Horror duo Leigh Whannell and James Wan found massive success with Saw and Insidious. Now Whannell is continuing the Insidious series without his frequent collaborator at his side.
Leigh Whannell at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
Larry Busacca / Getty Images
More than a decade ago, Saw, directed by James Wan and written by and starring Leigh Whannell, became one of the most profitable horror movies of all time. Now, after writing two more Saw movies and two films of a second franchise, Insidious, Whannell is making his directorial debut with Insidious: Chapter 3.
"Filmmaking seems to me to be a lot like skydiving. You can watch a bunch of videos about skydiving. You can learn the theory of it. But you don't really know what it's like until you jump out of that plane," Whannell told BuzzFeed News at L.A.'s iconic Chateau Marmont, where he wrote most of the third Insidious film. "I don't know that I was ready at all."
It's a big change for Whannell: Insidious: Chapter 3 not only marks his first time as a director, but also his separation from Wan, whom he met in film school in their native Australia. They embarked on a joint career that yielded Saw (Wan directed Saw and co-wrote the story of Saw and Saw III with Whannell, who wrote and starred in the first three) and Insidious (written by Whannell, with a story assist from Wan, who directed the first two). Wan has moved on to big-budget studio films, like Furious 7 and the upcoming Aquaman. And although he was a producer on Insidious 3, Wan was "pretty hands-off," which had its advantages and disadvantages for first-time director Whannell.
"My identity was so wrapped up in being one-half of the Wan-Whannell duo, and I realized I didn't know who I was without James," Whannell said. "He was doing Furious 7 at the time, which was kind of a hurricane of a production, with all this tumultuous activity that happened and the tragedy with Paul Walker, which stopped production. So he was right in the eye of that storm, and I think he really helped by what he didn't do. He didn't lean over my shoulder and tell me to do this, that. He didn't give me notes or tell me to change things."
At the same time, Whannell acknowledged that working without Wan at his side was at times a difficult change. "Things like that always turn out to be the events in your life that kind of shove you forward," he said. "It's like when you first move out of home and you have your own apartment, and you're thinking, Oh my god, this is so difficult. And then you learn the ropes and you sort of get shoved up the evolutionary ladder a little bit.
"It's been an ever-evolving journey. This is my first time, and I'm gonna have to learn by making mistakes."
Elise (Lin Shaye) steps into the Further in Insidious: Chapter 3.
Focus Features
Whannell's interest in horror began at a young age: While his friends were extolling the virtues of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, he was haunted by Jaws. And that particular genre had its practical advantages for Whannell when he and Wan were looking to make their first feature after film school. Once the duo realized that no one was particularly interested in blindly funding their work, they sought out to create something on their own.
"We started trying to calculate how much money you could make a film for at the absolute base level," Whannell said. "Horror is probably the only genre where a bigger budget doesn't really help. 'Cause what are you gonna do with that extra money? Are you gonna create a special effects sequence where a city gets knocked down, like something out of Man of Steel? … It's a very friendly genre to first-time filmmakers."
But even working within horror, Whannell and Wan had to look for ways to cut costs. Their first movie had to be very contained — the film equivalent of television's "bottle episodes" that lower the budget by taking place all in one room. It was in those early brainstorming sessions that they stumbled on the idea for Saw.
While the sequels to the 2004 film upped the ante on gore and world expansion, Saw itself is a small movie — the story of two men, Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) and Adam Stanheight (Whannell), who find themselves chained up in a basement with instructions that one must kill the other in order to escape.
"Essentially, Saw is the result of us pushing ourselves to come up with this movie," Whannell said. "I always loved the story. There was something about that story for Saw, as I was writing it, that gave me confidence — not so much confidence that it would be a hit movie, but confidence that people would like it."
And they did. Saw turned out to be a massive success, grossing more than $100 million worldwide, birthing a franchise, and becoming a part of the pop culture lexicon. Given the low expectations Whannell and Wan had, Saw's staggering popularity was a thrilling surprise.
"I knew that people would respond to it — I just didn't think it would happen on that level," Whannell admitted. "I'm still, to this day, pretty chuffed, pretty happy, that we made a film that impacted popular culture, to the point where journalists had to think up a term to describe the movie."
No comments:
Post a Comment