the appearance of the original film to this and create this new world.”
“I know what you did last summer” is now playing in theaters. To hear the entire Jennifer Kaytin Robinson interview and make sure you don’t miss a single section of Filmmaker Tolkkit, subscribe to the podcast on AppleThe SpotifyOr your favorite podcast platform.
