The movie I agreed to make, we did a reading for the studio and the studio decided to change the third act. So I worked with the writers and we changed the third act entirely.

What happened originally?

Well, in the original script, when they go to the truck stop, the car crashes, they get in trouble with the cops and then the three kids go home to New Jersey. They think Rusty Nail's basically dead, having committed suicide. Then ultimately the boys are at home at their parents house and they realize it was just the ice truck guy. He just put the shotgun in his hands and made it look like he had committed suicide. Then they realize Rusty Nail is still there and about that time, Venna (Leelee Sobieski) is getting out of the shower and she walks into her bedroom. There's Rusty Nail on the bed with a bottle of pink champagne which is a really creepy scene. The guys realize at the same time that Rusty Nail's still here, so they had to go over to Venna's house and kill the bad guy. I guess it was a couple of things. It felt like it was nice to keep the pressure on in the moment. We let the air out of the bag when we stopped everything and let them go home and took them out of that environment. So, we rewrote the script so we kept things going and we ended up in a cornfield and a truck blew up by hitting a propane tank. So, we shot that ending and thought it was better when you saw the bad guy. Usually you do this in the script phase. Then we realized that one of the scenes that we really liked, and I was always attracted to the practical joke element, was the scene where they go to the hotel room. It was a fairly long, drawn out, complicated process where we had the first half of the movie and we just kept trying to come up with the second part. We shot the first part, cut the movie together and watched and said we had to do some changes. Then we had to wait for actors and it's time consuming. We did three weeks worth of reshooting the first time. Then we screened the movie and had audiences liking it, you were still seeing the bad guy, and we started to feel like maybe it would be better if you didn't see the bad guy. The studio said, "Let's try this other ending. If you don't like it we won't use it." So, then we went back and now we rebuilt the entire motel inside the dome down in Orange County.