Upgrade Director Leigh Whannell Makes Movies for Himself

Leigh Whannell might not be a household name just yet, but if you've seen a scary movie in the past fifteen years, it's safe to say you've seen his work. Saw, written with close friend/collaborator/horror mainstay James Wan when he was just 23, has spawned seven sequels. 2010's Insidious, which he wrote and acted in, has had four installments, the third of which marked his directorial debut.

Now, this soft-spoken Australian with a taste for the gleefully macabre is stepping it up a notch. His new film is Upgrade, a fun, fast, screamingly violent movie in which a man named Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) is left paralyzed in an attack that claims his wife's life. A reclusive tech billionaire, Eron, offers him to try STEM, a new AI project inserted into his spine that allows him not just to walk again, but become a near-unstoppable force as he hunts down the people who destroyed his life. There are, of course, bumps along the way. GQ sat down with Whannell to discuss Upgrade, his contribution to the midnight movie genre over the years, and this one fucking staircase I've started to see in everything I watch.

GQ: You've had a hand in a lot of popular franchises over the last ten years now, why go for this completely new, risky original movie?
Leigh Whannell: People can tell you all sorts of stories about on set horrors, troubles, editing room fuck-ups but it all pales in comparison compared to coming up with the story idea that you like and putting it down on paper. Once I have a story idea I like it doesn't even matter to me what genre it is, I'm just so happy to have one. This was one of those, this was a story idea that I just couldn't give up, I had to keep going after it.

What was the germ of the idea initially that you had?
The first idea I had was the idea of a quadriplegic having an operation to have a chip installed that would control their body for them, where they could move. I've seen tech in the ensuing years sort of go down this path, of exoskeletons. Once I had that image and that idea I started to sort of reverse engineer a movie around it.

I'm wondering how you initially imagined STEM and what this actor eventually brought to the voice role?
I was wary of it not being too HAL-esque. Any movie that deals with an AI computer voice stands in the long, long shadow of 2001. So when we were auditioning actors I told the casting agent to point the camera at the floor. I didn't want to see the actor, I just wanted to hear their voice and not have a visual association.

Simon Maiden, who played STEM, I loved his voice in the audition. I met up with him and I put him together with Logan and then the last thing I said to him was "I want you to study videos of serial killers." There are videos of Ted Bundy doing interviews online and there's this charm that masks an undercurrent of sociopathy. I tried to steer away from voices we've heard before and create something that was ours, that was this movie. So I would let him have hints of passive aggression, or just straight up aggression, and we tried to have it fluctuate a little bit rather than be a monotone voice throughout the film.

Was Simon Maiden on set talking to Logan?
Yes, if you were Logan and we were shooting you we'd put an earpiece in your ear and we would put Simon out in the hallway, so you would be able to hear him talking to you. So all those interactions in the movie are really happening. It was the timing. They were able to interrupt each other, match tones, and have this banter between them.

There's also a lot of anxiety in this movie. A trepidation around this very real thing that's going on right now: these unchecked tech billionaires kind of hiding out in lairs and working on whatever they want, and putting it out into the world.
That's there for sure, and I think there's just a general hum of anxiety about today's society. This movie definitely reflects that anxiety, of feeling like the world is getting away from you and that everybody's buying into this tech that maybe you're not on board with. I see that in the character of Gray.

Maybe it was a subconscious thing, because I know I didn't necessarily write the first draft of the screenplay with that in mind but I've seen the world kind of catch up to the movie. It seems like the world has turned this film from being science fiction to science fact. Automated cars and smart homes are pretty ubiquitous now, they're a concept that people can wrap their head around.

But also this level of anxiety where you're constantly pulling this out of your pocket and letting it feed you all this stuff... And we don't really know who's making it. What they're watching.

The look of this movie, especially in indoors scenes, is very specific. There's a lot of rockery, there are plants indoors growing out of the corner. I wonder where that look came from and how you landed on that as a futuristic concept?
It's good that you noticed. I needed a production designer and when Felicity Abbott came along, she had a great resume and a great look book, but the thing that she brought to it is that she had never done a sci-fi movie before. She had done costume dramas and period films, but she'd never done a straight up genre sci-fi film. I loved that because I knew that she would bring fresh eyes to it.

Once she got onboard we started having a lot of conversations and we decided that the world of the future would be very influenced by the natural world. We wanted the tech to be imitating nature, and that's where all the wood and rocks come from. That's where we felt that the future would be headed. And I think it speaks to the theme of the movie where tech is trying to literally become the natural world, but that's how tech is being designed now, in the real world, too.

How did you and Logan go about researching and crafting his movements? Of in-control-but-not-in-control?
We put... a lot of work into it. Once Logan got onboard he was so dedicated to that physical aspect of it. That was the thing that enticed him to the role. [laughs] He started emailing me videos, at all hours, of him just... moving in his backyard, and I would give him thoughts and notes. It was important to be like, “You're not a robot. We want it to be fluid and graceful like a dancer, not super stilted like a '70s robot."

We worked with a stunt coordinator and a movement coordinator who worked with a dance company. So the combo of all of them working together somehow got Logan into that position. The thing is when you're shooting it you still don't know if it's all good. I still had questions when we were shooting it, like "is this going to be good?" But I loved the gamble.

I don't want to oversell it but I feel like you've definitely had a hand in the way that we're seeing horror evolve into a much more mainstream and bankable genre. Where do you think this appetite is coming from?
I don't think it's ever gone away. I think it's always there, there are just different iterations of it. So Jurassic Park is a genre movie, it's a monster movie, it's this landmark film. A film like Scream will come out in the ‘90s and all of a sudden that's the trend for a year or so: Teenagers being chased by a lunatic and they're all being very self-referential. Then all of a sudden ghost movies with twist endings will have their five minutes in the sun. It just keeps cycling.

So for me I don't try to predict where the Zeitgeist is going to be five years from now because it's so impossible. I just try to write literally what I love. That's usually the barometer that I use. As trite as it sounds, I'm like, "what would I want to see? What would I be excited about?" With Upgrade this is definitely a movie that lives in a world I'd be excited about. I feel like if I was a teenager and I read about a movie that was hyper violent with this kind of Terminator-esque vibe I would run after that movie.

What else is in the DNA other than The Terminator?
There's a lot of Cronenberg. I think Seven is a big touchstone for me. I continually come back to it as a reference point. I think it looks beautiful but it's grimy. It's got this strange combination—it's like a renaissance painting of something awful. I love the script, it's this perfect engine with this inevitable, terrible ending. I think it's been a big influence on me, if you look at Saw you can almost look at that film as a 23-year-old doing their best impression of a Seven.

I think that's a good way to put it. Saw and Upgrade are very much grounded in physical worlds in that they're violent as hell. Then you've got the Insidious franchise which is almost...
Family friendly! Exactly. I think that part of that may have been a conscious decision to steer away from gore because James [Wan] and I were so tagged by that torture porn label, and, maybe rightly, held responsible for that. I do feel like in filmmaking you are largely in control of the perception of you. If you want to be seen as the comedic person you've got to write a comedy and go after that.

So we wanted Insidious to be really scary but wanted to steer away from any gore. The studio are the ones who gave it the PG-13 label. We weren't necessarily going for that. I wouldn't say they're safe movies but yeah you're right, they're movies that are on the other end of the compass from where Saw was.

You go into these things with good intentions and if you're lucky enough for them to be a success sometimes they get sequalized out of your control. They made a lot of Saw movies and I wasn't involved and it was a strange feeling. I wrote two sequels and then I stepped away, it was a strange feeling to see billboards for something that I created, but didn't know anymore.

Have you even seen all of them?
[Laughs] There's a couple I might have missed.

You act in the Insidious franchise. Is that something you're happy to keep doing as long as they make them?
I don't know. If we make another one I don't know if I would. I feel like those four movies that I wrote, it's kind of a closed loop now. It's been fun to work with them and become a family with the crew and people like Lin Shaye and the cast. But I feel like the best direction for Insidious to go, if it's going to go on, it should just completely reorient itself.

I like the movies but I feel like you were tying yourself in knots trying to keep Lin Shaye as the franchise star, even though she died in the first one.
Ah, exactly. We always do that, James and I, we kill the best characters and then have to find ways to bring them back.

Now, I'm just generally curious about this: I've noticed a lot of stuff shot in Australia recently features this one staircase again and again.
Really! Is it that staircase leading down to Eron's lair?

Yeah. I just saw Predestination and it's also in that, and it's in The Leftovers at one point.
Wow, that's funny. The crew never told me that. They obviously hid it from me because they didn't want me to feel bad about it [Laughs]. It must be one of those staircases that location managers love. Man, I did not know that, and I'm friends with the Spierigs [the directors of Predestination], too. I knew they shot in that building but didn't know they used that particular bit.

So what do you think is next on your plate?
The one I'm writing right now is weird... I would say it's like psychological horror. I say psychological because it's not supernatural in anyway, no ghosts. I would say it's a horror film and I'm excited about it. It's kind of a bigger idea, it's a known idea that I'm messing with. You'll know it when you see it, you'll be like "oh that's the film he was talking about." For now I'm just enjoying Upgrade.

Me too. It's the kind of thing I wish I could go back in time and watch at midnight when I was 14.
Those are exactly the kind of movies I want to do.