THE MAGICAL KEY PART II

LEIGH WHANNELL

Leigh Whannell’s route to screenwriting stardom was a completely different path, but was made with just as much blood, sweet and tears. He just added a touch of R-rated ultra violence along the way. Having always been interested in film and a storyteller since he first learned to write, Whannell attended film school at RMIT University in Melbourne. At the very art-oriented school he met future “Saw” director James Wan.

“It was very like black nail polish and we would have days where we would sit in a room and one at a time show our work and explain it,” said Whannell, straight off a plane and speaking with a thick Australian accent. “So it was always like some guy who changed his name from Ian to Moonbeam getting up and his film is like a ten minute shot of a rock with someone poring milk onto it. You would do this from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.”

Then Whannell saw one of Wan’s short films. It was called “Zombie Holocaust” and featured stop animation with people having their heads ripped off.

“I literally approached James as a fan,” Whannell said. “I hadn’t met him before. He has his baseball cap on and for anyone that hasn’t seen James, just think of Short Round from ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.’ He’s walking the halls and I’m all, ‘How did you make that? How did you do the stop motion? It was so fluid.’

“It wasn’t jerky,” Whannell continued. “I’d love to see it now. It impressed the shit out of me. So I was like a fan and instantly latched on to him and I was like, ‘You need a writer. Your script was weak.’”

So the duo began making short films together. After they completed film school they realized no one was going to back two unknowns trying to make a movie that featured elaborate special effects.

“We were thinking about all this ideas that involved demons, ghosts and space stations,” Whannell said. “Finally one day out of frustration, we were just, ‘Let’s make something ourselves. We’ll just pay for it. That we can do.’”

Whannell said films like “The Blair Witch Project,” “Pi” and “Memento” made him feel like it was achievable. So they came up with a plan to each save $5,000 and use the money to fund their project. They decided to keep it extremely simple and planned on using a camera, a garage and a few friends. Wan would direct and Whannell would star in it.

“That’s how the idea came about,” the energetic and charismatic Whannell said. “We just tried to think of the cheapest thing possible, which is two actors in one room. That’s why ‘Saw’ is what it is. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, it’s basically two guys chained up in the toilet for 90 minutes.”

So they began saving money and Wan waited patiently as Whannell wrote the screenplay for “Saw.” During the writing process, Whannell began with the twist ending and all the main characters being killed. He then slowly worked his way backwards. Initially he wasn’t real big on the idea of a serial killer, but inspiration for Jigsaw’s motive came during a period when Whannell was having headaches everyday and anxiety that he had a brain tumor. All this meshed with a creepy doll obsession of Wan’s and the need to keep the budget down and about a year or so later, Whannell had his script. Their manager Stacey Testro read it and felt it could be so much more than a no budget movie nobody would ever see. She persuaded them to seek more funds and started sending the script out.

“I really reacted badly,” Whannell. “I was yelling at her like she was impeding our progress like we were about to make this dream happen and here comes this person, who wants to spend months and months to find money. I actually resisted it for so long.”
But then the script caught the eye of America. Well, one set of eyes anyway.

“It wasn’t like there was a biding war,” Whannell said. “There was one guy at one agency who liked it and he saw it as like, ‘This summer, Michael Douglas and Josh Hartnett in ‘Saw’’”

The agent was Ken Greenblatt of Genesis. He set up a phone conference with the filmmakers. “He was all, ‘I think you got to open it up a bit more,’” said Whannell in a geeky faux “Hey guys!” American accent.

“Opening it up” just meant adding car chases, explosions and various Hollywood ways of wasting money. He was also asked to Americanize the script. Knowing full well he didn’t want to sell the screenplay, Whannell reluctantly rewrote it.

“The only thing I did to the script was change the language because it was all written in Australian,” said Whannell to a roar of laughter. “So all I did was go through the script and instead of the cops saying, ‘Don’t bloody move, mate.’ It was like, ‘Freeze asshole or I’ll blow your fucking head off!’”

Eventually, Wan and Whannell were talked into flying to Los Angeles to take in a week’s worth of meetings in July 2003. About a month before coming over they decided to take one scene out of the screenplay and make a short out of it to bring with them.

“We had short films we made at film school that we were too embarrassed to show our friends, let alone this guy on the other side of the world,” Whannell said. “(We figured) if all else fails maybe we will sell it, go back to square one and then kill ourselves.”

Wan was unemployed at the time and Whannell was working at a TV station for what he called Australia’s answer to MTV’s “TRL.” Whannell rewrote the jaw headgear scene from the movie to stand alone with himself playing the victim that escapes from the torture device. He then shelled out the production costs and everything seemed to fall into place.

“It’s amazing what you can find when you are looking for it,” said Whannell, who managed to get a circular track from work, so they could create what he called Nine Inch Nails music video-esque shots. The duo then borrowed a 16 millimeter camera from a friend and had an engineer friend build a fully functioning reverse bear trap. Wan slapped together the infamous “Saw” doll in his bedroom with “ping pong balls and ice cream sticks.” Whannell then found a hospital basement near his house that looked like it was straight out of “Se7en” and everything was set. They shot the nine minute scene in one day.

“James directed the shit out of this short,” Whannell said. “People were interested enough in the script to take a meeting with us, but they just loved that fucking short. There’s no way James would have been able to direct that film or I would have been able to play one of the main roles if we hadn’t done that short. It’s so hard sometimes, especially in a crowded field like horror to stand out. You need that proof. Everyone is looking for that extra edge.”

The short, now available on the “Saw (Uncut Edition)” DVD, made its way to Evolution Entertainment, which is the company that represents Susco. He happened to be in the office that day with his manager. The short was being screened down the hall.

“All the sudden we hear these women go, ‘Ahhhh!” Susco said. “We were like, ‘Jesus Christ!’ and we ran in. I caught on the screen, this (guy) cutting open a body and all these images. Everyone in the company was coming over and were like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ And then we sat down and watched it again. It was such an impactful and genius thing these guys did. It shook the whole company up.”

So much so that producers Mark Burg, Gregg Hoffman and Oren Koules wanted to put up their own money to get the film made with Whanell and Wan. It all seemed too good to be true for the Aussies.

Whannell explains the meeting with Evolution as a very surreal and cinematic-like moment. “‘You want to direct this film?” Whannell mimics the producers, slipping into an almost Clint Eastwood voice. “Do you want to act in it? Let’s go make a movie!’

“And then there was like this dramatic pause,” Whannell continued. “I’m punching James under the table, going, ‘Did you hear that? It’s just like they do in the movies.’ I’m like, ‘Real life Hollywood assholes.’ It’s like I was at a zoo. You know like when you see a silverback gorilla for the first time? They were even dressed like Hollywood assholes. We were like, ‘Ah, this is awesome.’ But they kept calling, ‘We’re serious. We want to finance this film for one million dollars. We’re going to shoot it in 18 days. You can direct it. You can have the lead role.’”

Within a couple of months, the duo was on a plane off to shoot “Saw,” which went on to be the most successful film of the year, raking in more than 100 times its budget. Since then Whannell, who says he generally starts his scripts handwriting them in a notebook, wrote “Saw III,” rewrote the “Saw II” script in two weeks and penned the Hammer Horror tribute “Dead Silence,” which was directed by Wan, for Universal Pictures. As an actor, he appeared as Axel in “The Matrix Reloaded” and is currently filming Wan’s “Death Sentence.” Lions Gate appears to be moving forward with a fourth “Saw,” after the success of the third one, but even though Whannell says he has plenty of sick ideas he hasn’t used yet, like a self castration device, he and Wan don’t think they want any part of it.

Regardless, these days they can probably get any movie made they want and like Susco, they got there by creatively pushing their way into those positions. Whannell said there’s no one way to do anything and there’s no magical key to Hollywood. But in a way, I disagree. No, the magical key isn’t directing a short or manipulating footage from a foreign film and slapping your own subtitles on it. It’s not making a trailer or going all out and shooting a full length feature. When you look at all the great success stories of screenwriters and directors, it’s the same thing over and over again. None of them got there using the same means or mimicking the current trend of movies. They used their imaginations and made their big breaks happen. To me that’s what Susco and Whannell both did. Some may consider them lucky. But in actuality it was hard work and unique visions that put them in the position to make the luck happen. That’s the magical key.

- CCF, November 2006