“I Know What You Did Last Summer” Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson on Hooking a New Generation
“There’s a lot of sh*t that can get ruined on the internet in this movie, so I really do encourage people to see it as soon as possible,” director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson tells The Credits of her film I Know What You Did Last Summer, which carves its way into theaters July 18.
Robinson, 37, a Miami native now living in Los Angeles, has plenty to share, but for this writer, the real question is where she stands on the deli sandwiches from Florida’s Publix supermarket. Thankfully, we see bread to bread. “Publix subs are the best subs in the world, and nothing compares to them. My brother is in Florida right now, and he sent me a picture from Publix maybe three hours ago. We ride hard for Publix in my family.”
Important Sandwich takes aside, the former actor turned writer/director snatched Hollywood’s attention creating Sweet Vicious, a 2016 MTV series about two college girls who take revenge on campus sexual predators – a familiar refrain found in movies like Promising Young Women, Ms. 45, and M.F.A., the latter of which stars Leah McKendrick, who coincidentally has a story by credit on I Know What you Did Last Summer. “Leah came in with a really great pitch and she wrote an initial draft that then Sam [Lansky] and I ran with,” says Robinson. Lansky, the ghostwriter behind Brittney Spears’ memoir, co-wrote the screenplay with the director. “Sam and I had a lot of conversations about beautiful people behaving badly. And really, what is on screen is us taking her story and really crafting what ended up being the final version of the film…a story that would be scary, fun, and satisfying.”
The film serves as the fourth installment in the franchise, and Robinson confirmed it’s not a reboot but a sequel to the 1997 original film. The director stated that ISKWYDLS is canon. Jennifer Love Hewitt, 46, and Freddy Prinze Jr., 49, both return as Julie James and Ray Bronson in the slasher follow-up that sees five friends – Chase Sui Wonders, Madelyn Cline, Sarah Pidgeon, Jonah Hauer-King, and Tyriq Withers – try to conceal a deadly car accident, as in the original, their dark secret refuses to stay buried.
Missing from the cast (and rightfully so) is beauty queen Helen Shivers, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, who has been married to Prinze Jr. since 2002 and also starred in Robinson’s film Do Revenge (2022), a sharp, dark comedy tackling themes of female empowerment, rage, and agency. Gellar and Robinson have become friends since, and the director hopelessly tried to bring Shivers’ very dead body back to life, telling Entertainment Weekly, she “pitched some crazy sh*t” to convince Gellar to return. What we wanted to know is if Robinson had gotten that chance, would she have killed Shivers again? “Oh my god, I don’t think I would,” she retorts, “Everybody hates it when Helen Shivers dies. I’m not going to kill her a second time. Maybe a sequel idea, but no, you can’t.”
Another change, at least from a production standpoint, is its shooting location, moving from North Carolina to Australia, with some scenes being filmed in Los Angeles. “The most candid thing I can say about it is because of the budget,” admits Robinson. “Studios make those decisions, and you just roll with it to get your movie made. But, I think Australia ended up being a really awesome backdrop because a lot of the movie is about the way that Southport has been kind of overhauled and gentrified and had this glow up. So I think that Australia provided this really cool texture that I don’t necessarily know would have existed in North Carolina, as I think North Carolina looks much like it did in the ‘90s. So a lot of how everything appears, at least the fictional Southport of this franchise, is different now.”
To shape the visual language, Robinson tapped production designers Courtney and Hillary Andujar, who are twin sisters, and cinematographer Elisha Christian. Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws became one of their inspirations. “We talked about the color palette, how rich Jaws is, and how beautiful it is,” notes the director. “We shot the movie on an Alexa 35, which, while it is a digital camera, has a very film-like quality to it. There’s kind of natural grain that happens just in the way that this particular camera shoots, which I really, really love the end result of and I’m very, very excited about.” In defining the aesthetic, the director says she wanted the movie to have a “fresh and nostalgic quality to it.” Adding, “It should feel like a movie coming out in 2025. We didn’t want it to feel like we were trying to make something look like it was from another time. But I also really wanted it to feel like it has that same texture and quality of those slasher movies from the ‘90s that this is really nodding towards.”
Iconic to the franchise is the killer’s raincoat and the chilling hook that so often turns every scream into silence. Robinson sought to recapture the look but with a fresh twist. “We did make our own hook, but we had the OG hook and OG slicker flown into Australia so that we could all look at them. So, both with Courtney and Hillary, the three of us redesigned the hook together. And then with Mari-An Ceo, our costume designer, we redesigned the slicker together,” says Robinson. It was always my intention from the beginning of this process to make sure that this installment had its own identity in both hook and slicker. So, from day one, I knew that I was going to redesign these things because it is a different story, a different world, and a different version of I Know You Did Last Summer. So I felt that it was time for an update.”
The mayhem also got an update, the director drawing inspiration not just from the hook but from different fishing-inspired weaponry – harpoons, butcher’s knife, flare guns, and a lobster trap – into the attacks. “We went into this definitely wanting to ratchet up the violence, the gore, which I do think we’ve done. But also wanting to make sure that all of these kill sequences, action sequences, scare sequences feel like they were rooted in character, rooted in story, and weren’t just meant to scare you, but are always pushing the story forward,” she says. “So for me I think part of the spectacle, and part of the fun of designing them was also figuring out how each of them could be big and splashy, but also kind of nod towards character and story throughout the whole film.”
Adding to the scare factor was an in-camera approach. “I wanted everything to feel real. We do have a Kill Bill-esque moment, but the violence, the tone of the movie is very fun. In the harpoon sequence, which is in a lot of the trailers, Josh Cobrin is doing every single thing. We did not have a stunt person,” she says. “We cast someone who could do the entire sequence front to back. I wanted actors who could do things so we weren’t switching back and forth, and we were truly getting as much in-camera as we possibly could.”
The idea extended into the set designs with production rebuilding the original twisting road, Reaper’s Curve, to stage the initial car accident the group tries to cover up. The scene was shot in a former mining site in nearby Sydney and required four hydraulic rigs to pull off the intense action, with visual effects stepping in to paint the North Carolina backdrop. In another scene, Robinson took a page from a favorite auteur, David Lynch. “There’s a sequence with Madelyn Cline and Tyriq Withers in a cemetery. That cemetery is from Twin Peaks,” she says. When asked if she would consider a remake of that iconic series, she says, “No, no, I wouldn’t touch that. It’s so good. No one should touch that.”
I Know What You Did Last Summer slashes into theaters July 18.
Featured image: “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Courtesy Sony Pictures
