LYTrules.com EXCLUSIVE: Director David Hackl talks SAW V

I don’t have a picture of David, so instead I’m re-running one of SAW V co-star Meagan Good. I doubt you’ll complain…

LYT: So you designed all the traps in the previous movies?

David Hackl: Not all of them myself, but I certainly had a hand in the traps from the past few movies

-How well would they be delineated in the script, versus how you realized them?

Often times in the script it was just a line saying, you know, “then we see the most horrific Jigsaw trap we’ve ever seen before.” It’s just the sort of thing where a lot of times…sometimes the idea would be there from the beginning, for Darren there were traps in his mind that he wanted to do absolutely. There were traps that changed. For example, in Saw III, the twisty-Tim trap, where Tim gets twisted apart, that evolved form a trap Leigh Whannell had thought of that he wanted in the first Saw movie, which is a trap where a guy gets bent backwards in half and his back splits, and we drew a whole series of sketches and models. But we realized that bending someone backwards in half and splitting their spine doesn’t look great on film, because their feet have to be beside their head, basically, which means that you’re either looking at their belly, or you’re bending them backwards upside down, and no matter what, it’s gonna be so comical that it’s not gonna be visceral, it’s not gonna look horrific. So we eventually developed that into this twisting trap where we twist someone’s limbs off and twist someone’s head right around until it snapped their neck.

-And that, if I’m not mistaken, is one you had to trim for the theatrical cut quite a bit, right?

Yes. The bones jutting out of the arms and legs.

-Because I really didn’t understand it fully when I saw it in the theater, then I watched the first unrated cut – now there’s another director’s cut –

Yeah, that’s exactly it, I mean it was something that had to get edited down so badly that in the theater, it almost didn’t make sense

-My favorite, of course, is the pig-pulper

Yes, the pig-pulper was good, but that was something that also developed over time, I mean it was the sort of thing where it grew and grew and grew from a small machine with pig guts coming out of it to this giant pulley system with huge pigs falling from the ceiling into these huge blades, and then of course the little incinerator that was next to it, and the giant vat our man got strapped to the floor in. What else were your favorite traps?

-That was the main one, because it was so insane, how do you even think of that? Putrid pig corpses, you’re gonna liquefy ‘em, and you’re gonna drown someone in them, so that was awesome. One thing I still don’t get, in Saw IV, there’s the “see no evil, speak no evil” one, and I still don’t know who the bald guy was who had his eyes sewn shut. Is that something we get to in the new one?

Ah, no, we never really explain who he was, but we may in the future.

-Because in the first Saw, there’s a big deal about how these are kind of ironic traps based on people’s sins, and I was wondering when I saw that how that was an ironic punishment of sorts

Well, maybe in the future we’ll have to explain that. Certainly for the lawyer it was important, and there’ve been a few traps like that where the dead guy, or the guy who’s gonna die, is just a victim, who may have done something really bad, or may have been just a corpse.

-So now that you’re in the director’s chair, is someone else figuring out the traps, or are you still doing it?

I’m still doing it quite a bit. I still had a very big hand in it, and Patrick and Marcus, the writers, they had a lot to do with them, certainly there were a few things that they didn’t sort out, but for the most part, y’know, I mean we worked really closely in production, early in the script-writing, to make it all work out well. They pinned down a few of ‘em, but then there were a few that were just left hanging.

-The big box of glass we saw in Jigsaw’s flashback in the last one, does that pay off in this one?

I can’t tell you that

-That’s a positive sign

Whether it does or it doesn’t, it’s definitely an element that we want to hang on to.

-When you’re coming on a part 5, obviously there’s a visual style and an audio style that’s been well established. Did you feel confined by that, or were you able to bring your own thing to it?

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