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Is the process similar, like creating a backstory for Jigsaw?
“Yeah, it was a very different process. Dead Silence was my film school, basically. I went to film school for three years in Melbourne but I learned far more on Dead Silence about the way Hollywood works. That was really trial by fire and couldn't be any more different to the process of writing Saw. Saw was done, I wrote that film on a clunky old PC that I used to have. I didn't know the rules. I had a couple of screenwriting books and a couple of scripts that I had bought. I didn't know what I was doing really. I was kind of flying blind and there was freedom in that. There's a certain freedom in naivety. I was definitely naïve about what I was doing and what I was putting on paper. Whereas with Dead Silence, I knew a bit more. I was living in LA.
The main difference, I think, between the writing of the Saw films and the writing of Dead Silence was it was a pitch. So instead of just going off and having an idea and putting it down on paper with no one looking over my shoulder, I had this huge multi-national conglomerate looking over my shoulder. General Electric essentially was looking over my shoulder. We went into the Universal offices, pitched them and they were like, ‘Great, we like it, go ahead.’"
Will you stay involved with Saw IV?
“I am going to be involved to the extent that James and I created it so our names are still on it as executive producers and anything that your name is on, you want to make sure the quality is still there. So I'm definitely going to be involved. I believe a script is being written now so I can't wait to read it. I'm definitely going to have my input. I guess I'm going to be a smaller version of that studio going, I'm going to have my notes. The good thing is, Mark [Burg] and Oren [Koules] sort of welcome my notes. Any ideas that James and I have, they're really open to them because they know that we created it and we have the authority with it. So that's definitely something I'll be involved with.”
Are any of your ideas part of the assignment?
“Well, I had a couple of ideas. I know that the direction they're going in sort of does spin off from one of them. But the good thing is with Saw IV is everyone got together, Mark, Oren, Darren, myself, James, anyone who was involved with Saw at a key level got together and threw our ideas into the hat. I think that Saw IV will end up being a good mesh of the best ideas we had.”
There are many ways to stay with Jigsaw. Will the answer please fans?
“I think it will. Without wanting to get killed by a Lionsgate marketing person for revealing anything - I think that knowing the direction we're going in, I think Saw fans will be pleasantly surprised. I hope the twists and turns we come up with for this one still fool people. So yeah, I think that people will be pleasantly surprised. It doesn't suck, in other words.”
The TV spots for Dead Silence don't really tell the plot. Is that good? Do you want audiences to be surprised?
“Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's one of those films where we kind of want people to discover the film. I actually would like every one of the trailers for all of the films that I'm involved in to be like that. Don't you find these days that trailers just reveal the whole movie from start to finish? There've actually been a couple of recent trailers where after I've seen them, I've turned around to whoever I'm with and said, ‘Well, I don't need to see that film.’ I'm trying to think of one recently that basically spelled it all out. I think Premonition, which we're going up against, that's one particular one. I think the Saw trailer did that well as well, kept a little bit of mystery so I'm glad that Dead Silence is doing it too.”
Does it give info enough to hook them?
“It gives enough information about what the film is. It has a very distinct tone to it, Dead Silence. It's something I hope the trailer conveys, but the film is really a tribute to all the Hammer horror films, the horror films of yesteryear. We love those old horror films where the fog machine got put to good use and it was a painted backdrop. We love matte paintings and fog machines, basically. So in this film, you really will see a lot of that.
The whole thing is really fogbound and essentially the town that most of the film takes place in, Ravensfair, is just a big tribute to Edgar Allen Poe. It's interesting, I'm not sure whether younger audiences will get that per se, for want of a better word, or whether that will even matter to them but for us it really is like our Sleepy Hollow. I mean, it's set in modern times, albeit with a couple of flashbacks to the '30s but even though it's set in modern times, it really takes place in this other world. It's basically a Hammer horror film world or an Edgar Allen Poe story. So that's the main thing that we really wanted to convey with the trailer was the feeling of the film, this kind of old timey feeling.”
So how would you describe what the movie’s about?
“The movie is about a young man, Jamie, whose wife is killed under mysterious circumstances. He and his wife receive a ventriloquist doll in the mail that has no note and no card. It just turns up. They're pretty bemused by it. Then later that night, Jamie's wife turns up dead. There are no suspects. There's not anything in the crime so through various circumstances, Jamie ends up returning to his hometown where his wife was from as well, which is this town of Ravensfair. He goes back with his wife and starts to find out that something in his hometown may have had something to do with his wife's death.
He basically starts uncovering the mystery of this old ventriloquist who used to live in the town. She was like an old hermit. She lived in this old theater and kept to herself. When she died, she was buried with her children, which is basically her doll collection. She had 101 dolls she was buried with so her spirit, her presence has haunted this town for a long time. So yeah, I don't know if that's coherent but there's lots of dolls and things and scary things in there. It's creepy.”
