MCN Interview: Saw

Saw is not your typical horror thriller about a homicidal maniac. The villain is called Jigsaw because he constructs diabolically intricate snares for his victims, who then themselves are forced to perpetrate murders, making Jigsaw possibly the first serial "enabler" in the history of the genre. The movie stars Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Monica Potter, Shawnee Smith and Leigh Whannell, who penned the screenplay, based on a story he co-wrote with director James Wan. The filmmakers, who are both 27, met in film school in their native Australia, and caught Hollywood's attention with a quickie DVD demo of a scene from the script. They landed their debut feature deal with the proviso the movie had to be done fast and cheap-with no budget for CGI or re-shoots. The result is a perfect example of "less is more," a lean, terrifying chiller.

JAMES WAN: I shot the entire movie in 18 days. People ask about the budget; I usually say I can't talk about the budget, but if you know anything about filmmaking, the number of days really gives you an indication of what the budget would be. It was crazy, and I only had five days of pre-production as well. Not many directors say, "Hey, guys, we're going to do a rehearsal right now, and we're going to shoot it as well! And if we get it, that's it, we're going to go with it!" And believe me, a lot of it was just rehearsals. We were doing like, two takes; on a good day I might get three takes with the actors. It was really tough, but I definitely feel really grateful that we ended up with the film that we did.

ANDREA GRONVALL: How big was your crew?

JW: Small skeleton crew. We shot the whole film essentially in one location, a converted warehouse, where we built the bathroom set, and for all the other locations found existing rooms and dressed them. Pretty much the whole film was shot in the interior. There was really only one sequence, during the car chase, that was the only bit where we went outdoors. That was part of my aesthetic that I was going for. I wanted to make the film really claustrophobic, and one way I was going to do that was, every time we go to a new location, I'm not going to set it up using an establishing shot. You don't see a house, and then cut to the inside of the house. You cut to inside, to inside, to inside.

AG: There isn't any exposition at the top of your script, there aren't any wasted words, and there are no plot threads that don't pay off. How did you collaborate as writers? Did you plot scenes on index cards? Did you draw timelines on a board?

JW: This is all Leigh's doing. I pitched him the initial premise, the setup, which was essentially a very simple story of two guys stuck in a room with a dead body on the floor, and every now and then we'll cut to the bad guys watching them, and then the ending happens. Leigh was the guy who turned it into this big jigsaw puzzle of a movie.

LEIGH WHANNELL: I did use index cards. With a form like this, it's easy to lose track, so if you have cards, you can do a lot of shifting and changing while looking at things. It can get a bit tricky. It's much easier to write a linear story: a boy buys a dog, the dog gets hit by a car, the dog comes back to life, he's happy. When you're doing something like this that cuts in and out of time, flashbacks within flashbacks, it's easy to lose your place, so I definitely needed to have a roadmap set out. Yeah, I tried to keep it very economical, I wanted to do things through action rather than words. Even though it could have been a film that was really wordy, with two guys speaking back and forth, I tried to keep it quite sparse, in keeping with the tone of how cold it is, and how the characters treat each other.

AG: To come up with something like this for your first feature-how many years have you been writing?

JW: It's just genius. [Laughter]

LW: I've been writing stories since I was a kid, and James and I had been talking about wanting to make a film for many years before this. Even though we wrote the film as a means to an end, so that James would have something to direct and I could have something to act in, it wasn't a slough for me to get through it because I love writing. It took me a long time only because I felt like it was all or nothing, that this script had to be good enough to compete at a world level. We didn't want it to be something that was something that was pretty good for a couple of guys from Melbourne. We wanted it to be a good film on a par with other independent films like Run, Lola, Run and Pi and Memento, these cool thrillers that had ticking-clock gimmicks to them. They're the type of films we wanted to be up there with.

AG: When you do something that's so striking in its originality, people jump, like they did at the screening last night. It reminded me of the old French film Diabolique.

LW: That was actually a film I was watching when I was writing. I loved the simplicity of it, and the ending.

AG: Saw got a lot of buzz last month at the Toronto Film Festival. What was your audience like there?

JW: It was great! It was literally the last film of the festival, finishing the festival with the Midnight Madness section. You can imagine the kind of crowd we were pulling in with that. It was at the Ryerson Theatre, on the [University of Toronto] campus where 1200 people showed up. We were in the green room, when we literally heard outside, like [sound of rhythmic, loud clapping]. We felt like rock stars.

LW: For, like, two seconds. It's weird. For me, growing up wanting to be involved in film--and as you get older you realize how difficult it is to get into that world--I spent a lot of time thinking about concession prizes, second prizes. Like, the first prize is almost so unreachable that you think, "Maybe if I worked on a TV show, it will be almost like film." It just seems so unreal that you could ever score the first prize, which is to actually make a film. So we're so excited! We can't believe we didn't have to settle for less-we actually get to do what we always really wanted to do.

AG: Let's talk a little bit about your calling card scene that you shot, then burned on a DVD and sent to LA. What scene in the script was that?

LW: That scene right there [pointing to the advertising one-sheet featuring Shawnee Smith in the time-triggered steel trap mask].

JW: I got an industrial designer friend of mine to make that for me. And because he's not a prop maker-he's a real industrial designer-he designed it in such a way where it could actually work.

LW: It's not like he knew how to make fake rust. To rust it, he put it in a bathtub of salt water on the roof of his garage and left it there for a week. So this thing was actually rusted! Funny now, it's making me ill thinking about it, because it was so rusted and it had to go in your mouth and it was all steel, it was crazy. This version [pointing to Shawnee's mask] is obviously done by a professional, who painted the rust on, and it's kind of a fake thing. But this thing [the first mask that I wore] was a monstrosity.

AG: I love that scene in the film. It's almost operatic. Watching it, I was thinking, how did he do it? Number one, he dollied around Shawnee Smith. Number two, you sped up the film, and number three-you used some jump cuts as well? How did you pull it off?

JW: [Laughs] It's essentially what you said. It's all about the timing, and a lot of it is to complete the illusion with the sound design and the music and the lighting-it's the whole package. And I guess, with the emotional intensity at that point, it's all about building up to a crescendo, building it up and coming back down again. It was all done in camera. I didn't add any special effects afterwards; I did not spiff it up in post.

AG: Fabulous-it's the centerpiece of the film. It's also interesting for another reason. I'm sure you're well aware there's a tradition in horror films of misogyny, of women being treated particularly sadistically.

LW: Yeah, yeah - women are known as the victims.

AG: Right! In your film, they have it a little easier.

LW: I wouldn't say that was entirely non-deliberate. I do think men can be especially selfish, very focused on what they're doing. Women often-the mother character in the film cares for the child more than she cares for herself, and just from my own point of view, I felt that the men in the film are more the type of people Jigsaw would have a major problem with. You saw it last night, didn't you?

JW: You saw the Sundance version.

LW: You actually saw the NC-17, uncut Sundance version. The actual theatrical R-rated version is slightly cut and it's been a little bit more finessed, the color's even, and the sound.

AG: Well, I don't see why it got an NC-17 in the first place. I mean, what was wrong with it?

LW: They [the MPAA] said it was about tone.

JW: Yeah, they had a problem with the tone of the film.

AG: The tone.

LW: How do you cut tone? [Laughter]

JW: Yeah, they said it was too dark and depressing. And I'm like, well okay, you're penalizing me because I've done my job. They don't see themselves as a censorship board, so if they told you to cut something specifically, that would make them a censorship board, as such.

LW: So, they give you an idea, and-

JW: It's up to you to interpret what they mean.

AG: So you guess.

JW: Yeah! [Laughter] Essentially, what ended up being taken out for the theatrical cut were some of the sifting through the guts shots. I reduced the scene of the guy thrashing around in the barbed wire so it wasn't as long, and a lot of the forensic shots as well, shots that were a bit more gratuitous.

LW: I was worried when James was making the cuts, and then I saw the edited version, and it still retains its nature.

AG: Well, it would be impossible to cut too much from it, because that's the way you scripted it.

JW and LW [in unison]: Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

JW: There's no way a whole scene could come out.

LW: It's like a house of cards-remove one thread, and the whole house collapses.

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Hot on the heels of Saw's $17.6 million take opening weekend, Lions Gate has announced plans for a sequel

November 2, 2004