By Daniel Robert Epstein
[Ed: Possible spoilers if you haven't seen Saw II]

Picking up almost directly where the first Saw ends, Tobin Bell is back as Jigsaw and this time he has kidnapped a police officer’s son and put him in a house with a bunch of other kidnappees. The Saw II DVD has just hit the street and director Darren Lynn Bousman graciously sat down for a chat with us.

ReallyScary: Congratulations on SAW II becoming such a monster hit!

Darren Lynn Bousman: Thank you. It’s insane. It is one of those things where you wake up and you’re like “Oh my God, how did this happen?”

Saw II Director Darren Lynn Bousman and star Shawnee Smith.

Darren: Yeah, I think it just goes to show you what the fans want. Early reviews of the movie came out and they were really good and then more reviews came out and they were really bad. We wondered what was going to happen but in the end the fans spoke. Now you’re going to see a surge of these violent films, which is great.

RS: What were the phone calls like on Saturday morning?

Darren: Oh my God, it was crazy. I didn’t sleep at all. You hear about tracking but in the very end you just don’t know. The next day I was getting calls from people I haven’t talked to in years. People that had fired me years before.

RS: What were the people who fired you calling for?

Darren: “Hey, Darren, long time no talk. When are we going to sit down?” It was one of those things. It was really funny.

RS: What do you say to those people?

Darren: I hung up on them.

I have an ongoing joke with myself. When I came out to LA I had just shot two short films and I felt like “Spielberg’s going to call me. I’m going to get all the big people knocking on my door and making me movie offers.” But of course no one cares who the fuck you are. So I became jaded after working as a PA for two years. I decided that was I going to write a script. I would take my computer to work and when I should have been guarding the set, I’d be writing. That angered a lot of people and I was asked not to return to a couple of TV shows. But me getting fired from those shows completely paid off.

RS: What was happening in your guys’ minds when SAW II had a big second weekend as well.

Darren: It was insane. Gregg Hoffman and myself and all the people that worked on the movie really believed in it. We were like, “Man this is going to be great.” But I don’t think any of us knew how good it was going to do at the box office. I am a junkie for all of the Internet websites like Box Office Mojo that tell you how things are doing. I would sit at the computer refreshing the pages every five seconds to find out if there was an update to see how this film was doing. I drove by the theaters constantly.

RS: The first Saw was really big with the urban market. Obviously a lot of thought was given to that when it came time to cast the second film.

Darren: The casting of the movie was very important. I wanted an ethnically diverse cast. I can’t stand movies where you’ve got all the pretty white kids. Horror like this happens to everybody. Not to get kidnapped by Jigsaw and put in a brutal trap, but I’m saying that bad shit happens to everybody in every race and every nationality. I wanted to get people that weren’t necessarily attractive. I wanted to put Hispanics and blacks and whites and old guys. The age range for the house was 17 to about 45 years old. I wish we could have put someone in even older. So it was something that we obviously thought about but we never had any idea as of how well it would do in that demographic.

RS: What’s interesting is that a lot of online critics don’t like the Saw movies.

Darren: There are obviously theories about why that is. This is not a movie for the critics. It’s a movie for the fans.

RS: But I don’t mean Ebert and Roeper. I’m talking about hardcore horror sites.

Darren: Some people think we’ve commercialized the violence. But we’ve just found a killer that resonates with people. We’ve found the new Jason or Michael Myers or whatever you want to call him. A lot of these sites talk about the crazy cutting of the MTV style generation. Obviously something is being done right because people are responding to this type of movie. I know exactly what you’re talking about because, like I said, I’m an internet junkie and I read the reviews. I’ve probably read every review out there on SAW II. Some people think it is the most ridiculous film while others love it. You’re never going to please everyone.

RS: I was lucky enough to speak to Tobin Bell when SAW II was released. I knew he would be really intense. But he’s really intense [laughs].

Darren: [laughs] Tobin Bell is great I’m a huge fan of his. I remember him from the days when he was the albino killer in The Firm. When I first met him, he talked with such passion that I was scared of him. I’m sitting there across the dinner table from him and I’m scared he’s going to stab me with his fork or something. Even on set you go up to him and you talk to him and he looks at you with these eyes. You can just tell he’s looking through your soul. But at the same time he is the nicest, sweetest guy in the entire world.

RS: Yeah and he’s also got the real method thing going on. He’s just so interesting.

Darren: He definitely is. He was very collaborative in the whole process as well. He had great ideas and great thoughts. He would call me in the middle of the night and say “Hey Darren, I just thought of this idea.” Some of his ideas were so just out there, yet they were so amazing at the same time. One of his brilliant ideas I was so upset we cut from the film. He called me and was like, “I really want to make Jigsaw human and not some rambling idiot. Let me try something tomorrow.” Next day the cameras are ready to roll and Tobin pulls out a box of Cheerios. He pours himself a bowl, pours milk on it and says “Alright I’m ready.” I’m not joking; there was an entire sequence where we had Tobin Bell as Jigsaw eating a bowl of Cheerios, slurping milk, waiting for the SWAT team. It was absolutely the creepiest thing I’d ever seen. In the end it didn’t work for the film but it was a great sequence.

RS: I don’t know if I want to see that [laughs].

Darren: [laughs] You’ll never think of Cheerios the same way again, I promise you.

RS: [laughs] Is that scene on the DVD?

Darren: No, it’s not on the DVD. A lot of people asked me about the deleted scenes or whatever. But we really lucked out with the MPAA. They didn’t make us do massive cuts. We self censored ourselves, the best that we could. There are scenes that we cut down dramatically. There is more violence that was cut out of the movie. But you could call the cut that is on the DVD the director’s cut.

RS: I met Gregg Hoffman at that Saw DVD release party in New York. Could you talk about his impact?

Darren: Gregg is SAW. That’s his legacy. He found the script, he brought it in to his partners and he said that this is the movie we’re going to make. But more importantly than that, is the amount of people he gave careers to. I was dubbing videotapes and he said, “Darren, come on we’re going to make this movie.” He pulled me out of there and made this movie with me then got me a deal with Dimension. He did the same thing for James Wan and Leigh Whannell. He took them from Australia and said “Come on, let’s do this movie.” Now James is doing huge movies for Universal. In a town full of shady characters it is great to have someone so nice and so passionate. He had no reason whatsoever to help me. He could have got anyone to direct a sequel and he went with an unknown. Gregg Hoffman changed a lot of people’s lives because he believed in them. Not only was he a mentor and a producer but he was also a very close friend. I talked to Gregg twice maybe three times a day. He would always joke that I talked to him more than he talked with his family. Gregg and I were working on his other film when he passed away. So it was a tremendous shock. His legacy is going to live on through these films and through the people’s lives that he changed.

RS: When I spoke with Leigh Whannell in New York he told that he was thinking about doing something completely different with SAW II but then he realized that it was more for the fans than for him.

Darren: Yeah, when constructing the Saw movies, that’s what we have to think about it. Part of us really wanted to say, “It would be great to take this in a completely different direction.” But then we thought, “What is everyone else going to say?” Since the fans have been so loyal we thought about what they would want. If we did a movie with no traps or blood in it what would they think? This movie is bigger than us. SAW II is for the fans.

RS: What do you feel was the biggest twist in SAW II?

Darren: So many people have different ideas of what the actual twist ending was. To me there are three or four in the movie. The one with Shawnee was just the natural progression of what was going to happen. It is a shock when she comes out but I think people might have guessed that. In my original draft of the script, the whole thing was always about showing the audience two separate stories and you think it is about one thing but it is really about another. A lot of the audience said, “I didn’t get to know any of the people in the house. The only person I actually got to know was Donnie Wahlberg.” Well then I accomplished my job because the movie was not about the people in the house. The movie was about the setup of Donnie Wahlberg’s character. The whole movie was a bunch of pawns to take down one person so the movie is about Donnie Wahlberg’s game. The movie is about something much bigger than we first realize. We think it’s about a bunch of people in this house and a cop trying to get these people. But the more you watch the film, you can start seeing things you probably didn’t see before. There are things said and that take place in the house that make it all about Donnie’s character.

RS: I really like the fact that Jigsaw doesn’t lie.

Darren: Right and that was another huge thing. Everything that Jigsaw says might be ambiguous but he does not lie. Everything that Jigsaw said, he a hundred percent did.

RS: If Donnie Wahlberg’s character had just shut up and just listened…

Darren: He would have had his son back.

RS: But Jigsaw is so damn manipulative because he knew that’s what Donnie Wahlberg’s character would do.

Darren: He knew exactly what was going to happen but he gave him a chance.

RS: What are you doing next?

Darren: I’m working on a film with Bob Weinstein at Dimension Films. This project came to me from Gregg Hoffman. He sent it to me and said, “Bousman, this might be the sickest thing I ever read in my entire life. You have to read it. You have to read it.”I read it and I passed. There was no way. I was absolutely disgusted. I was thoroughly appalled.

RS: Wow.

Darren: To actually disgust me is a hard thing to do. But I went to sleep that night and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Then I sent it to my lawyer. She calls me back two hours later, “I hate it, it’s the worst thing, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I don’t want to think about this.”

Then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I called Gregg Hoffman in the middle of the night and he answered the phone going “you like it, don’t you.” I’m like, “oh my God, I can’t stop thinking about it.” About four hours after that my lawyer calls me and says “Darren, I got to say, I can’t stop thinking about this.” I gave it to Dimension and same thing, “We hate this. There’s no way. This is wrong.” The next day I get a call from them, “You know what? We can’t stop thinking about this project.” It is the most vile, upsetting, wrong thing in the entire world, yet beautiful at the same time. If we can do it like we want to do it, it would be a new breed of horror. It’s not violent, it’s not bloody, it is just something that I don’t think we’ve seen before.