So how does a nice Chinese bloke from Australia go from directing student shorts and some cooking programs for TV to helming one of the most highly anticipated horror flicks of the Halloween season?
Sheer crocodile-hunter-style chutzpah, from the sound and look of James Wan, the director and co-writer of Saw, with star and co-writer Leigh Whannell. The pair more closely resembles trendy yet scruffy film-school hipsters than the next great Aussie hopes in horror filmmaking.
The slight, slim Wan sports a “Murders at Rue Morgue” T-shirt, long and spiky comic-book-hero hair with chunky coppery-red highlights, and a broad accent with Cantonese and Australian flourishes. Chatting up his love of surreal-horror maestros David Lynch and Dario Argento, the grinning, boyish 27-year-old wouldn’t be out of place at either a Strokes concert or a Quentin Tarantino retrospective.
And so like Tarantino, Wan connects his cinematic success to his genuine love of zombie movies, killer dolls and jolt-out-of-your-seat shocks.
“We were just such big fans of the horror genre,” he says effusively. “If you go with that, chances are that someone else will like it as well. So in that sense, if you make a film for yourself, you’ll probably find an audience as well.”
And it’s likely that audiences with a taste for the grisly, gritty and downright diabolically shocking will see plenty of things to like in Saw: Two men — a doctor (Cary Elwes) and a photographer (Whannell) — wake up in a battered, abandoned bathroom, chained to pipes on opposite sides of the room. A body holding a pistol and a tape recorder lies in a pool of blood between them. Who put them all there and what does their kidnapper want?
Elwes tries to trace back his last steps, and through a series of clues, the two begin to realize that some fiendishly twisted mastermind, known only by the police nickname “Jigsaw,” has set in motion a deadly endgame. One of them must kill the other in order to be freed — otherwise one of the men will lose people near and dear to him.
It was the twisting-and-turning script — which Wan and Whannell worked on for years in a buddy-system scenario that almost seems to parallel the central two-man drama of the film — that drew players like Elwes, Danny Glover and Monica Potter to the relatively inexperienced director’s debut feature.
The final product is a demented mind game of a movie, with clever allusions to other scary-screen gems, gruesome extremes, and a grimy and claustrophobic B-movie look. Imaginative and energetic filmmaking makes up for the small budget and short shooting schedule of less than 20 days. The film also draws from minimalist Japanese shockers such as Ringu and cat-and-mouse Hong Kong thrillers like Infernal Affairs. The persistence and resilience of the characters — intent on surviving under the most trying circumstances — even remind a viewer of nail-gnawing war films such as Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain and earthy neo-realistic movies like Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju. Live through this, the movie — and by extension its philosophical killer — implies, and you’ll be the better for it.
Though the movie is filled with more Asian faces than most of its kind, Wan thinks his love of Japanese films and particularly horror movies only creeps out subconsciously. “It’s an equal-opportunity, egalitarian killer!” he says with a laugh while confessing that some of Saw’s masks, dolls and aesthetics are directly in line with the demonic imagery found in Japanese ghost stories. “We are big fans of Japanese horror, like Kwaidan. And Ringu was a breath of fresh air — straight-up ghost horror. The thing is it’s never left Asian film because it’s a part of Asian culture: superstitions and spirits.”