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″This place is creepy as f—,” a character in the new instalment of slasher franchise I Know What You Did Last Summer nervously utters as dead bodies start accumulating along its seaside setting. The average moviegoer would agree, but Sydneysiders might have a different response: “Wait, you mean Watson’s Bay?”
“Nooooo, she doesn’t say that!” the film’s writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson animatedly interjects over Zoom from Los Angeles. Look, my notes don’t lie – and let’s be fair, the queue for takeaway fish and chips at Doyle’s is definitely a killer sometimes.
“I think she says, ‘This place is so beautiful it makes me wanna die!’ She’s saying it’s beautiful!” pleads Robinson.
The filmmaker – along with a cast led by rising stars Chase Sui Wonders and Madelyn Cline, and franchise OGs Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr – spent September to December last year based in Bronte, as they transformed bits of Sydney, from Little Bay to Cabarita, into Southport, North Carolina, the setting of the original 1997 hit.
“It was very difficult, and there’s a lot that goes into it,” says Robinson of the set dressing that turned Sydney Harbour into the US’s Cape Fear region. “You have to change all the signage, and you have to be careful you can’t see the roads because you guys are driving on the other side.”
The Fisherman’s new victims, from left: Jonah Hauer-King, Sarah Pidgeon, Chase Sui Wonders, Madelyn Cline and Tyriq Withers.
In what sounds like a Nathan Fielder-esque gag, they even spooked the bejesus out of some American tourists. “We were setting up in Watson’s Bay, this big Fourth of July bonanza we were going to shoot, and a couple got off the ferry and they were actually from Southport, North Carolina, who were visiting Sydney,” Robinson laughs. “They were like, ‘What is happening here?’ They were very confused.”
What was happening was movie magic, the making of the third official entry in the box-office breaking franchise that turned “What are you waiting for, huh?!” into slasher film lore.
Released in 1997, the original film was a global smash, grossing $US125.3 million worldwide on a budget of $US17 million; the sequel, released the following year and starring singer Brandy, fared almost as well. But almost 30 years on, at a time when moviegoers’ cynicism around reboots and revivals is at an all-time high, why the decision to bring it back now?
Robinson wants to be clear: “This isn’t a reboot, it’s a continuation, a sequel. And I think that dismissing something on the merits of that and not on the merits of the story is a disservice to yourself as an audience member, because it might be your favourite movie and you’re deciding it’s not based on… what?,” she says.
“Just ’cause it’s a continuation of a story from the past does not mean that there are not a lot of fresh, new ideas within it. The only thing I can do is make the best movie I can make, and I felt I had a way into this that felt like it should exist.”
As with any slasher film, there’s little that can be discussed without spoiling the whole thing. But suffice it to say, Robinson has updated the franchise with a fresh, fun and subversive new flavour (one kill specifically, a piss-take on prevailing Gen Z socio-sexual mores, still makes me giggle at its sardonic brashness). Robinson has a pedigree for such stylistic flourishes.
A sort of Netflix auteur, she previously directed the streaming favourites Someone Great (a sassy anti-romcom starring Gina Rodriguez and Lakeith Stanfield) and Do Revenge (a high-school take on Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train). Pop films filled with bright aesthetics, Top 40 hits, and the youthful energy of late ’90s and early ’00s teen classics, they echo the feeling you might’ve had the first time you watched Cruel Intentions or Jawbreaker.
“That’s innately who I am as a filmmaker; it’s what I’m drawn to and it’s the movies I grew up loving the most, and I Know What You Did Last Summer is one of those movies that inspired me to be this type of filmmaker,” says Robinson. “So to be able to create my own instalment in this franchise has been very surreal.”
Robinson was finishing post-production on Do Revenge, in which Sarah Michelle Gellar cameos, when Sony first approached her about taking on a new I Know What You Did Last Summer. The studio weren’t even aware that Robinson had been working with Gellar, one of the original film’s core stars.
“It was kind of kismet. They brought it to me and were like, ‘What do you think about this?’ and I actually called Sarah right after and was like, ‘What if I did this? Would that be cool?’. And she was just like, ’100 per cent’. She was so supportive immediately.”
The film’s writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson.Credit: Sony Pictures via Getty Images
While Robinson worked as a writer alongside Taika Waititi on 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder, I Know What You Did Last Summer is her first directing job on a major studio blockbuster, rather than a streaming film for Netflix. “There’s no difference for me in terms of approach – its character and story come first, then designing something and really wanting people to be immersed in a world,” she says. “This one just had the extra bonus of having a theatrical release, and so I was wanting it to feel big and awesome and sound huge and look big and be worthy of the large screen.”
You can sense Robinson’s big-screen aspirations in the epic way she reintroduces I Know What You Did Last Summer’s iconic killer: as an orchestra swells, the camera ever so slowly pans up over the killer’s gumboots and rain jacket and the fishing hook in their hand.
“Yes, it had to be cinematic – you want to tease it, you want to give it that drama,” says Robinson. “Because it should feel like this epic entrance of this character who hasn’t been on screen in 27 years.”
Before she was a filmmaker, Robinson – 37, and born and raised in Miami, Florida – was an actress. The first paragraph of her Wikipedia page is incredible, noting: “At 16, she moved to Los Angeles and reached the final round of auditions for Hannah Montana.”
“Yeah, that’s true. That’s a very true thing about me,” Robinson laughs. “I wanted to be an actor. But I think it’s because I just didn’t know what job I wanted. Coming from Miami, I did theatre growing up and so I was like, oh, if you wanna make movies, the person who’s creating it is the actor! And then I got here and I realised, oh, I don’t want to say what’s on the page, I want to write what’s on the page. I figured out quickly that I didn’t actually want to be in front of the camera.”
Freddie Prinze Jr, far right, makes his return to the franchise he starred in in 1997.
She fell from acting to writing through trial-and-error. At 26, she sold her first TV show, the MTV revenge-dramedy Sweet/Vicious, about two female college students who turn vigilante against campus sexual abusers. “Through the process of making and co-showrunning that show, I realised, oh, I don’t just want to write, I want to direct,” Robinson says. “By then I’d already written Someone Great, and I went to the producers of that movie, Paul Feig and Jesse Henderson, and said, ‘There’s no reason why you guys should let me direct this, but can I direct this?’ And that’s how I came to directing.”
Perhaps considering her own journey within the industry, there’s a prevailing sense of femininity in Robinson’s films. For starters, she works extensively with young female actors – Gina Rodriguez, DeWanda Wise and Brittany Snow in Someone Great; Camila Mendes and Maya Hawke in Do Revenge; and now, in I Know What You Did Last Summer, the coolly aloof Chase Sui Wonders and bombshell-in-waiting Madelyn Cline. As a once aspiring actor herself, she must feel an empathy towards young women working on screen?
“I do,” says Robinson, “and I really love working with young actors. The way I write a script is I never really write it for anyone, I like to hear people read and meet with them, and then have the actor find the thing that brings it all together. From there, I spend a lot of time with that actor, rewriting and crafting the character, so it’s specifically tailored to them. It’s always such a joy for me to cast someone and then really create and find the character with that actor.“
Like Robinson’s other films, I Know What You Did Last Summer shares her focus on female camaraderie, both friendship and rivalry. Without giving too much away, it’s a strain that subverts the slasher genre’s usual tropes, which typically hinge on a bloodied and beaten final girl.
Jennifer Love Hewitt, who played the original film’s final girl, Julie James.
“I think this movie reinvents the idea of the final girl, so that there doesn’t need to be only one. I also think there’s something really fun about subverting the slasher genre, which can be kind of a gratuitous genre in terms of killing women,” Robinson says with the right amount of spoiler-averting vagueness.
“I definitely wanted it to feel like the film was doing something different. My hope is that people don’t go, ‘Oh, I see what she was trying to do there’, but that after they leave the theatre and they’re thinking about it and they’re talking about it with their friends, they’re like, ‘Wait, hold on a minute…’ and then they take a step back and see the whole picture.”
At my screening, a number of people left right as the closing credits started. I feel pity for these people because they missed the sort of mid-credits reveal that could break the internet. It points to a continuation: is Robinson already set to make a sequel now?
“I mean, I hope so!” she says. “If people go see this movie and people want more, there is a sequel that I would love to make.“
Once they’ve seen the tease, the internet will be outraged if she doesn’t make it. “I agree,” smiles Robinson. “Now tell Sony.”
In any case, Watson’s Bay will be ready for its callback.
