Page 2
Handling the Naysayers Who Just Don’t Like Sequels: “You’re always going to get that. I find the Internet is really giving a voice to all and sundry. I mean I love the [Internet]; I’m a big user of the Internet. I’m not someone who hates computers and doesn’t like the ‘net, but I find that I can’t read any of the message boards or anything just because of a lot of those negative opinions. Even though I know they mean nothing, it’s some 15-year-old boy in his room at midnight, firing off something. He’s pissed about something, he’s pissed about the fact that his dad took his car keys away so he writes a little dissertation about what a bad actor I am. It’s written badly, the punctuation…you can’t really read that stuff and have it land with you. I mean, it’s not like it would kill me to read it, but I just prefer not to.”
The vocal few who disliked the idea of a Saw II haven’t all gone away now that there’s a Saw III on the way. “It’s always there. It’s always going to be there,” says Whannell. “I think it’s getting to the point now in pop culture where it doesn’t even matter whether you’re liked or hated, as long as you’re known. Look at Paris Hilton. She, what she has masterminded - or perhaps accidentally masterminded - is that it doesn’t matter if she has legions of people out there who think she’s a douche bag, as long as they think of her. And so I think these days in pop culture that the engine is moving so fast that as soon as you find something out there, it’s going to have an equal number of haters as it does people who love it. You’ve just got to expect that. I’ve just come to expect it with the terrain.”
Learning to Accept the Haters: “You’ve got to ignore it. The way I’ve approached writing any film is just shut off my brain and think about what I like. When I wrote the first Saw film I was doing it in Australia. I was still living in my parents’ house. I didn’t have any template. I didn’t have any industry knowledge or never, you know, lived in L.A. before. I just had this clunky old PC. I didn’t know what I was doing, really. I really think that naivety can really sometimes lead to something special.
It’s almost like when you don’t know the rules, it can be a help sometimes. And now that I’ve been living in L.A. for a couple of years, I feel like I know the rules a little bit and I can’t unlearn them. I wish I could go back. If I could do anything, I’d like to rewind back to when I was really naive and didn’t know the rules just to see what I would write. And what I try to do when I write any film, including Saw III, when I went into it was to try and tap into that naivety. Try and shut my brain off, unlearn the rules, and just go, ‘Okay, what do you like? What things do you enjoy?’ That’s how I did the first one. I was using my own taste rather than say a working screenwriter might think about what the public taste is. ‘What would everyone out there like to see?’ Whereas I was saying, ‘What would I like to see?’”
But what if Whannell’s vision for the story differs from what the fans of Saw and Saw II expect from the third film of the franchise? Whannell answered, “That’s a good question. It’s a good point. Now we definitely have more cooks in the kitchen, so if it differed dramatically - if I handed in a draft that was suddenly set during the Depression and it was a Saw film about a bunch of female garment manufacturers, I think Lion’s Gate would ring me and say, ‘What the hell are you doing? We’re paying you..’”
Knowing the target audience and what they want from their Saw movies is an integral part of the writing process. Even if what fans expect isn't totally in line with what Whannell wants, he knows what it is he has to deliver. “That, my friend, is a word called compromise. But the thing is, I’m realistic enough to know that I couldn’t do a film set in the Depression about a bunch of garment manufacturers. I know what is required for the Saw films to be successful. And when I say successful I mean to have the people in lines going in and the people at Twisted Pictures saying, ‘Good work. This is what we want.’
I know the template. The hard thing with Saw films is to work within the existing template and still be interesting. That’s so much harder. If I tell you to go off and write me a story and I say to you it could be about anything, you can do anything you want. Sometimes that can be easier than if I tell you I need you to go off and write a story about a journalist who’s interviewing someone, because all of a sudden I’ve given you these restrictions. It can work both ways, but the template of the Saw films are my constraints. I know that I have to operate within that framework. To try and be interesting within that framework is hard.”
Page 3: Leigh Whannell on Horror Remakes and the Lack of Original Ideas
