Is The Further a concept in spirituality and metaphysics that you’ve been interested in before?
Leigh Whannell
Tags: Horror, Gore, saw, Leigh Whannell, Insidious, screenwriter
I first met Leigh Whannell as the writer and costar of Saw. I thought it was a really cool indie movie that came out of nowhere. It had a mind-blowing surprise at the end and a theme that really spoke to me. When Whannell wrote two sequels in two years, I really got into depth with him on Jigsaw’s morality. Seven Saws later, and Whannell has written another script for his directing buddy James Wan .
Insidious again deals with themes that are bigger than the immediate story. In the film, parents Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) find their homes (that’s plural) haunted by spirits. So it’s a ghost story.
These ghosts are from a realm called The Further, the realm where souls live. That’s nice if Josh and Renai’s son has the power to leave his body while he sleeps. Not so nice if the evil souls of the dead come after the boy’s body while he’s out. Whannell also plays Specs, a paranormal investigator in the film.
I reunited with Whannell in Austin where his film had just premiered at the South by Southwest on opening night. He’d had one hour of sleep after the midnight premiere, which made me feel guilty for getting a whole four. Perhaps we were both a bit closer to The Further than the waking world for this discussion.
SG:
LW:
Yeah, insofar as it is the afterlife. I’ve been fascinated with that topic for as long as I can remember. I don’t know what’s out there. That’s my belief, that the universe is full of mystery and I don't know what happens after we die. I don't know if everything goes dark or if there’s something more. And I wouldn’t claim to know and I’m afraid that I’m only going to find out once I die, so I’m kind of obsessed with the topic of ghosts because seeing a ghost is a confirmation during your lifetime that there may be something else beyond your death. I haven’t personally seen a ghost or had any experience but I know plenty of people who have. So I’ve been fascinated with that topic and I guess The Further represents the mystery that lies outside our death. From the moment we’re dead, what happens then?
SG:
The Further seems connected with metaphysical ideas with whatever energy our body has, that there could be a realm where our energy exists in a different form.
LW:
Totally, absolutely. I spoke to a medium before I really started getting into the writing. I had everything sort of sketched out but I was just talking to him about his job. He was talking about ghosts being energy. We have energy in us, like electrical energy, the human body. When we die, the energy doesn’t just disappear, it sort of becomes part of the atmosphere. That is what he was saying a ghost is. It’s that energy manifesting itself as something so it’s kind of an interesting idea what you’re talking about. It seems at face value like an outlandish concept that is representative more of the horror genre than it is of real questions about what happens after we die. But if you look at it from a different angle, sure there’s ghosts in white makeup but really what it’s looking at is this realm that could be all around us. There’s so much we don’t know as human beings. There’s so much we don’t know about space, about the human brain. I wouldn’t even begin to assume anything about what you’re talking about, like a plane where human beings can exist that isn’t this plane, that’s a different level.
SG:
That was my way into it. It didn’t have to be ghosts for me to be interested.
LW:
Right, exactly. You’re one of the only people who’s picked up on that. It doesn’t necessarily have to be ghosts. It could be a time loop of people repeating things. It’s really just “the beyond,” the space between.
SG:
Where did you find the maturity to write parents when you’re not one yourself?
LW:
I have a lot of friends who have children and my brother has a daughter. I’ve kind of observed this shift in the last few years. As you get older, I’m 34 now, so I’m starting to see the effects of aging, those first little creaks, the wrinkles and three day hangovers, saying things to kids like, “Oh, this music sucks. When I was growing up we listened to Nirvana. That was real rock. What the hell is this Lady Gaga bullshit?” Once you catch yourself saying something like that, you realize that you are your parents now.
SG:
I find myself saying, “Ra ma ramama? Come on, that’s gibberish!”
LW:
[Laughs] You know what you sound like though, don’t you? You do. You catch yourself and you’re like, “Oh my God, that’s something my uncle would’ve said.” Yeah, I find myself lecturing kids about the golden age of hip hop which of course was my age. In 30-40 years time, not even, sooner than that, the cover of Rolling Stone will be Kurt Cobain and Trent Reznor. It’ll be the icons of our youth. Instead of Mick Jagger and Jackson Browne, it’ll be Curt Kobain and
Chris Cornell. Each generation gets to a certain point and position of power in the world, and then says, “What I grew up with is the most relevant, important stuff.” Then forces it on everyone else.
Chris Cornell. Each generation gets to a certain point and position of power in the world, and then says, “What I grew up with is the most relevant, important stuff.” Then forces it on everyone else.
SG:
Can you imagine the generation that grows up on your films and holds them in that regard?
LW:
That’s an interesting point. I know, it’ll be interesting because I think they’ll regard Saw the way that you and I regarded Freddy and Jason. I look back on Freddy and Jason now and all the hours I spent watching that stuff as a teenager and it was cool. I was so excited about seeing that stuff.
SG:
What has it been like for you to start one of the horror movements with Saw and then see another movement begin with the Paranormal Activity type movies?
LW:
That’s been an interesting changing of the guard. It makes you realize that the media cycle we live in is more accelerated. I think trends dip in and out much quicker. There can be a microtrend that lasts for a very short time. I think that with horror, the comment I get a lot is, “Oh, well horror’s back in now. It’s popular right now.”
SG:
They were saying that when we were growing up.
LW:
Right. What you and I know and what these people aren’t getting is that horror is always there. What comes in and out of popularity are the different subgenres of horror. For a little while it’ll be slasher films and then that’ll run its course. Then it will be ghost movies and then it will be torture porn, extreme horror films like Saw and Hostel. Then that’ll run its course and something new will come in. There’ll always be something new. It’s like whack-a-mole. You can whack one head but something else pops up over here. I also get the comment a lot, “Well, horror’s back in right now with Saw.” And I’ll say, “It’s always been around. What about The Others, The Sixth Sense?” “Oh, that’s not horror.” And I’m like, “Yes, it is.” “No, that’s thriller.” And I’m like, “No, The Others and The Sixth Sense are horror films.” So I also think people have trouble perceiving exactly what is a horror film. To me, a horror film is something that is purposely trying to scare you or unsettle you. That is horror. Within that phrase lies everything from Cannibal Holocaust to The Others.
SG:
You talk about an accelerated media cycle. Isn’t there an accelerated production cycle too? We’ve never seen franchises release a movie a year before.
LW:
It’s unprecedented. It started with Saw. We’ve created a monster. When people ask me, “Is the Saw franchise really over?” I say, “Yeah, these guys, these producers have worked their asses off. They’re exhausted.” They made one film a year for seven years. They literally finished work on one film on a Friday and had to start working on the next film on Monday. It was that much of a turnover and I think they’re ready to just take it easy for a while.
SG:
I do hope you’re a millionaire from executive producing the seven Saw films. How have you supported yourself with that franchise?
LW:
[Laughs] Well, James and I get residuals from the Saw films, the fact that they make them. So it’s definitely been good to us in terms of letting us be more choosy with our other projects. I think if it wasn’t for the Saw sequels, we would be out there shilling for whatever projects we could get to put food on the table. The Saw films have been this thing that has allowed us to be really creatively choosy. It’s been at least a cushion of okay, a Saw film’s coming out this year, I don’t have to worry about taking a job.
SG:
You always said you intended us to assume Dr. Gordon died after he cut his foot off.
LW:
I know!
SG:
How did you feel when they said, “We want to bring back Cary Elwes and this is how Saw VII will end?”
LW:
I didn’t have much to do with it. The thing is, because it’s such a collaboration, after part III as you know I didn’t have a direct involvement. So they made four more movies. That’s four movies they made without my direct involvement. I think it would’ve been impolite of me to come in and say, “At this point, no, you can’t do this.” It was better for James and I to say, “Listen, we know the films we’ve done and we know our mythology and we’ve created this character. It’s now been taken over by new owners. It has a new foster home and it’s best to let them do what they did.” To their credit, the producers were always pretty stringent about giving the fans exactly what they wanted. They really worked their asses off on those films so I didn’t really say anything. I just let them do it.
SG:
Certainly if they chose to go in that direction, they came up with a sensible reason for Dr. Gordon to survive and it ends the series on a high.
LW:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve always chatted to you with every Saw film that I was involved in and seen you and you’ve been there from the start. So you’ve really seen this evolution from this standalone indie film to oh, now there’s a II. Oh, now there’s a III. Now it’s a mythology. It’s this intertwined storyline that goes on. And you’re making me think about a lot of things or articulating a lot of things that I don’t usually think about, like yeah, one film a year. That’s an unprecedented concept.
SG:
How about this? You’ve had five screenplays produced. How weird is that?
LW:
I know, it’s cool. It’s a weird concept. I almost meld the three Saw films into one in some way but they’re not. They’re three separate movies. The weird thing is, over the last two years, I’ve written four films that haven’t been produced yet. Over the last two years, I’ve written four scripts that you haven’t seen that are all in various stages of development and/or production. None of those scripts were a horror film. One was a noir thriller. One was a children’s film. One was an Australian film, like a crime drama and one’s a comedy. So it’s pretty crazy that the films that are actually tangibly seeable are all horror films, yet I’ve spent the last two years concentrating on anything but horror. But to you, it doesn’t exist. To me it’s my whole life but to you, these films haven’t been produced yet. So I’d love to chat with you during the press talks for one of these other movies just to see how that goes.
SG:
Will each one of those, even the children’s film, have a twist ending?
LW:
No, the noir thriller had twists in it. The children’s film is fairly straight ahead. That’s going to be an animated film hopefully. A company’s picked that up that’s going to hopefully turn it into an animation, so that’s probably the most exciting project just in terms of the newness of it. The process of animation’s just so foreign to me so that to me would be the big one. We’ll be talking about that in 2015.
SG:
LW:
That would be very interesting if they did have it because they kind of made that their thing. Here are the rules. I wonder if they’ve adjusted their rules.
Insidious opens on April 1.
Insidious opens on April 1.
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