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In most cases, what passes for a “Horror” film these days is in actuality little more than a blood-and-guts gore fest in which a killer terrorizes unsuspecting youths. “Saw,” on the other hand, harkens back to the days when “Horror” movies were just that — horrifying, and sought to creep out and disturb more than it wanted to slay the senses.
The film, directed by Aussie imports James Wan and starring Leigh Whannell (and written by both) begins with a simple premise: two men are locked in an abandoned public bathroom as a dead body lies between them, and they know only that one must kill the other in order to get out alive. Sound freaky? That’s merely the beginning.
So which one of your twisted minds did this idea come from?
James Wan: I came up with the original scene with two guys stuck in a room with a dead body lying between them on the floor, and somebody is watching them, and in the end, something happens. Leigh kind of had the terribly hard job of coming up with everything else. He wrote the screenplay — he spent a year writing the script, and then after the first draft we talked about it and went back and forth.
I imagine there was a point where you had these two guys stuck in a room, then you had to ask yourselves, “Okay, what are we going to do from here?”
Leigh Whannell: It became a thing of: Why are they there? Who put them there? And why would someone put someone in that situation? You can always fall back on the safety net of well, he’s crazy. I guess if a guy is barking at the moon and flicking the bedside lamp on and off like Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” you can say that he’s nuts, but I sort of wanted a strong reason why they would be there, so I came up some stuff that lies underneath the film, and allowed that to come into play.
In my mind, true horror movies should be creepy and disturbing, at least much more than they attempt to scare you with actual shock value. What it reminded me of, in a way, was Tobe Hooper’s original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” where we not only have Leatherface and his chainsaw, but also the girl screaming for the last 45 minutes of the movie. It’s incredibly disturbing, and makes you kind of uncomfortable and squirm in your seat. Was this the effect you were going for?
JW: Yeah, absolutely. I think “Texas Chainsaw” was a big influence just in terms of the intensity and constant barrage of screaming and noise, and with “Saw” we wanted to take it one step further.
At the same time, though, there are also some existential questions here: What would you do to survive? And how the hell did I get into this situation, and how am I going to get myself out? I assume this was intentionally in the script from the get-go.
JW: Leigh spent a long time thinking about things like that. You have to focus, especially on a film like this, to have something to say and not make something mindless. If we had wanted to make a mindless horror film, it would’ve been much easier to go in that direction with the blood and gore. And this was a big risk. If you’re going smart and don’t succeed, the failure is almost bigger.
LW: It’s almost smarter to go dumb. If you make a dumb film, about a serial killer who stalks a bunch of kids around a holiday resort cutting them up one by one in creative ways with lots of gore, it’s almost smarter ‘cause you can say “hey, this is what it is,” and people go in knowing that. For the age we were when we started this [mid-20s], it was dangerous for us to have these lofty aspirations of commenting on life. I mean, what if we failed? People would go: “My god, who do these kids think they are?” But we wanted to have something there, and on top of that you can’t present it in a way that it’s too obvious.
I was also reminded of “Seven” when watching it: as awful as the killer is, he’s doing things that he believes are right.
JW: Leigh and I were saying that the killer doesn’t actually see himself as a bad guy. He’s actually trying to help people out — it’s his method of going about doing things that makes him evil.
You got Danny Glover, Cary Elwes, and Monica Potter — that’s some star power for your first movie. I think the complexities of all the characters, particularly Glover’s, which didn’t have to be complex, probably sold them on the script.
JW: It’s a combination. The producers were welcoming to begin with, then the script really drew people in. Plus, the six-minute short that I made that previewed the situation in the bathroom also got people interested.
Did you ever lose the film? Did Hollywood ever say to you, “Well, we like it, but we want someone else to star in it and direct?”
JW: When Leigh and I were shopping the script around, we actually received a lot of offers to just buy the script, but we stuck it out and didn’t want to sell out. We wanted to be attached to the project, and I guess we went with the producers who were willing to take a chance on us. I think a big factor too was that at the end of the day, it’s [production-wise] a pretty small film. We shot the entire film in 18 days, so the actors only had to be there for a couple of days. In fact, we shot all of Danny and Monica’s scenes in a couple of days, so it’s not like we were asking the actors to dedicate a whole year of their lives.
Did you always know that you were going to star in it, even as you were writing it?
LW: I knew I wanted to, but I didn’t always know. It was fate. You were asking before: “How did we manage to get these people and not have the movie taken away?” Coming from Australia, it doesn’t really have a screenwriting industry the way America does, where there’s a whole body of people whose sole job it is to turn out scripts. In Australia the film scene is smaller, and people usually write scripts because they’re interested in directing them. It’s nothing like L.A. We spent a lot of time on the script, so to sell it would have been really heartbreaking. We were really attached to it. If we sold the script, we would have only done it to make enough money to write and produce another script that we’d write. And just as James wanted to direct, I always wanted to play that role — I wrote it for myself to play.
When I looked at your bio, I saw that you were in “The Matrix Reloaded.”
LW: It was a tiny role, though. I liked to call it a “die-on” role. I literally walked on and died. I was kind of half-running half-walking, and the bridge collapsed underneath me and I died. It was still awesome though. The things I love about films of that size is that five lines takes you two weeks to shoot because they move at the speed of an asthmatic mammoth. So I got to sit around and watch the Wachowski brothers work. I would call James from the set in Sydney and tell him all about it, and that would just fuel us more to want to have that job. I mean, when you see two guys wander on the set wearing black Batman t-shirts, black shorts, and backward baseball caps, essentially comic geeks, and there were thousands of people standing around waiting to be told what to do by these comic geeks. And the amazing thing is: once they say something, people start running to get work done, and you realize that their minds and imaginations gave birth to this incredible world of machines and buildings. And that was how it felt when we walked on the set for “Saw.” We realized that we were walking onto a physical reality of something that came from our minds, and it was completely surreal.
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