Director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannel rose to prominence when they created the seemingly endless and endlessly bloody Saw franchise. Having initially teamed up in their film school days in Melbourne, James and Leigh have joined forces again to create Insidious, a contemporary take on that reliable horror trope, the haunted house story. Totally Dublin caught up with them to hear some ghoulish tales.
I saw the film and definitively not a violent film. Most of the fighting and action scenes are really pushing and shoving so I was wondering was there a sense that it was a reaction to some of the criticism that you might have got for being almost too violent, too gory with the Saw movies?
L: Yeah, in a way. It was us wanting to prove we could make a film that was really scary without relying on blood and both of us know from all the horror films that we love that you don’t need blood for something to be super scary.
You concentrate on the psychological
J: Especially ghost stories and haunted house films, you don’t need to rain blood at all, have limbs cut off, it doesn’t work like that. I think it would be counter intuitive if we were to have made a bloody, gory movie with a haunted house movie. I can’t honestly think of a bloody haunted house movie that works!
L: Or even the stories that we used to tell each other – none of the ghost stories we heard from friends or relatives ever involved someone having their throat cut or something like that. The story is only ever seeing someone in the corner [of your eye] and there’s a hint of something that’s going to happen and then that’s it, it never actually happens.
J: Yeah, that’s what makes haunted house films and ghost stories creepy is seeing an apparition, or the boy standing in the corner of the room through your peripheral vision or a door creaking on its own. That’s all you need for it to be really chilling.
Kind of playing on pre-existing fears
L: It is. I mean, it’s a fascination with death I think, in terms of ghosts. It’s the ultimate question, the unknown – what is there beyond death? Telling a ghost story, it piques that and adrenalizes that part of your brain that wants to know the answers to the mysteries of life.
I suppose its one of the reasons that horror films are so transferable through time, it’s that they play on a human thing.
L: Yeah, humans love to be frightened and they also love to hear about things that cannot be explained by science, that can’t be explained easily. They deal with the every day life, they go do the shopping, all that stuff is boring and there’s a method to it. All of a sudden you hear a ghost story and its outside of the realm of what you know or what you can see, and that makes it fascinating.
It’s the same as the Saw movies, you can use the concept which is transferable to another movie. Was it intentional to have a concept that was relatively free of baggage that could be set almost anywhere? All that this movie needed was two houses.
L: We think its fairly universal, the concept, in terms of being set anywhere.
J: You’re right, its very relatable. And that’s part of the reason too why, for this film, we wanted to make a ghost story movie but set it in the real world as much as we possibly can. And part of the reason I believe too that haunted house films have been around for so long, is that they work. Its something that we can all relate to. We all live in houses and apartments. Our house is supposed to be our sanctuary and the idea that it could eventually be invaded by some supernatural force is pretty frightening. And Leigh did a really great job writing characters that you actually believe in – Mum and Dad and three kids. And we wanted to start the movie pretty slow burning to begin with, very casual and everyday to slowly lull you into the sense of mundaneness. So you look at that and go “that’s kinda like my life!” Its not a very glamourous Hollywood lifestyle and that’s what makes it work. When all the weird stuff starts to happen, you can relate to it.
So how was it working with what I gather was a relatively small budget?
J: Its not relatively small, its super low. Its micro-budget.
L: It means things go fast, that was a good thing about it. Like I wrote the script really quickly, I did it in Australia, by the time I got back from Australia, these guys were location scouting.
J: It also means creative freedom which is was what Leigh and I wanted. That means a lot to us because I felt like Leigh had written such a great script that I didn’t want people to basically mess with it. And so when the opportunity arose, I wanted to make this film where I knew that it would not get bastardized in any way. I felt like if there was too many cooks in the kitchen for this, I felt like the scares probably would not work, that the family dynamic would not be as strong, every little thing might be slightly off-kilter and collectively that may be a lot. In the bigger picture, it may not feel like the film we wanted to make any more. So I was very careful to the point where I really wanted to edit the film myself, which I ended up doing, because I felt that way I could control every aspect of it and that way I could shoot the film knowing exactly how I was going to edit it later. Which was very economical as well because the film is such a low budget film and we shot in 22 days so that means that we don’t have a lot of time to mess around with it and I need to go in there knowing exactly how I was going to shoot the film.
So in a way the constraints really aid the focus of the film.
J: It aided the process for me, and you in the writing too.
L: Yeah it does, because it’s freeing in a way.
J: Exactly! Its like, “Leigh, you can only write a movie that takes place in two houses, now go and be as creative as you can!” So its very restrictive but at the same time it sets us on a path saying okay, this is all we’ve got to work with but lets make this incredibly scary and as good as we possibly can.
L: Its interesting because we wrote the first Saw film knowing would be low budget but I think James went into that film having a much bigger scope in his mind. He’d been storyboarding the film in his head for years and then he got on the set and the cold reality of what you can actually afford for the budget we had came crashing down on him. He had the 1st Assistant Director in his ear saying “Eh, you can’t afford that crane shot” So there was a lot of frustration on his part. Whereas, I think, in this film he went into it knowing exactly what the restrictions were so there was no frustration, it was a sense – okay, I bought into this knowing exactly what I can and can’t get and I’m much more experienced.
J: Experience was a big deal for me, I’m not a first-time director anymore like I was when I made the first Saw, so I knew how to run a set, I knew how to work with crew, I knew how to work with actors, I knew how to tell the stories, all that stuff. Well I did know that stuff even back then, but obviously, it’s your first one!
Its like they say “you have your whole life to make your first album and a year to make your second one.”
L: There was a lot of frustration coming from James on the first Saw film because you’re thinking “I’m gonna get this huge shot” and then somebody would say “No you’re not!” For me in the writing was the same thing, knowing that the film was going to be set in two houses with a minimal cast actually freed me up to say “Okay, cool, I know the tools I’m working with.”
And so you can concentrate, with less money, on really simple ideas rather than on cinematic power.
L: Exactly, I’ve found on big-budget stuff I’ve written to be much harder because you can do anything. All of a sudden your brain thinks, if you can do anything… I could have the world break in half, I could have the universe fold in on itself and you start to become overwhelmed by the choices. It’d be like if I said to you, you can either take a holiday this year in Turkey or Spain that’s it. If I said you could go anywhere in the world, you’d start pulling your hair out because of all those choices. I liked the freedom of that. I liked being Turkey or Spain.
It hones things like dynamics or pace within a film because especially working in a genre that you’ve worked in before, you know those dynamics and how they work. Do you think you would export those to another genre?
J: I think, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a scary story, or if it’s a funny story or it’s a drama story, its just story telling, right? So if you know how to write good characters and you know how to tell story beats, that all it comes down to. It doesn’t matter what context they’re put into.
L: Its got to have those story beats and then once you’ve got the great story you can layer it up with trappings of the genre. If you’re making an action film, once you’ve got your great story, you can then step back and say when are we gonna drive a car off a bridge or blow up a building, whatever it is.
One of my favourite things about the entire film was the sound design of the film and the score. How much control over those elements do you have?
J: Oh super control! Everything with Insidious is extremely calculated, very controlled.
L: The sound designer was working out of your house!
J: I flew my sound designer friend from Australia to come hang out with me in LA while he just tweaked away on his computer. He would record the sound of ice-cracking which is the sound of the demon’s claws. Little things like that were so much fun, really harking back to our film-school roots, of having control and doing it the way we want to do it. And the musical score was written by a friend of ours. I worked very closely with him. I did not want a score that’s melodious in anyway, I want it to be very atonal, almost very avant garde, all the piano bangs and screeching violins. Those were the two things I really wanted. Out of tune pianos, opening up the grand piano and hitting the strings with drum sticks and all that!
I haven’t really had the chance to give credit to him, but the sound mix of the film, what levels to put the sound at, where to put the sound and what kind of sound to use – that was really important. Like, how cavernous to make the house sound, what kind of creak do we put on this? Does a ghost make a sound when he walks?! Little things like that. Typically a ghost should not make any sound but its not effective without it. So a lot of though went into the sound as much as the visual. If anything I think I spend more time on the soundscape than I did on the visual landscape… and I spent a lot of time on the visual end of things!
L: As you’ve said, that’s just as important, if not more important in a horror film. Think of the low-budget horror films you’ve seen where the sound of it was really the only aspect.
Or the silence of it.
J: Or what is used to depict silence. In Insidious we wanted a lot of silence but we knew we needed a sound to depict the silence and that’s why I have a lot of ticking clocks, the dripping water taps, the creak of an old room. Someone asked us why we had the ticking clock and I think that’s the main reason, to create the silence of the room.
Did any really creepy stuff happen on the set, Exorcist style?
J: Do we wish that creepy stuff had happened so that we actually had a cool story to tell?!
L: The Kraft services table was quite Insidious. It kept on drawing me in to eat peanut butter snacks! Unless you asked Ty Simkins who played the little boy, he was quite scared by the demon, so he probably thought the set was quite scary place.
You’re working a graphic novel adaptation next. I think the aesthetic of the demon and doll in Saw are quite comic-book. Are they an influence?
J: Its one of a few projects I’m working on. I think its worth bearing in mind that a lot of graphic novels were actually inspired by movies. A lot of comic books these days are heavily inspired by films. Films inspire comics and computer games in a big way and then films adapt comic books and computer games in this weird cycle! I definitely did grow up loving comic books, but I don’t read them like I used to.
One last quick one for our apocalypse-themed issue: What movies would you take with you to a fall-out shelter?
L: Wow, you’d want a real range there. I’d probably take Jaws because I love it so much.
J: You probably wouldn’t want to take an apocalyptic themed movie.
L: Although maybe Mad Max 2 would be a great instructional video! I’d take The Big Lebowski for a laugh, as long as we had post-apocalyptic pot and then maybe something romantic to keep the idea of love alive? So maybe… Before Sunrise? I love that film. That would be the film the idea of love alive.
Insidious is in cinemas now.
Words: Ian Lamont
