Hello, Amanda,” chides a chilling voice to a chained brunette, her jaws clamped shut with orthodontic headgear from hell. The camera swoops around the haggard victim, capturing her mounting panic as the screen whirls faster and faster, jerking to a sudden halt while she shrieks in agony. Her heart throbs in synch with the pulsating fluorescent lights, and her eyes widen with terror as a cracked-out clown face suddenly appears on a flickering television screen. “I want to play a game.”
Yes, “Saw” director James Wan is incredibly twisted. From his open obsession with creepy clowns — “James always puts (them) in his movies,” teased “Saw” screenwriter and actor Leigh Whannell — to his uncanny appreciation for the deliciously grotesque — think “Kill Bill” minus the elegance of kung-fu — Wan is one of few directors with enough guts to tackle a production this incredibly disturbing.
Then again it’s not like he had anything to lose. A recent graduate of Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, where he received a bachelor of arts degree, Wan had never even dabbled in feature-film direction. Instead he gained behind-the-lens experience solely from shorts and music videos.
“We just finished school,” Whannell explained. “We had no money, no distributor — we just wanted to shoot a film, the cheapest fucking thing we could do.”
More than hindering the feature, however, the budgetary constraints only further contributed to the plot development. In order to eliminate unnecessary set expenses, the writer-director duo opted for a (mostly) one-room setting, thereby creating the movie’s primary premise — two men wake up in a bathroom, on either side of a dead body, to be manipulated for the amusement of a serial killer, nicknamed “Jigsaw” by authorities.
Wan also envisioned the perfect ending to his twisted tale, leaving him with a provocative start and a climactic finish — but nothing to bridge the gap in between.
Enter Whannell, the middle man, who penned a script that filled Wan’s holes and breathed life into his horrific cinematic debut.
“We tried to think of stuff that would be really difficult to get through,” Whannell said of the film’s many twists, turns and toe curling mind games.
He wasn’t kidding. One Jigsaw stunt involves a naked man trapped in a cage full of barbed wire, with only two hours to escape before the lone exit is permanently shut.
Another requires a kerosene-covered man to find a door-lock combination from hundreds of possibilities scribbled on the walls while holding a candle and traversing the glass-shard-covered floor — in bare feet.
No wonder the Aussies wouldn’t touch this stuff. After shooting Amanda’s jaw-trap scene — so they could illustrate their vision for potential financers — Wan and Whannell pitched their project to several Australian distributors but wound up “spending an entire year hitting brick walls.”
So they did what any broke, rejected, aspiring Aussie filmmakers would — and no, it did not involve Foster’s.
The duo sent their preview scene to the United States where, oh-so-shockingly, the controversial content was warmly welcomed. Wan and Whannell partnered with Lions Gate Films, where they received a budget — which they vaguely hint is “well under $10 million” — and a slew of actors who, Wan claimed, just “did it for fun.”
Such an unusual motive could likely be attributed to the movie’s next-to-nothing filming demands. The entire feature was shot in 18 days — highly truncated in comparison to Hollywood’s standard multi-month schedule — and some cast members, like Monica Potter, were only called for three. “Saw” also necessitated only five days of pre-production and six weeks of post-production.
Despite its curtailed production period and limited funds, “Saw” still manages to supersede many mainstream horror flicks in both quality and originality. “CSI”-style camera effects pervade the film with a heavy dose of in-your-face frights and stellar performances by Danny Glover (as vengeful Detective David Tapp), Cary Elwes (as struggling family man Dr. Lawrence Gordon) and Whannell (as money-grubbing photo-voyeur Adam) only further highlight the script’s refreshing creepiness.
As for a possible sequel?
“We don’t talk about those things,” Wan teased. “We’re superstitious.”4
Medill freshman Dan Macsai is a PLAY writer. He can be reached at [email protected].
