FAQ

Christopher Smith got the original idea for Triangle when he and producer Jason Newmark saw an ocean liner at Cannes and Newmark asked him "Why don't you set a movie on an ocean liner?" Smith has explained in interviews and on the DVD commentary that he then needed to find a mythology to turn this idea into a whole feature film. This led him to set the story in the Bermuda Triangle, and he referred to this in early interviews. As the script was developed and production progressed, direct references to the Bermuda Triangle were dropped, however the title was retained and some indirect references remain: e.g. Smith named the yacht "Triangle" so that the audience could infer a connection, and the home port of the Aeolus is given as Miami (one of the three vertices of the Bermuda Triangle). On the film's Making of documentary, Newmark says "The film is set off the coast of Miami. We don't refer once in the film to the Bermuda Triangle, but it's kind of there as a hook on which to hang the hat if we want to."

A number of viewers have suggested that there is a similarity to the film Timecrimes (2007) (Timecrimes). These suggestions generally centre on perceived similarities in the plot and overall theme, and the use of a masked protagonist. However, Timecrimes was released in September 2007, whereas Christopher Smith and Jason Newmark explain on the film's Making of documentary that the central idea for Triangle came about while they were in Cannes in 2004 after making Creep (2004). Also, Smith referred to the production of Triangle in an interview with Shock Till You Drop in May 2007 - months before the release of Timecrimes.

Smith discussed similarities between Triangle and other films in an interview with Bloody Disgusting: "At roughly the same time there was Triangle, Timecrimes, Moon and Primer (slightly before but similar), all of which deal with the idea of looking back at yourself. Its the zeitgeist I suppose, film-makers responding to the news and culture around them and asking themselves, whos the good guy, whos the bad guy, and feeding this into their work."

The sackcloth mask used in Triangle was inspired by Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), and is one of many intentional movie references that appear throughout the film. The "mask" worn by the killer in Timecrimes is in fact a wrapped-round bandage.

This is the character Christopher Smith refers to on the DVD commentary as "the mean Jess":

"So the one that's now been shot in the head [by "loop 2" Jess in the theatre] will end up being the one who is the one with the blood on her face, which we call "the mean Jess", and I've seen on the Message Boards on the IMDb, people saying "Who's the mean Jess?". The mean Jess is, for me, is someone who perhaps has been through the loop before - this was the ideas we were having in the script - but really what it's about is that our Jess has a mean side. We see that later on when we get home: we see that she has a mean side when she hits her child. So there's no reason why we can't assume that the one that's on the ship that's playing the mean side of her could have gone that way, and could have got to... I mean, if you got back on the ship and you do remember what's happened, you're going to be a lot more brutal and calculating than the Jess that we're following, because you know that you have to kill those people in order to get back to save your son."

Smith goes on to explain the significance of the mean Jess's wound:

"...And the way we've set the make-up up is very deliberate: that she's got this blood in a very designed way on one side of her face. It's the same make-up design exactly as the Jess that dies in the back of the car. So it shows that the idea that the mean side of Jess is the one that dies in that car: the one that's killed by the hammer at the end is the mean side of her, and it's that mean side of her that is the more brutal killer on the boat."

During the sequence where Jess comforts a dying Sally, it is this same mean Jess that we see being overpowered, apparently killed and then dumped overboard by another iteration of Jess.