One of the most memorable aspects of the 1997 “I Know What You Did Last Summer” is its location, a North Carolina fishing town called Southport where the vengeful killer tries to pick off cast members Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Ryan Phillippe, and Sarah Michelle Gellar one by one. Vividly conceived by production designer Gary Wissner, Southport provided a unique and richly detailed environment for the original movie’s action, and its spirit remained central to the 1998 sequel “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” even though most of that movie moved the horror to an island in the Bahamas.
For the latest installment in the franchise — also titled “I Know What You Did Last Summer” — co-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 to this story is the gentrification of Southport, which underwent this glow-up and is a very different place now,” Robinson told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. In Robinson’s conception, Southport had to reinvent itself after the murder spree of the original film — meaning that it’s no longer a working class fishing community but an idyllic resort town.
This transformation plays a key role in causing the film’s villain to snap, and it also enables Robinson to come up with a new color palette for the movie, replacing the first film’s occasionally dreary grays with eye-popping whites, blues, and pastels. That meant choosing a different location than the North Carolina towns where the first movie shot. “I felt that going back to the same place 27 years later it would just look the same,” Robinson said. “We wanted to reimagine the world and have it feel different from the original movie.”
With that in mind, the filmmakers chose to double North Carolina in Sydney, Australia, a decision partly made because of tax credits but primarily due to the area’s natural beauty. “It’s this idyllic, idealized seaside 4th of July town,” Robinson said of the Southport recreated in Sydney, “and Sydney was a really good double.” Robinson noted that even in the original film some material was shot in Northern California, including the scene where the road accident that sets the story in motion occurs.
“Nothing looks like that in North Carolina,” Robinson said. “But Sydney does look like the intersection between Northern California and North Carolina, so there are some ways that made it harder and some ways that made it a lot easier to marry the look of the original movie to this one and create this new world.”
“I Know What You Did Last Summer” is now playing in theaters. To hear the full Jennifer Kaytin Robinson interview and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.