"Where Movie Critics Get A Taste Of Their Own Medicine"
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AN INTERVIEW WITH:
JAMES WAN & LEIGH WHANNELL
by Peter Sobczynski

October 29, 2004

"Saw", the grueling new horror film from writer/co-star Leigh Whannell and director James Wan, is one of the nastiest pieces of work to achieve a wide commercial release since "Seven" (one of its clear inspirations). The premise is fiendishly simple: two strangers (Whannell and Cary Elwes) wake up chained to the walls of an abandoned bathroom containing a dead body, a couple of audiotapes insisting that one will have to kill the other in order to survive and a pair of hacksaws just strong enough to cut through bone. As they try to piece together what has happened, they gradually realize that they are the latest victims of the "Jigsaw Killer"-a monster who forces people to go to horrifying lengths to prove their will to live by using such contraptions as a cage made of razor wire and a spring-loaded contraption strapped to someone's head that can rip off their lower jaw.

Strong stuff-the kind that could make even the most dedicated genre buff a bit squeamish-and so it is not surprising that when Wan and Whannell arrived at a local Chicago theater recently to host a screening of the film, they were more than a bit taken aback to see the line extending from the lobby waiting to get it. Not the fact that there was a crowd, but the fact that it consisted almost entirely of families and young girls-not exactly the key demographics for the film. After the initial shock, they soon discovered that this particular crowd was waiting for an advanced screening of the latest Hilary Duff nonsense and that their crowd was already sitting down to experience their gory epic in all of its glory-even more than the filmmakers had anticipated, as you will soon discover. The next morning, the duo sat down to discuss the film, their horror influences and the kind of mindset that leads to the notion of the aforementioned jaw-ripping machine, otherwise described in the film as being like a "reverse bear-trap".

THE INTERVIEW

So, what was going through your head last night as you arrived at the theater to introduce the screening and saw the long line waiting outside the lobby-a line consisting mostly of little girls, families and others not exactly in the target demographic for "Saw"?

Whannell: There were all these people walking in and I thought "Jeez, that is a big line!" and then I saw all these little girls and I started going "Hmmmmm". Finally, I heard one of the girls say "I love Hilary Duff!". It's Hilary Vs. "Saw"-that is how it comes down.

People always talk about how they someday are going to make a movie and take the film world by storm. Since it has actually happened for you, how did you get from that initial thought to where you are right now?

Whannell: We were just a couple of former film students who wanted to make a film but had no money and were kicking around in various jobs-it was like wanting to be an ocean fisherman but only being able to fish in the creek behind the house. James worked in an advertising agency and I was presenting pieces on television shows in Australia. We were sort of in the media and even interviewing filmmakers through my thing-we sort of had our toes in the water of the world we wanted to be in but we wanted to get fully wet and go out and make a film. It took a few years of kicking around in these jobs and talking before we decided that we were going to have to actually pay for it ourselves. That decision to pay for it ourselves led to the writing of the script. When you think that someone else is going to pay for it, then the sky is the limit in terms of ideas. Once you decide to put your own money in and shoot a film, you start to strip down and think about what is achievable.

Presumably, you two were both horror buffs growing up, even though the Australian film industry has never really been all that hospitable to the genre.

Whannell: There isn't that great of a lineage.

Wan: Unless you count that giant-killer-pig-in-the-outback movie, "Razorback".

Or that one slasher film from a few years ago with Molly Ringwald and Kylie Minogue...{"Cut"}

Whannell: There is not a great tradition. Australia has a great film tradition-even great genre films like "Mad Max" and "The Road Warrior", as you guys call it-but you are right. I don't know why that is. It was difficult for us once we finished the script to find anyone interested in it in Australia and that is what led to us coming here.

So how did the idea for "Saw" come about?

Whannell: Because of the budget restriction, we tried to think of the cheapest thing we could do. We thought about trying to put a minimal amount of people in one location-we are fans of the sort of locked-room thrillers like "Rope" where it is just a few
people in a house. James called me one day and pitched me the idea of two guys chained up in a bathroom.

Wan: Initially, we wanted to make it ourselves with our own money as a sort of guerrilla film, so we really wanted to come up with an idea that cheap and doable but that had a kick to it and a gimmick that would stand out among the other low-budget indie films. We needed a hook to hook people in because we weren't going to have big stars or big set-pieces to lure people in. It was very calculated in that respect. After I pitched the initial premise to Leigh, which was basically the set-up and the ending, he really liked it. He took the idea and ran with it for the best part of the year to work on the screenplay. He would come back to me every day with new ideas and new scenes but I pretty much didn't see the script until the end of the year, which is pretty tough when you are sitting there thinking "When can I see the script?".

Was the structure of the film-a complicated series of flashbacks within flashbacks-always a part of the script or did that aspect develop over time?

Whannell: Once I went up and started writing, I was thinking about how best to go about maintaining tension in the room since you can't really set the entire film only in the room with these two guys. I thought what would best elevate the tension would be to have these pieces coming together about their lives and the person doing this to them so that by the end, you would have this wealth of information about them. I guess that particular non-linear structure was the one that suited it best.

One of the obvious inspirations for "Saw" is David Fincher's "Seven". Obviously, there are the nature of the killings-elaborate tableaus in which the murderer is making some grand metaphorical point-but even some of the background details-the anonymous urban setting and the oppressive atmosphere-are similar.

Whannell: Definitely. "Seven" is a great film in many respects. Actually, what I admire most about "Seven" is not so much the John Doe-serial killer element, but the comments that it has about the city and city life. In terms of writing a strong thriller, I was
looking at other scripts and "Seven" was definitely one of them. Also, films like "Cube" and other tight-situation thrillers like "Phone Booth" and "Rope"-films that confined their spaces-were a big inspiration. I really thought of "Saw" as a big stew of all our influences. Something like the jaw-trap, for instance, looks like it came out of "Delicatessen-that Jeunet-Caro thing. It has other stuff from films like "Tetsuo" and "City of Lost Children". The music comes from music that we like, industrial stuff. A film like "Requiem for a Dream", the ending of our film was influenced by the intensity of that film. I really feel "Saw" is a stew of the influences of both James and I-not just influences taken from other places but our own as well. James has a lifelong fascination with these creepy dolls and that comes in. It may have come from something else but he has morphed it into his own thing-I haven't seen a doll like that in any other film.

Wan: (laughs) I think the doll thing began when I was 7 and saw "Poltergeist"-I was seriously scarred by that film. I became very fascinated with creepy ventriloquist puppets or just dolls in general. It is that classical thing about being repulsed by
something and yet fascinated by it at the same time. In the film, we needed something to help hide the identity of the killer and it fit nicely.

One of the obvious pitfalls of writing a movie like this is trying to keep the screenplay from being nothing more than a series of violent set-pieces linked together by the barest amount of plotting...

Wan: And with a marketing campaign like this [pointing to the poster featuring a victim in the aforementioned jaw-trap], people are going to go in thinking that it is going to be much gorier than it actually is. Leigh and I spent a long time working on the
screenplay so that it would have a story and not just a collection of gory scenes. For us, it is more about these two guys in a room and most of these killings are just peripheral in that add to the sadisticness and badness of the bad guy.

Whannell: It depends on your own threshold. I never really thought that "Saw", at script level, was very extreme. I thought the idea was clever and that we had a good enough ending to suck people in but at times, I used to wonder if, for exploitations sake, we should go further since we were trying to get peoples attention. I thought it wasn't really that necessary. It is funny, now that it has come out, that a lot of people have said that it is quite extreme-imagine what would have happened if we had gone further.

Well, the jaw-ripper, described in the film as a "reverse bear-trap", is a pretty nasty bit of business.

Whannell: I guess that may be why certain people who don't like the more fantastical horror stuff-zombies and werewolves-have seemed to respond to "Saw". We found that when people were reading the script in L.A., they told us "I don't usually get into horror" but they responded to this. I think it was the reality of it-it's amazing how we underestimated that.

How does one first come up with the idea of something like that and then go about actually putting it together?

Wan: That device was created for the short that we made-we shot a scene from the screenplay-and I got an industrial-designer friend of mine to help make it. The really scary thing was that he designed it in such a way that it could actually work if you replaced the spring that we used with actual bear-trap springs. When we got the chance to do the feature, I got the special-effects guy to simulate that exact same design.

Whannell: We knew exactly how we wanted it to look and he managed to build it. I originally pitched it to James over a few beers and he came back the next day and he had it drawn. The drawing was pretty much exactly what I had in my head-which I guess is a testament to how sick we are. We were lucky to find a guy who could actually build it.

How difficult was it to finally get the film financed and off the ground in the end?

Wan: We had the script for more than a year in Australia-we had done numerous drafts and hitting dead-ends. Finally, we were at the end of our rope and we thought that we weren't going to get the film made. Our manager said that she wanted to take it to America-we didn't have any money and we didn't think there was any chance of getting it made. She convinced us, though, and so we took one scene, the jaw-trap bit, and we shot it with our friends on 16mm as a sort of expensive business card to go along with the script. It was a lethal package because when we got over here, we did this victory lap around town with everyone telling us how much they liked it. There was a lot of this verbal lip-service but this one company put their money where their mouth was and said "Let's do it!". Lo and behold, they were serious!

When the film played at the Toronto International Film Festival, the program notes indicated that they would be showing the uncut version while Lion's Gate would be releasing a cut R-rated version in America. Considering the intensity of what is in the film now, what is missing from the original and long did you have to battle with the M.P.A.A. in order to get the more commercially viable rating?

Whannell: You actually saw the fully uncut version last night. The theatrical version is not drastically different from that but we were really stunned last night that you guys saw the Sundance cut-it even had the old Lion's Gate logo on it.

Wan: Leigh and I, even though we aren't exactly fans of the cuts, the theatrical version does have more power. The Sundance cut was rushed in order to get it done in time for the festival-some of the sound mix was rough and some of the color timing was off. At the same time, I thought it was cool that you guys got to see all of the guts and all of the scene with the stomach being ripped out!

-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI

Copyright © 2004 Peter Sobczynski
All rights reserved.
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