Director Leigh Whannell arrives for the premiere of BH Tilt’s ‘Upgrade’ held at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, California. (Photo: Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images)
Leigh Whannell is not only one of the minds behind two of the most popular and most successful horror franchises of the last 15 years, he’s also one of the most personable and grounded people in the industry today.
To date, unadjusted for inflation, Whannell’s movies have taken $977.3 million worldwide. His latest, the sci-fi body horror thriller Upgrade, has been received well by critics and audiences alike, debuting domestically with a box office haul of $4.46 million, almost $1.5 million more than expected.
I caught up with Whannell to talk about the Blumhouse-produced genre movie and his thoughts on a sequel, as well as his track record for creating extremely bankable franchises.
Simon Thompson: You have been working insanely hard for the last few weeks promoting this movie right across the US. How are you feeling?
Leigh Whannell: I feel like I’m standing in the middle of a hurricane and you’re talking to me through an earpiece from a news studio saying, “What’s the hurricane like?” I want to be able to do a proper autopsy on this whole thing over the next few weeks but right now I’m watching the numbers rolling in.
ST: How are you feeling about it? I’ve seen promotional materials for Upgrade everywhere. Word of mouth and interest have been strong.
LW: I’ve seen the reaction from critics, it’s been great to see the audiences that have seen the film around to the country reacting to the movie that way that I hoped they would and it’s gratifying. When you make a film you essentially make a bet, a Vegas bet, the world is going to care about some imaginary stories that you conjured out of nothing. To stand back and look at it, that’s a pretty foolish bet to make because what are the chances that anyone in the world is going to care? It almost takes a foolish person to get ahead in this industry because you have to have that fool hearted belief. It is nice to be validated by audiences and have people come up to you after a screening and tell you that they loved the movie. It never gets old.
ST: You put these ideas on to paper and make them real but when, why and how do you decide which you are going to produce and direct and which ones you want other people to take the wheel on?
LW: Often someone else will make that decision. You can write a movie and have every hope of directing it but someone else will tell you that’s not going to happen. For me, it’s really been dictated by the passage of time. Prior to Insidious Chapter 3, I was happy to write movies for James Wan to direct as I felt very much that I was one half of a duo. I looked at us as a team who works together and I was happy to be part of that, I was happy to effectively be the bass player in The Beatles. James was a very sharing, collaborative filmmaker and he made me feel like part of the process. Some directors don’t welcome the writer being around but James wasn’t like that. When I directed the third Insidious film I loved it so much that I decided this is what I want to do from now on. I don’t even think I would write something as a screenplay now with no intention of directing it.
ST: A number of your films have become franchises. When you came up with the idea for Upgrade, did you look at it as something you could do sequels to or create a universe around?
LW: All of the franchises that I’ve been involved with have happened accidentally. None of them were created with sequels in mind. Saw was a film that James Wan and I came up with back in Australia and we were just hoping anyone, literally, anyone would make that film and if nobody would give us the money we were going to shoot it in a garage somewhere. That mode of thinking was as far as you can get from franchise creating. It wasn’t until the first Saw movie was a hit and we got a phone call from producers who promptly introduced us to the world of franchise filmmaking and sequels. It’s not something we are expecting, we kind of stumbled into it and it happened again with Insidious. We wrote that as a standalone film, we weren’t thinking about the world, we never saw the potential for spinoffs; we just thought this was a great standalone film but when it was a success the producers wanted to make more of them. It all feels very organic and accidental and the same goes for Upgrade. I am too suspicious about movies to think about a sequel. I feel like sequels before their time is an assumption of success and that’s not something I like to dabble with. I also love endings, I’m a moviegoer that loves a great ending but often these days you see a movie where there’s not an ending but a cliffhanger to have you waiting for the next installment and I’m not a huge fan of that.
ST: At what point do those calls come from the studio? Do you get it on a strong Friday box office or do they wait until first thing on the Monday morning after opening weekend?
LW: In my experience, it’s been a Monday call but I’ve been very surprised how quickly it comes. I had no idea. It certainly a surprise for me the first time with Saw because I was so young and naive, I thought they’d wait maybe a couple of weeks and there would be some time to sit around smoking cigars and drinking Mai Tais just celebrating the film’s success. There was none of that. It’s all about getting back to it. That was especially the case with the Saw films because they were coming out one per year so you would wrap one on a Friday and then they’d start asking you about the next one on the following Monday. With the Insidious films, we haven’t had that structure or calendar so there’s been a little more breathing room. To answer your original question, the call comes very quickly.
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