WHO IS JAMES WAN?
Could you pick him out of a line-up? Check the description again. On paper, he is perhaps the single most financially successful figure in Australian movie-making history. In creative terms, he is one of a select handful of genre defining directors. He is also the subject of a baffling cultural silence. Preparing for our interview, I ask his agent for any recent in-depth profiles. There arenât any. Even the new premium on âdiversityâ in the arts has done little to generate curiosity about an outstanding Asian-Australian. Over Zoom from LA, Wan is amiable and animated, with a hint of boyishness that has survived into his late 40s. So I ask him outright: why is his story so little known? âI donât know, Richard,â he says. âMaybe you can enlighten me.â
And that story is singular. No other route to the directorâs chair started in Kuching, in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, then twisted its way through Perth, Canberra and Melbourne prior to arrival in Hollywood. Wan tells his American friends he âcame a long way to Los Angelesâ, and that this world tour was taken in baby steps. âFor every step of the way Iâve been an immigrant,â he tells me, and this semi-permanent outsiderdom trained his eye. âI enjoy telling the story of someone whoâs trying to fit in, into what seems like a normal society. But thereâs always something under the surface.â It was his own experience, each location a variation on the theme.
His industry fans are fervent â Nicole Kidman told me he is âthe hardest worker I knowâ â but he lacks the name recognition of a George Miller. We can speculate on the reasons: his decision to leave and move to the US, local prejudice against horror movies (especially from Australian funding bodies), jealousy, perhaps. There might be a racial aspect, although Wanâs most frequent collaborator, the actor-director Leigh Whannell, who is white, is under-celebrated as well. Wan is also private and self effacing, a quiet-achiever persona that clouds just how dominant his box-office presence has been.
Delve into the numbers, and you start to gauge his preternatural ability to crowdplease. His Aquaman outstrips The Dark Knight Rises as the most successful DC Studios film ever made. His entry in the Fast & Furious series, Furious 7, out-grossed every other film in the series. Only five horror franchises have earned more than a billion (USD) at the box office, and he created two of them from nothing: the Saw series has made a billion dollars collectively, while the eight films in the The Conjuring suite have generated more than two billion, a record for a horror franchise. He makes not just films, but universes, and they defy Hollywoodâs slow financial decline. Whannell, who has known Wan since film school in Melbourne, thinks this feel for the audience begins with an âuncanny instinct for the thing that will cause everyone to respond in a very visceral wayâ
Untold by this raw accounting is Wanâs role as a cultural change-maker. With rare, end-of-decade exceptions like The Blair Witch Project and The Ring, the â90s were a thin vintage for horror movies. Conventions had gone stale, and for every Scream-style reinvention there were dozens of forgettable retreads. (âWhat if Jason were cryogenically frozen and woke up in outer space?â) Saw ended this era and began another. Taut, gruesome and with a puzzleshaped plot, its first screenings were so electric its own distributor thought that test audience scores had somehow been faked.
It was a breakthrough that also heralded a new kind of hitting it big: two friends from film school making a return on investment so massive the âSaw thingâ was referenced on The Sopranos as shorthand for getting-rich-quick. That was exactly 20 years ago, and itâs been hard to see the man for the phenomenon ever since. âI do have immigrant kids and young Australian kids hitting me up on social media, saying how much they love my story and how they want to do the same thing,â he says. âIâm always happy to tell my story. If people ask me.â
IN THE JUNGLE
James Wan grew up on his grandfatherâs farm on the north-western tip of Borneo, where there were pigs and horses, and a big pond to fish in. Kuching was at a cultural crossroads, combining the Taoist superstitions of China with shamanistic Malay beliefs, making tales of the supernatural inseparable from his earliest memories.
âWe grew up on stories,â he says. âA lot of ghost stories. M. Night Shyamalan has said the same thing: we cannot help but be influenced by this when we make these movies. Stories we used to hear find their ways into our work,â he says. âAnd it helps make my films uniquely mine.â The stories in Kuching were about the thick tropical forests of the surrounding island: the spirit of the trees, the spirit of the jungle. The Shadow Demon that comes out to snatch kids.
It was there in Kuching, aged seven when Wan saw Poltergeist, young enough to âscarâ him and imprint as his permanent cinematic touchstone. After his family emigrated to Australia he became something of a âStranger Things kidâ, as he puts it, hanging in Perth parks, riding bikes down to the local milk bar, eating fish and chips and watching âweird and wonderful genre moviesâ on VHS.
His favourite feeling on set remains âthat excitement I had when I was a teenager
watching a horror movie that I shouldnât be watchingâ. That is the James Wan aesthetic: the pre-digital dread of the VHS storeâs forbidden section.
The move to Perth was a search for opportunity; the move to Canberra was spurred by loss. âWhen I was about 12 or 13 years old, my dad died from cancer,â Wan says, an event which âshaped who I am todayâ. Moving was a fresh start, though tough on his mother, who found herself a young widow taking care of three kids. Yet the bereavement did not push him to dark subject matter. Horror, instead, offered a sense of companionship that nothing else did. âWhen you come from the outside, you donât feel like you belong, but now you have a group of people that shares the same love and interest and passion,â he says. It made him feel part of a community.
The death of Wanâs father also gave him a deep appreciation for his mother (âI attribute everything that I have today to her â all the way to where I am nowâ) and an unusually acute sense of time.
âI think it made me realise at a very young age that life is short; you can just lose it any time,â he says. It instilled a yearning for success, and narrowed his focus â he could put âblinders on and hone in on what I loveâ. And the sense of time it gave him was very specific. âItâs this really strange thing. My father died when he was 41 years old, or 42 years old. And so always in the back of my mind, I lived with this ticking clock â I need to get stuff done before I hit 41 or 42.â (The ticking clock
persisted until that milestone; in the half decade since, it was replaced with a permanent sense of relief.)
Wan lighted on the idea of becoming a director unusually young, and pursued âartyâ high school subjects to help him prepare. When he headed for the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), it marked him as the âblack sheepâ in a family full of scientists, though relatives were more perplexed than opposed.
At RMIT he went against the grain, as well. His classmates were mature-age students fawning over documentaries or arthouse cinema â the default attitude was âto kind of shun Hollywood, if you will, because thatâs too mainstreamâ. Wan, one of the youngest students in the class, had something very different in mind. âI want to be the next James Cameron,â he announced during introductions at a nearby food court.
I CAME, I SAW
Two other young students remembered this comment. Shannon Young and Leigh Whannell were already friends â Shannon had mowed the Whannell family lawn to create a stage for shooting Super8 animations â and they too wanted to make blockbusters. The three of them connected very quickly. They loved horror, and âeventâ cinema. too â they might watch Titanic or Independence Day and then talk about them afterwards, sometimes to the individual frame. This group âloved popcorn movies and we were not ashamed of it,â Wan says. âThose were the movies that we grew up watching on VHS â weâd love A Nightmare on Elm Street. The more schlocky it is, the better it was.â
By the late â90s technology had democratised movie-making. âThere was a real distinct vibe in that period,â Shannon Young recalls, âwhere the barrier between professional and sort of rising amateur was very blurry.â Though the lecturers gave careful encouragement to make a short film, Young and Wan were âabsolutely committedâ to making a feature: âshorts are for pussiesâ became a catchcry.
âWhen youâre working on a very low budget or self-financed film, youâre doing everything yourself,â Young says. âYou can rope in small groups of people to help, but at the end of the day, everything depends on you. It takes incredible emotional and mental fortitude to put together films like that, because everythingâs working against you.â Wan, the most tenacious, had a gravitational pull.
Stygian is the feature Wan and Young co-directed and finished in 1998. Unreleased by mutual agreement, it has taken on a lost-grail quality. Itâs not only the first James Wan film, but a record of a vanished subculture: horror fandom at the end of its pre-internet period. One of the Stygian crew, for example, had read a letter published in Fangoria magazine and then called everyone named Young who lived in Scoresby to connect with Shannon Young. It sounds âstalkerishâ now, says David Lorensene, but there was no other way. A picture framer by trade, Lorensene started as the filmâs location scout and wound up acting: he played an arachnophobic criminal whose hand transforms into a spider, a prop built by Wan.
âJames made that whole contraption,â Lorensene remembers. Now co-organiser of the Melbourne Horror Film Society, he has followed Wanâs entire career, and traced those âmodels and toys and creationsâ ever since. âItâs interesting looking back â I can see where and why he puts all these little things into his films, because itâs what heâs so passionate about.â Leigh Whannell was astonished when he first saw the stop animation Wan had made as a high-school student. âI swear to you, Jamesâ stop motion had the fluidity of professional Wallace and Gromit-level stop motion. He truly was operating at a little bit of a higher level.â The animations, the set pieces, the props: each became film sets in miniature, scale models to practise directing.
âHe is a cinephile. He understands suspense and comedy and he is very aware of whatâs going on in the worldâ - Nicole Kidman
Whannell and Wan chimed. They worked on the same TV programs, at the ABCâs early digital channel Fly TV, where Whannell was a film critic and Wan an animator, and together they worked on screenplays. One anecdote from this period, about the phone call that cemented Sawâs best-known scene, has become a favourite of Whannellâs. âShawnee Smith wakes up with this sort of hideous device on her face, and if she doesnât cut the key out of this guyâs stomach in time, itâs gonna go off and rip her face apart. So Iâm pitching that to him breathlessly, thinking, This is pretty crazy â heâs gonna love this,â Whannell says. âAnd, typical James, it wasnât crazy enough for him. I get to the end of my pitch and he goes, âThatâs cool. Thatâs cool. But at the end, a creepy doll should come in on a tricycle.ââ There was always a cherry on top. âLee would always love to use that as an example,â Wan says, âto point out that I like to take things up a notch. I think that sums me up.â
The script, Saw, proved so unsaleable in Australia that Wan and Whannell considered another DIY feature, until an agent talked some sense into them. Instead they made a trailer, a proof-of-concept DVD to shop around. It did generate international interest, but by then the process had been so gruelling it seemed a mixed blessing. âThis was after many years of struggling,â Wan says. âI had no money left in my bank account. And I was like, how are we even going to go to Los Angeles? This feels like a very expensive handshake.â He borrowed money from his mother and Malaysian aunties to make the flight.
Though they hadnât âreally believed that anything would be offeredâ, there was interest almost immediately. It just didnât meet their conditions: Wan would have to direct, and Whannell would have to star. The offer they finally accepted was so small that producers insisted Wan use the same puppet he had made for the trailer as a cost-saving measure. Billy the Puppet, made from âpopsicle sticks and ping-pong ballsâ in Wanâs Melbourne apartment, was smuggled over the US border in a suitcase. It is now one of the iconic faces of horror, alongside Chucky from Childâs Play, and dolls and puppets are renowned as Wanâs most famous motif (his Instagram handle is @creepypuppet).
There are possessed dolls in Annabelle and M3GAN, and a sinister ventriloquistâs dummy in Dead Silence. There were even creepy dolls in Stygian â Young remembers one scene shot in an Ishka craft store after hours: âThere were dolls hanging on the wall which were supposed to be lovely ornaments,â he says. âAnd I remember we were getting shots, cutaways or b-roll that we were going to use.â Late one night, Young startled Wan in the RMIT edit suites. He had been sitting there, looking at these dolls, and freaking out. âThere was something about them. I donât know, you know, if they were necessarily the first dolls that creeped him out.â
His âcreepy puppetsâ have since made three billion dollars.
ESCAPING DIRECTOR'S JAIL
Sawâs rise was vertiginous enough it made success feel unreal. Even as it played at the Sundance Film Festival, Wan worried that he and Whannell might be âone-hit wondersâ, and, as it gained traction, he realised that âyou canât really go back. We canât really go back to making small little student films.â But what did forward mean? The success was soon tinged, as well, with an unpleasant reputational restriction. Directors can be typecast as well, and in 2006, the critic David Edelstein described the gritty new wave of Saw inspired horror as âtorture pornâ.
It turned out to be a lasting coinage, and Wan detests it. âI found it really kind of lazy,â he says. âLeigh and I took three years to write the script, to make this crafted thriller, but it seemed like everyone was focusing on the trap aspect of it.â He was so repulsed by the term that he fled from it thematically. His next film, Dead Silence, âwas more of an atmospheric, old-school Hammer Horror film in spirit. And then, after that, I didnât want to do another horror movie, so I did an action revenge thriller.â Though they have found cult followings since, neither film performed financially at the time.
Just as Wan was finding his feet â instructing Kevin Bacon and John Goodman
on the set of Death Sentence, finally accepting he was a âreal directorâ â the ground under him was crumbling. Money was the only metric that counted in Hollywood terms, and by that measure, he was failing. âI didnât realise that I was moving into what Hollywood called âdirector jailâ,â he says. He rejected offers to direct more Saw style gorefests (including all of Sawâs many sequels), and kept trying to outrun its defining effect on his career. On the cusp of burnout, he recalibrated himself.
âLeigh and I said, âWhy donât we just go back and do what we learned to do: letâs come up with a little contained movie, in the spirit of our film-school days, with just our buddies and our matesâ,â he says. âWe had a lot of our friends to help us make that movie, which was a very low-budget film.â This time, they found a powerful collaborator with a perceptive view of Saw. The producer Jason Blum, whose Paranormal Activity had made $200 million on a $15,000 budget, had seen past the torture-porn controversy to something else.
âThe original Saw was really a detective thriller that happened to have two elements you donât see in a traditional detective thriller: a huge twist and a gruesome premise,â Blum says now. âOther studios looked at Saw and imitated its gruesomeness. But when I looked at Saw, all I wanted to imitate was the way it was made: with total creative freedom.â Wan pitched Blum a haunted house story with a PG-13 rating, then unheard of for a horror movie, and Blum offered him complete creative freedom.
The âlittle contained movieâ was named Insidious. And as well as resuscitating the
haunted-house subgenre of horror almost single-handedly, it marked the arrival of the James Wan high style. âI was no longer the green, new kid who doesnât know how to run a film set,â he says. âBefore, Iâd been so young and naive and just very innocent to how the process was. But by the time this came around, I knew itâs a game. You only have so many days to shoot your entire movie.â This assurance imprinted his themes onto the film. There was the nuclear family, situated in an off-kilter suburbia, under threat from malign supernatural forces. Cinema history was bubbling in the background like a masterstock: The Shining and Poltergeist, but less obvious influences, too, from David Lynch to black-and-white obscurities like the Ealing Studios 1945 film Dead of Night.
Insidious had a lush, sharp palette that helped set the tone for the âelevated horrorâ of studios like A24, which soon followed. It also had a lot of jump scares, and â another escalatory Wan hallmark â jump scares upon jump scares. These tend to divide critics and audiences. The case against is that they are formulaic and lazy, the same unelevated horror as fright masks and ghost trains. The case for is that calling jump scares a horror clichĂ© is like calling punchlines a clichĂ© of comedy: they are part of the genreâs make-up at an atomic level. Wan has made this comparison himself, likening the timing of a scare to the structure of a joke. Whannell likens the resulting cascade of sensations, always teetering over-the-top, to the killer in Psycho ripping off a dress âto reveal a sequin suit and do a dance numberâ. This turned-up-to-11 tone has been named, too: âbatshit horrorâ.
Is there something tongue-in-cheek to it? Whannell thinks the saturation effect comes from Wanâs heritage. âYou have to remember that James is Chinese,â he says. âHe was born in Malaysia. If you look at Asian cinema, it has a much different sensibility to Hollywood cinema â it is much more heightened.â When Australian film-training emphasised subtlety, Wan instead chose the garish and loud.
Other international influences feed these crescendos as well: Malignant is a tribute to Italian giallo cinema, the lurid crime-horror hybrid typified by Dario Argento. Wanâs sound design comes from this tradition, and its keening, dissonant synthesiser soundtracks that slather on tension.Â
NUMBER WAN FAN
Ultimately, Wanâs intensity is the intensity of a fan. âIf Iâm able to shoot a scene that Iâve had in my head for a long time, and Iâm able to sort of bring it to life, with my actors, and my crew, in the special effects team, I still get very giddy,â he says. He retains an âinnocenceâ, he believes: his friends and collaborators are fellow horror-movie geeks, unrepentant âfanboys and fangirlsâ. He has had versions of the same conversations for 25 years, a continuity that began at RMIT and encompassed Patrick Wilson on the set of The Conjuring, talking horror in between takes. âThat enthusiasm has never left him,â says Shannon Young. âHeâs obviously working on a much bigger stage now, but from a creative standpoint, thatâs sort of where he operates. Heâs got that kind of bubbly, infectious enthusiasm for making genre films.â
This enthusiast-in-chief persona attracts talent. Nicole Kidman, known for her discerning eye for directors, âknew about James Wan way before James was James Wanâ, she says, and followed his work from the time he was in Australia. They worked on a shelved project before they finally combined on the second Aquaman. âHe is a cinephile,â she says via email. âHe understands suspense and comedy and he is very aware of whatâs going on in the world. James is a very, very kind and warm man and I was always drawn to that. And he is funny!â
Wan says heâs now interested in developing fledgling talent, helping out young, upcoming filmmakers. âIâm taking on the role of a statesman, by trying to help other filmmakers out.â Jason Blum admires Wanâs producing even more than his directing. âMost directors who become producers will be overbearing,â he says. âThey will just tell filmmakers how to do it. Whereas James is able to empathise deeply with filmmakers â but also see their work clearly and give them truthful feedback without trampling their artistic instincts.â
Back when Insidious came out, David Lorensene and the Melbourne Horror Film Society booked out two rows of the cinema, and afterwards, as the lights came up and chatter broke out, someone asked if theyâd heard âsome guy scream outâ. Lorensene admitted it was him. âIâve often said, âIâd love to be able to tell James that he made me cry out as a grown man in a cinemaâ. That I did a manscream when I saw Insidious. Iâd love that to get back to him somehow.â
Editor-in-Chief: Christopher Riley
Words: Richard Cooke
Creative direction: Grant Pearce
Photography: John Russo
Styling: Audrey Brianne
Grooming: Barbara Guillaume
Stylist assistant: Tyree Robinson
Production: Ken Waller
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