What if we could change our fate? And what if fate hit back? In the early 00s, within the space of a year, writing and filmmaking duo Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber delivered two films that questioned everything we think we understand about time, destiny, and free will. First, Final Destination 2 turned death into an invisible deadly force that will always find a way, while The Butterfly Effect flipped time travel from a PG fantasy to a brutal meditation on trauma and the ripple effects of rewriting history. Together, they created two of the most defining films of their genre, whose imagery and ideas have endured far beyond their original release. Passed from one generation to the next, they have become modern allegories, reminding us that every choice carries consequences, and that some destinies can’t – and shouldn’t – be rewritten.

Alex James Taylor: I recently rewatched Final Destination 2 and The Butterfly Effect back-to-back – what a mindfuck. [all laugh] I didn’t remember just how dark The Butterfly Effect is – it hits hard.
Eric Bress: The last time I saw it, probably with only ten minutes to go in the film, I realised, god damn, we never take our foot off the gas pedal of shit. When we set about writing The Butterfly Effect, we were both fans of Back to the Future. From the first time you hear The Power of Love and Marty McFly is skating behind the truck on his way to school – I got goosebumps. Side note: in that movie he doesn’t jump back to 1955 until like 27 minutes into the movie, which is a long first act. They spend that time building our connection to Marty, so when he goes back, we’re not so much watching him as being along for the ride. I was Marty McFly’s age when that movie first came out, but I was an observer. I’m not Marty, and nor will I be in any way affected by the decisions he makes – it’s all very specific to Marty and his family. When we made The Butterfly Effect, we wanted to provoke a much more holistic or universal feeling, so that when people left the theatre, they were asking themselves, what would I do if I could go back into my personal trauma and change something – and how would that affect the person I am today? To me, that was the difference.
J. Mackye Gruber: The idea of The Butterfly Effect started with the notion that everybody has a day in their life that they would love to live over, but if you could do that, should you? Because your life wouldn’t be the same. All the horrible stuff, warts and all, it’s made your journey to where you are.

AJT: Final Destination 2 and The Butterfly Effect came out within a year of each other, and they both share such similar themes in terms of fate and ripples through time. What brought you to these stories during this time?
JMG: We were given Final Destination 2 based [on the strength of] The Butterfly Effect script, [The Butterfly Effect was written first, but made and released after Final Destination 2] so we had already gone down this journey, and our heads were already tuned into that whole idea of fate and destiny. And as great as the first Final Destination movie was, there were a lot of flaws regarding the logic of the thing, so we had to create some new logic, and we went off where our heads already were, this whole thing of fate. So The Butterfly Effect definitely influenced our journey on Final Destination 2. Would you say that’s true, Eric?
EB: I would also say that walking out of the first movie… it’s so bombastic and horrific in its set pieces, and we’re looking at each other going, “Isn’t that strange that none of these characters at any point looked at another character and said, ‘I can’t believe this fucking shit is happening.’” So when we went into the second movie, we knew our characters had to be aware of how ridiculous this is. So we took the very serious events of the first movie and said, let’s just inject a little more humour, fun and maybe reliability. I think we’ve been lucky in that the log truck has stood the test of time and become a meme – not by design, just by chance and circumstance. That has made its way into the general consciousness of anyone who’s seen the film, or even heard about it. They have a visceral reaction when they find themselves driving behind something that seems a little precarious. That has literally changed the way a lot of people drive, and maybe literally altered some fates.
JMG: When I first moved to Wales, I remember someone saying, “I’ve got to show you something.” He loads YouTube, and someone had cut together Final Destination 2’s log truck scene with all the accidents caused by people reading the dual-language signs from Welsh and English. [laughs] I was like, “Oh, wow, it’s even come to Wales.” The amount of people I still meet to this day that say, “I can’t drive near a log truck.” You saw in the recent Final Destination they brought it back not once, but twice.
EB: In Butterfly Effect, taking two steps slower running down a path causes a branch to scar the thirteen-year-old Kayleigh’s face and affects an entirely different outcome of her life. It’s easy to go down that rabbit hole of literally every single nuanced decision or misstep you make [changes everything]. Those characters don’t say, “Gee, if I were only two steps a little faster, or slower, I would have avoided that, and it wouldn’t have affected my life.” But for those who look for the Easter eggs, it’s all there, waiting to be found. Final Destination also focuses your mind on… you’re going to look with all of your alertness at maximum capacity to find danger lurking beyond the horizon, because it’s coming faster and harder than you have ever had to tackle it before.

“The idea of The Butterfly Effect started with the notion that everybody has a day in their life that they would love to live over,”

AJT: Going back to what you said about Final Destination entering into wider culture and society, when people see, maybe, an escape ladder which looks a bit precarious, they will literally say to each other, “That’s a Final Destination scene waiting to happen.” It’s really become part of the cultural language. It’s very interesting when the line between reality and story becomes blurred.
JMG: Living in Wales, I’m surrounded by farm equipment now, and I’m like, “Oh, no one’s really gone and utilised any of these monstrous machines…” [laughs] When you actually write a Final Destination and your brain has been focused on trying to come up with the little mousetrap, Rube Goldberg patterns, it never leaves you. At least for me, it never leaves. You’ll be in your car and you’ll see something – and you will see death everywhere.
EB: I wrote the fourth in the series too, so that’s a total of like, a year of your life where my job, from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep was, “OK, I’m doing my laundry, let’s think of all the things that could go wrong. If that bottle of bleach were to come down, and the lid happened to be up, and it splashed in my eye…” Your job is churning up your inner paranoia to the point where, like Jonathan said, it doesn’t leave as fast as it should. It definitely lingers.
JMG: The one thing that I would say is different between the movies is Final Destination, even with all of our premonitions and all that stuff, kind of lives in its own universe. Whereas The Butterfly Effect is a generalisation of how you’re viewing the world and everyone’s personal experience. I think it has a broader scope.

“…it never leaves. You’ll be in your car and you’ll see something – and you will see death everywhere.”

AJT: When I was looking at Final Destination, I was thinking about its sequels as almost modern-day fables, passing down the story and mythology to new generations. It’s the same with movies like Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer.
JMG: Every generation embraces it and makes it their own. That’s how it’s changing through folklore; it’s an organic process. When it gets into the hands of different filmmakers and writers, they decide to go in a different direction, and it takes on a new life of its own.
EB: There’s something about how, at the time a film comes out – say Platoon, or when Aliens came out – they are really commentaries about the Vietnam War. Or when The Texas Chain Saw Massacre comes out in 1973, it represented the traumatised horror mindset of those who were returning home from Vietnam. Watching some of these films generations after they were released, I didn’t quite understand that, nor was I necessarily conscious of the times we were in when they were made. Making The Butterfly Effect or Final Destination, I was not necessarily aware of us being like, “We need to capture the current distrust in government today left over from the Nixon administration and the Clinton impeachment.” It was more like, “This is real shit. This is the world we know.” While I plead my ignorance to what may have affected me while Jonathan and I were conceiving of things, I’m the summation of everything I had seen before that. So when I was ten it was A Clockwork Orange on repeated viewing, and while that came out probably fourteen years earlier than the time I was watching it, that informed me. I didn’t even realise how much of a spiritual or religious component there was in A Clockwork Orange: free will versus determination, religion versus humanism. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t absorb them at the time, and I’m sure that people who watch The Butterfly Effect don’t realise it at the time either.
JMG: When Eric and I met, we happened to like a lot of the same pivotal movies, and our love of those informed our own movies, which then inform the next generation, so one thing falls into the other. When Eric and I first started out, it was a time when everybody wanted to do something different. We were like, “Screw three-act structure, we’re coming up with something different. It might have worked for the Greeks, but forget it.” [laughs] That’s why when we did The Butterfly Effect, yes, we didn’t invent time travel, but the way we did it was completely different.

AJT: On that, I read an interview you guys did in the early 00s, and you spoke about how wild the Final Destination theatre audiences were – people screaming and leaping off their chairs.
JMG: We went to a test screening at the Magic Johnson Theatre in South Central LA, and at every little moment, the audience were jumping up in their seats, screaming. For me, that’s the closest thing to magic.
EB: That test screening. First off, I’m there sweating bullets, because if the audience is bored, you know, we have a clunker and we’re in big trouble. So automatically, I’m very nervous. Then the audience started getting rowdy. At first, it’s like, “OK, thank god they’re in it.” Then there came a point – it was probably after the crash, the big opening set piece – where they were getting so rowdy, they weren’t settling down. There was this nervous excitement, like, “I think they’re gonna start tearing the seats out of the theatre. I’ve heard about when The Warriors came out in the Bronx in 1979 – it’s about to happen again!” There was so much energy there. It was scary, and exciting.
JMG: When you’re seeing an audience really connecting, that’s special. It’s almost spiritual. During the sound editing of The Butterfly Effect, we made sure that all of the shot cuts were really pumped – they were really loud and scary. [laughs] At the premiere at Sundance, I’m there and I want my friends and my mom to enjoy it, but then I realised that one seat away from me was Macy Gray! She’s sitting there, and on the first shock, she fell out of her seat screaming and laughing. I was like, “Oh, this is so good.” It got me so worked up and excited, and every time I was looking around to see who else fell out of their seat.

“All the time people are asked, “What would your superpower be?” For me, there’s no question it would be time travel.”

AJT: Lastly – big question – why do you think these stories of fate and destiny have always fascinated humans, stretching back from ancient civilisations to today?
JMG: Do we have control over our lives? That’s the ultimate thing. Is there some guiding force, or are we the masters of our own destiny? I think every generation will be fascinated by that.
EB: Next to the question of, is there a god? Am I here for a purpose? Once you strip that away and you’re left with the reality of day-to-day living, all you have to control what happens is a wish – this one wish that you had an opportunity to turn back time, and what you would do with that. All the time people are asked, “What would your superpower be?” For me, there’s no question it would be time travel. Although at the same time, I had a career boost by positing the theory that you should not meddle with time travel. [laughs] But we all have our secret desires or compulsions to go back and regain control over the things we have no control over, and time travel is the only way to get there. Every bit of remorse or regret that we have, it can be solved through this one power. If only we had it. And we know what it is, we just don’t have access to it, but it feels this close. It’s in the movies. They have it, so why can’t I – just once?