‘Saw X’ Producers On The Latest Entry In The Bloody Franchise
Producers Mark Burg and Oren Koules have been part of the Saw franchise since the beginning. For two decades, they’ve seen countless traps tear apart victims and the bumps in the narrative road. They’ve helped shape Saw into what it is today: a genre-changing series that has changed the landscape of horror forever.
Now, the tenth entry in the franchise, Saw X, has hit theaters. Many see the new film as a return to form for the series, showing us a different side of John Kramer (Tobin Bell) and his apprentice Amanda (Shawnee Smith). According to both Burg and Koules, this is the best Saw film yet, functioning as both an ode to fans and an entry point for new viewers.
Dread Central spoke with Burg and Koules after the Saw X secret screening at Fantastic Fest about the film’s legacy, the queer readings of the franchise, and more. We also briefly spoke about why they decided to set the film in Mexico City and their experience working in the city.
Dread Central: Congratulations on Saw X. What was it like watching it with the big crowd last night?
Mark Burg: It’s rewarding because we thought we made a good movie, but you really never know. Like we said last night, we don’t ever do research screenings because we don’t want our movies getting out to the public. We never wanted our endings to be out where there’d be spoilers. So the first time you see it with an audience is really the first time you really know. We showed it to a couple of friends. They say they’re being honest, but they’re friends and wives. So last night seeing the reaction was really fun.
DC: Oh yeah. Some of those traps had me squirming in my seat.
MB: Which one in particular?
DC: The bone marrow one…
Oren Koules: Yeah. Yeah, we understand.
MB: That’s tough even for me to watch. Having seen it all, it’s still tough to watch.
DC: I was going to say you guys have seen it all and I wanted to ask if you had, not just in Saw X, but in the entire franchise, a favorite kill that still sticks with you to this day?
MB: I think of all the traps, the bloodboarding one is my favorite. I don’t want to give anything away, but it’s in Saw X and it’s my favorite trap to date.
OK: Mine’s a cheap answer. It’s from [the original] Saw when Shawnee’s taking the key to get the head trap off. She was cutting the guy’s guts open to find the key and that was actually me on the floor. So yeah, that’s always my favorite.
DC: No way. Oh, that is so cool. So Mark, have you had a cameo as a body in any of them?
MB: No, no. I like being behind the camera.
OK: I laid on the floor, so it wasn’t like I was doing a lot of work. We were so broke and cheap when we made Saw one. I mean it was [made for] $965,000. I think somebody wanted a thousand dollars to be the dead guy and I like, screw it, I’ll do it for free. Let’s go.
DC: I love indie filmmaking, man. And Saw has its roots in indie filmmaking, so it’s cool just to hear the things you did to make these movies happen.
MB: We always thought we were indie filmmakers, right? We do it ourselves. We finance the movies ourselves. We have an amazing partner in Lionsgate and they market the movie. They crushed Saw X, the best campaign to date. But yet the Independent Spirit Awards won’t even watch our movies because we’re not independent enough for them.
DC: So in the Fantastic Fest Q&A, you did tease a potential return of Hoffman. Can I ask more about plans for furthering the franchise and what that might look like in the future?
MB: We’re superstitious. We don’t really talk about the next movie till this movie opens. But if there was another one we would love it. And we’ve spoken with a couple of actors that have been in previous Saw movies, including Costas Mandylor who plays Hoffman, [about coming] back.
DC: So cool. Going into this screening last night, it was so cool to hear people talking about the Saw timeline. What has it been like to watch the fandom of this franchise grow over I think two decades almost to the day since you started filming the first one, right?
OK: We actually still have our call sheets from Day One of filming Saw. I mean, for us, [Saw X is] really kind of gratifying because we seem to have made a film to bring new fans in and get the fans that kind of drifted away from Saw. We’ve seen so many reviews and just comments from people saying, ‘I haven’t seen a Saw movie in I don’t know how many years and this one’s got me hooked again’ or ‘I haven’t seen a Saw movie ever, but I’m going to this one’. Even with the AMC bit, that Nicole Kidman thing that we did or we didn’t do, so many fans are like, ‘You know what, I’ve never seen a Saw movie, but this is so cool. We have to support them.’
DC: I do have to ask, how do you feel about all of the shipping and the romance between characters that people have created online?
MB: Who’s falling in love with who?
DC: The big one is Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannell. There’s even a shirt coming out about them being in love with each other. There are also a lot of queer readings of Saw.
MB: Oh, I love that.
DC: It’s really cool and weird that Saw has this and I am very excited that I’m now telling you about it for the first time because it’s a huge thing online.
MB: I need that shirt.
OK: Oh my God. Can you please send me a link because we’re having a big kind of reunion dinner next month with everyone, with James [Wan] and Leigh [Whannell] and Charlie Klauser from Nine Inch Nails, Kevin [Greutert], Mark, myself. You have to get us the link to those shirts.
MB: You made our day. I’m going to show up to this reunion wearing those shirts.
DC: Go down the rabbit hole online. We actually on Dread Central have an article ranking all of the apprentices by how queer they were. So you have an entire sub-audience of the Saw universe.
OK: No way.
MB: I love that. That’s awesome.
DC: I’d love to hear what it was getting to work with Shawnee and Tobin again.
OK: It was fun to see them offscreen. I mean, they probably have not seen each other in 12 or 14 years. So just seeing them together on the first day, during the first table read, and them hanging out, was really cool. They truly, truly, truly care about each other. I mean, they took this ride together, so they were off just talking and showing pictures of kids and it was really, really neat. We’ve always tried to keep a very family, such a weird word. We’re all kind of in our own group. Every one of our directors, except the Spierigs, worked with us in some capacity before or directed or written after. I don’t know how to explain it. We keep it very family-like.
MB: If we did do another movie, I can tell you that Kevin will come back and direct it. We want him, he wants to do another movie. Anthony Stabley, our production designer who designed and built all these traps, has to come back.
OK: Our DP has to come back. Everything about everybody on this crew was great and we loved Mexico City. We would go back there in a heartbeat. We loved it there.
DC: This is the first time you’ve actually named the location where things are happening. Again, I know that you mentioned this last night, but I would just love to hear more about why this city and why you wanted to explicitly name it.
OK: It’s got such a cool vibe. There’s this total mysticism to Mexico City and some of the old heritage. It was such a cool city. We wanted to name it because we had to be out of the United States to do the experimental treatment.
MB: And in the marketing of the franchise, Lionsgate did a brand study and we found that a third of our worldwide audience for this movie is Latin. It’s actually 38%, I think was the exact figure. So prior to finding that out, we were going to probably do the movie in Eastern Europe somewhere and then we’re like, let’s move it to Mexico City. They have a great film business. They have great crews. It was great. It was a lot of fun to actually work there and be there. And it’s not that far from home in Los Angeles. It’s not like you’re 15 hours away, 12 hours away, you’re only three hours away. It makes a big difference.
DC: I also wanted to hear about casting Renata Vaca as Gabriela. I actually was lucky enough to speak with her and she is so incredible. I loved her character and having this foil to Amanda in the film.
OK: Mark and I were in Mexico City doing a scout, and they asked us to meet with her. So Mark and I met with her, with casting with everybody. It was like 10 or 12 of us.
MB: Oren looked at me, she walked into the room and 30 seconds later, Oren looked at me. I looked at him, we said, “Okay, hire her.”
OK: Yeah. Actually, we didn’t know this until after, but her manager used to work for Mark and me. So it was kind of fun. It wasn’t really even casting, we were just gossiping and talking about fun things and about Mexico City
DC: And my last question for you both is are there any traps in the Saw franchise that were your idea?
OK: I mean, we sit and talk. With the early ones, David Hackl did such an amazing job. But I mean, we all talk. When we do a script, we actually just do the script without the traps, but we’ll have a placeholder for a trap.
So we make sure the logic and the story tracks. Then we start working on the trap. They’re the last things to work on. Some of them might be location-based, some of them might be set-based and then it’s really collaborative. But I mean we’ve always been really fortunate to have great production designers. They get to do and make something that will live on hopefully in infamy. So production designers absolutely love this, it’s like their Super Bowl.
MB: We now do it in my house or Oren’s house, but we used to sit in a restaurant and meet with the writers, whoever was working on that script, and we’d start talking about how we’re going to kill people. Then you would slowly realize that the people around us were kind of moving away
OK: Or staring at us
MB: Or kind of pointing at us. You just realize that it was too much to do in a public place. But I’ll tell you, the traps are all a group effort. Feel free to call us with any ideas. We’re open. It’s getting harder and harder to come up with new traps.
The Saw shirts mentioned in this interview are available from Super Yaki.
Categorized:Interviews
