Saw III
Interview: Bousman and Whannell on Saw III and Star Wars
“I remember reading an article where Leonard Nimoy would attend these Star Trek fan conventions,” said writer Leigh Whannell. “Huys would get up and be like, ‘In episode 12, you were wearing a wristband that’s clearly from the planet Taktar and Taktar wasn’t discovered until series 3. Now how could you have that wristband?’ Here, this poor actor who’s just gotten off doing Hamlet on Broadway is like, ‘You know what? I don't know. I don't know what Taktar is. I didn’t write it.’ For us, the thing is, I did. So we get on the message board and there’s some kid going, ‘Now hang on, if he was lying in a pool of his own blood…’ And sometimes they get you. You’re like, ‘Oh, geez, we didn’t have an answer for that one.’”
So, Whannell wrote Saw III with a mind to answering some of the fans’ questions. The film flashes back to Jigsaw’s operations before the original film. Director Darren Lynn Bousman said. “The big one that we tried to answer on this one was everyone says, ‘Why didn’t Leigh drown? He was in the bathtub, why didn’t he drown?’ So that’s why that whole scene came around. Like I think it would be cool to see Jigsaw setting it up, answer that f*cking question, why didn’t he drown?”
Whannell actually took some inspiration from the Star Wars prequels. “Jason Constantine from Lionsgate, during the writing of Saw III, we were talking about he’s a huge Star Wars fan and we were talking about the prequels. Which I have to go on record, for fear of being struck down or hit by a sniper’s bullet, I didn’t like the three Star Wars prequels, even Revenge of the Sith. Sorry, George. And I was talking to Jason Constantine about it and he’s like, ‘You know what? I’m such a massive Star Wars fan that I got a kick out of them just through seeing things like oh my God, that’s how Boba Fett became Boba Fett.’ He called them General Antilles moments. There’s a General Antilles from like Empire Strikes Back [sic, it’s from A New Hope]. You see him in one of the prequels and only the most hardcore fan would pick it up but he got a kick out of it. So we called all these little flashback scenes throughout Saw, we called them General Antilles moments. Jason, when he was reading the script, he’s like, ‘Ah, you’ve got a cool little General Antilles moment here where we find out how…’”
Some of these General Antilles will require the DVD to catch. “There’s the big stuff that’s very easily seeable like the setting up the bathroom, the Leigh stuff,” said Bousman. “Then there’s really small stuff where actors make the appearances, like the fire guy, Ovi, burned in the fire, he’s in the movie. He’s in the movie for like half a second. You see him there if you know where to look for him. There are files on the desk that relate back to Saw I. The camera pans over them and you can see them. There’s tons of little things like that. We answer a lot of questions. It’s not readily in your face, that for the die hard fans, and believe me they will find it. They will freeze frame and we set up a bunch of new ones too.”
Whannell added, “All the flashback scenes, as you say, it’s a playful way of giving back to the fans. And it wasn’t so much born out of the frustration of like ‘Here, here’s the answer.’ It was more like if you were a fan of Saw, this would be like a little gift.”
Saw III opens to theatres on October 27th.
For the posters, trailers, more interviews, synopsis and more movie info, go to the Saw
III Movie Page.
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