The Voice of Jigsaw: Tobin Bell’s a little league baseball coach when he’s not scaring the crap out of audiences as Jigsaw. Bell says the voice he uses to encourage the kids is definitely not the voice of Jigsaw. “I don’t use the same voice all the time. The further away I get from the whole Saw thing, the more my voice changes.
I think the whole voice thing came about as a result of in Saw I. You heard my voice throughout the film. You heard all the tapes and everything. It was probably one of the reasons why they wanted me to do the film in the first place, because those tapes had to be compelling in a certain way. It wasn’t just a matter of imparting the information. You heard my voice throughout the film, and you saw me kind of hooded and caped throughout the film, but you didn’t really connect that hood and cape guy to the guy on the floor. If you had, that would have blown the whole thing. So when I got up off the floor in the end was really the only time that you saw me speak on camera.
I was drawn to the film because I believe that there is power in silence. When I first read the script [for the original Saw), when I saw that there were three people on the stage, that was like a curtain goes up in the theater and you see three people on the stage. It doesn’t matter whether this guy in the middle of the room [is dead]; it’s like he’s still there. He’s part of the play, so that didn’t concern me. Then when I got to the end of the script and I saw the gag at the end, I hadn’t seen that before and I was completely surprised reading the script. So I thought, ‘Well, if they can do this well, if the audience is as surprised as I was, that’ll be fun to do.’ I was drawn to it for that reason. I thought it was very theatrical, the three characters on a stage. You don’t see a lot of films that are structured that way, so it was different in that way.”
Creating the Tone of the Saw Movies: “One of the testaments that I have to make to Leigh Whannell, the writer, and to Darren [Lynn Bousman, the director] is that even if the dialogue doesn’t happen exactly the way it was written on the page, they give you clues to the direction that they want to go,” said Bell. “Somewhere in what they’ve written, there’s a clue to what’s trying to be created there. Sometimes the rhythm of it isn’t quite right or the texture of it isn’t quite right, or on the page it will be just kind of verbatim. But when you actually begin to say the words, they’re infused with the reality of the moment if you’re in contact with the person who you are working with.
Somewhere in your soul, you’re trying to create something that’s either subconscious or conscious. The camera doesn’t miss that.
The Reaction of Saw Fans: “15, 16-year-old kids, six of them will come up to me with their skateboards and they’ll say, ‘You’re the man, you’re the guy’ and I’ll say, ‘Well, yeah.’ And they say, ‘We love Saw, when’s the next one coming out?’ I say, ‘A couple of weeks.’ And I say, ‘So what is it about Saw that you like?’ And they say, ‘Well, geez, it’s so whoa.’ And the power of the whole thing, but then one of them will say, ‘And you know, it teaches you stuff.’ And I say, ‘Well, what do you mean by that? What is it teaching you?’ And they said, ‘Well, like when you said to the guy if you knew the exact moment of your own death, how would it change how you live your life?’
The fact that 16-year-old kids are thinking about that or 15, is just great. I’m like okay, because I’ve been thinking about that for years and I still haven’t figured out how to do anything about it because you know how it is. One day, you get up and you’re like, ‘Ah, geez,’ you’re bitching about this and complaining about that. You feel like, ‘Oh my God, I gotta do this and that’s terrible and the bills.’ Why is it that the human condition is such that our blessing, which is something that Jigsaw talks about all the time, our appreciation of blessings, why is it that we can’t seem to focus in on our blessings? It’s so much easier for us to focus on the negativities. And here you’ve got 16-year-old kids thinking about and talking to you about stuff like that. I’m like, ‘Great!’”
Page 2: Shawnee Smith and More Saw Movies
