anderswolleck

After years of interviewing Saw II and Saw III director Darren Lynn Bousman, finally we get to do it for SuicideGirls. I have been a fan of all the Saw films since I saw the first one in preparation for my interview with co-writer/director James Wan. I had no inkling that this gory little horror flick would change the face of American horror and put us into this torture porn cycle that we are still in three years later. The Saw films have always gotten a lot of shit from the online press but it is hard to argue with a franchise that has grossed nearly $400 million worldwide. Bousman is the director of the two Saw sequels and Saw III is truly the one that ties them all together. With Tobin Bells Jigsaw and Shawnee Smiths Amanda now front and center, the audience gets to really feel the precarious mental state of the serial killers and maybe even can sympathize with them. With Jigsaw on his last legs due to cancer, Amanda has taken over the task of testing their captives and pushing them to their limits. I got a chance to talk with Bousman about the new unrated Saw III DVD.

Buy the DVD for Saw III

Daniel Robert Epstein: Have you started shooting Wichita yet?

Darren Lynn Bousman: Wichita got blacklisted from Hollywood I think. My whole goal in my tenure here in Hollywood is to offend and upset as many people as humanly possible, but I think that Wichita might have crossed the line. There is nothing in my mind that will ever top the disturbing factors that Wichita has. So dont be looking for Wichita this year but Ive got some other very interesting things out there that are very exciting.

I want to do things that are crazy and unique and interesting and not just do the same the same rehashed pile of shit over and over again. It looks like one of my next projects is going to be a rock opera of all things.

DRE: Thats right; I remember that you were a huge fan of Jesus Christ Superstar.

DLB: Huge fan. Ive been working with these two guys on this rock opera for years now. I directed a play called REPO! The Genetic Opera about five years back in Hollywood. I always said that if I ever get the chance to make the movie I want to make, I want to go make REPO. When Saw II hit, I called the writers up and said, Guys, you better write a script right now. I guarantee Im going to get this movie made. So they went off and turned the play into a script. So Saw III is a hit and I was like, Im going to shoot a scene of this so people know what it is. So much like James Wan did in the original Saw, I went out and I shot a scene with Shawnee Smith and Michael Rooker in it. It is like a throwback to Rocky Horror Picture Show and Jesus Christ Superstar and people got excited by it. The writers knocked it out of the park with the script and it seems that we will be doing it sometime this year.

DRE: Is it a Tommy-like rock opera?

DLB: Id probably say that its the music of Rocky Horror Picture Show and the visuals of Blade Runner but its violent as hell. Its a very in your face horror theme.

DRE: At 2006s San Diego Comicon I met Shawnee Smith for the first time. Shes a lot shorter than I thought she was.

DLB: Can I please tell you that Im in love with Shawnee Smith. I think I always will be.

DRE: I have a huge crush on her. I told you not to introduce me to her at some party and you brought her right over to me. I was so mad [laughs].

DLB: Shes beautiful and shes great person as well. I was really lucky to work with her in Saw II and Saw III and I plan to continually use her for different roles. I knew she was in a band called Fydolla Ho but who would have known she has a major singing voice? So when REPO came up I was like, Hey I need your help. I want you to come help me on this rock opera. She was like, Alright, what do you want me to sing? At that point I wasnt going to have her sing. But then I gave her the song and she knocked it out of the park. She sounds like a diva.

DRE: How was it getting to meet Darren Aronofsky in San Diego?

DLB: Amazing. I saw The Fountain and it was fantastic. Heres this romance movie told in this fucked up way. Its genius. I hate movies that dumb down for the audience. All these romantic movies that are out there with Jennifer Love Hewitt or Brittany Murphy, no offense to both, are just typical. But here Darren Aronofsky does his version of a love story and its this amazing, crazy thing called The Fountain.

DRE: I was shocked and surprised when there was some negative response to it.

DLB: It upsets me that movies like Pans Labyrinth and Fountain arent the ones having these huge opening weekends because theyre so innovative and original. Why arent people flocking to the cinema to see this stuff? Darren Aronofskys movies just continually evoke emotion. If I watch Requiem for a Dream, even after 30 times, I still get sick to my stomach. I still feel queasy.

DRE: You know what made me feel queasy, Donnie Wahlbergs mushy foot [in Saw III].

DLB: [laughs] That was a good time on set. The best part was when youre submitting to the MPAA, you know youre not going to get an R rating. But youre still going to send it in there anyway. In the initial edit, I think we had Donnie hitting his foot 17 times. The MPAA was like, Not going to happen. So every time we had to resubmit it to them wed take one hit away. So I think I got the MPAA desensitized to seeing Donnie Walberg smash his foot.

DRE: The traps in the third movie had a much deadlier feel to it because of the character that was creating them but was it a different way of thinking up traps?

DLB: I went into this whole movie with a different mentality. I was like, Okay I did Saw II and that was more like an action horror film which has people running around screaming and so on. I wanted this one to be more emotional. So the traps are more emotional. For [Angus Macfadyen's character of] Jeff, we had an emotional choice for the character. Does he burn his sons possessions? Thats not violent but in my mind thats more disturbing than the pigs getting chopped up. Here is this guy holding onto his childs death. Same thing with the freezer chick, it wasnt necessarily gruesome but here he is standing face to face with a woman who could have possibly helped his son but she walked away. He has to decide if hes going to save her or not. Also these traps dont have anything to do with the victims. Its not about the victims saving themselves. Its all about, will they allow this other character to save them, which is something that hasnt been done in the Saw films. Its not hard to gross somebody out. Thats the easiest thing. Anybody can go get an 8mm camera, get cow innards and disgust people. Its funny because one of the biggest problems that the MPAA had was with the scene of the freezer woman. Not because of the nudity or blood but because of the amount of time she was screaming in agony. That was great to me because I finally upset someone and it has nothing to do with violence.

DRE: Im sure you guys knew Saw III would do very well, but 70 million dollars?

DLB: It was a risk for me to come back. I was sitting there biting my nails because if this thing ended up being less successful than the previous one I would look like the biggest fool in the world. When you hit the jackpot, you walk away. You dont double down. I doubled down on Saw III and if I had failed it would have basically negated the success with II. I think that really helped streamline this movie and make it what it was. All of us, [co-writer] Leigh [Whannell] included, were very scared going into three like, What can we do to not make this a Friday the 13th number 19? What can we do to make this further the story, not just further our pocketbooks?

DRE: How was it getting to direct Leigh for the first time?

DLB: [laughs] It was funny. My favorite part would be when Leigh would get all serious with his character and he would try to ask a question and I would either fall asleep or take a cell phone call. That was something he used to do when I would try to give him notes on the script, so it was a nice trade off. The sad thing is that a lot of Leighs scenes got cut. Hopefully one day therell be a directors cut, I have to convince Lionsgate to let me do one, but I would like to put back one of Leighs best scenes back in.

DRE: I love Tobin Bell too.

DLB: Tobin is a super genius. He sits there and analyzes every line and he will ask you questions for 30 minutes about a line like There will be blood. Hell philosophize about what those words really mean. Is he hearkening back to a darker time in his life when his mother might have said that to him? Eventually youre like, Okay Tobin, fine. Dont say the line. He goes, No, I had to know. Then he says it and it sends chills down your spine.

DRE: When Saw II was released you told me that some of the traps were left over from an old screenplay of yours called The Desperate. Was anything from that screenplay in Saw III?

DLB: No, there are some maybe in Saw IV. I think Ill have the bravery to put them in. We have some great traps that have never been used yet.

DRE: Did you guys really get the Saw bathroom from Scary Movie IV?

DLB: Yeah, we did but we should have just built a new one. It probably would have been faster and cheaper because they didnt do it to the right specifications. When youre dealing with the fan base of the Saw films, you cant fuck around and kind of make it look like the original bathroom. It has to be the original bathroom. So we spent about a week and a half trying to fix it and restructure to make it look like the way it does in the final project.

DRE: How was it working with Angus Macfadyen?

DLB: Angus was a lot different than all the other cast. Angus is a classically trained actor and he was in fucking Braveheart. Thats Sir Robert the Bruce. Every day he came on set it would take me a couple of minutes to shake off that I was talking to Sir Robert the Bruce. Angus was fun and he has a very dry sense of humor. A lot of the time I was like, I think he hates me because I would say something to him and he would look at me cockeyed but thats just Angus. He adds so much. Ill say, Angus, its going to be crazy. Im going to shoot this in a really fucked up way. I want you to throw your head from side to side and scream. Then you turn the camera on and he would give you something ridiculous. Ill give you a perfect example. When Tim [played by Mpho Koaho] was on the cross, I told Angus, I want you to act completely crazy. We put the camera on. He went to a place that I wish I could have put on the deleted scenes. He mocked Tim on the cross which is a thing that most actors would be scared to do. He threw his arms up and started mocking him. We showed it in a flash frame. It was great to have an actor who was willing to commit an experiment.

DRE: Whats it like having everything link up to the first film?

DLB: Its fun and its extremely hard. Again, were dealing with fans who dissect everything. The minute a trailer is put online the fans have it on the internet, they inspect it frame by frame and they start pointing things out like, This isnt right. This head wound was a fifth of a centimeter to the right. It wasnt a nine millimeter gun with two bullets, it was a glock whatever with one bullet. It was so hard. We had an entire team of people whos job it was to make sure everything matched what we were trying to match to. For example the flashback scene where Jigsaw put the head trap on Shawnee was done with obsessive compulsive precision. Those were actually Shawnees original clothes from Saw I. She had to go to her attic to find those original clothes. Then we had to put the tattoo that she had on which was just something she drew on that day. One of those little scenes that lasted maybe 30 seconds in Saw III took weeks of planning. We wanted seamless integration from the original film to this one.

DRE: Saw III ends with a cliffhanger, do you know how its supposed to keep going?

DLB: Im not going to say. I read the script a couple days ago and I was pretty blown away because at some point youre going to jump the shark. At some point its going to get ridiculous. You will have Jigsaw in space. You will have Jigsaw versus Leprechaun. But somehow they make it work. At the end of the script my jaw dropped. I was like, Fuck, here I am the director of the last two and I was a hundred percent sure they werent going to trick me but they did it.

DRE: Saw III is a much tighter film than Saw II. Thats just the nature of it because Saw II had so many characters. Im sure when you look at Saw II, you see all the things you wish you could have done differently. Do you have different feelings about Saw III?

DLB: Im extremely happy with Saw III. A lot of people ask what my favorite scene is and thats probably when Shawnee is cutting herself. Its such a small scene but when I first pitched that I wanted a scene of her cutting herself, everyone kept saying, Okay, thats great, but why do we need it in the movie? My whole point was that it is not needed in the movie but so many times you have serial killers who have madness that isnt grounded or based in any sort of reality. Theyre just there. But here we have a living, breathing, character with flaws and has this compulsive disorder to cut herself. The little things make Saw III what it is.

DRE: The Saw movies are not so much scary as they are disgusting and disturbing. Would you agree?

DLB: Yeah, theyre not scary at all. One of my favorite things on Rotten Tomatoes is when people say the films are not scary. But Ill be the first to say that the Saw films are not scary. They are fucked up. They are disturbing. They are gory. But they are not scary.

DRE: It is interesting that you freely say that.

DLB: I will be the first one to admit that and I think James [Wan] and Leigh would say that as well.

DRE: Do you think thats why the Saw films get so much shit?

DLB: Yeah, because it does have elements of horror but it is not the classic idea of horror.

DRE: Do you have a desire to make scary movies?

DLB: Yeah, I think that Ive done this now and hopefully after the rock opera that will be the next one.

DRE: If I get on the Saw message boards and write a bunch of traps I want to see, will they put them in?

DLB: [laughs] I think were pretty desperate for traps in four so please do. Maybe youll have a great idea and maybe Ill take credit for it.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck