Two men wake up chained in a grimy bathroom with a corpse between them. One has until 6:00 to kill the other, or his wife and daughter die. That is the whole engine of Saw, and it still runs.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
A Bathroom, a Hacksaw, a Deadline
James Wan directed Saw in his feature debut, from a script he wrote with Leigh Whannell. The film is a horror mystery with a crime spine. Its tagline asks how much blood you would shed to stay alive. The movie means that literally.
Whannell plays Adam Stanheight, a photographer who comes to in a bathtub, ankle chained to a pipe. Cary Elwes is Dr. Lawrence Gordon, an oncologist chained across the room. Between them lies a suicide victim holding a revolver and a microcassette recorder. Both men find tapes in their pockets. Adam’s urges him to survive. Lawrence’s orders him to kill Adam by 6:00.
The Saws Were Never for the Chains
Adam finds a bag in the toilet with two hacksaws. Both men try the chains. Adam’s saw breaks. Lawrence works out what the saws are actually for: their feet. That beat is the film’s cruelest piece of design, and it lands because the movie withholds it until the tools have already failed.
The captor is the Jigsaw Killer, who tests victims’ will to live through deadly games. Lawrence knows the name because he was once a suspect. Detectives David Tapp and Steven Sing, played by Danny Glover and Ken Leung, found his penlight at a game scene. His alibi cleared him. He later watched testimony from Amanda Young, a heroin addict and the only known survivor of a Jigsaw trap.
Amanda Young and the Warehouse
Tapp and Sing trace Jigsaw to a warehouse using the videotape from Amanda’s game. They detain him and save a man from a trap. Jigsaw escapes after critically injuring Tapp. Sing dies in a shotgun trap. The film runs this as a nonlinear narrative, cutting backward five months and returning to the present bathroom, where Alison and Diana Gordon are tied up and gagged in their apartment.
Shawnee Smith Almost Said No
Shawnee Smith is not a horror fan. She first turned down Amanda Young, calling the script “horrific.” She changed her mind after watching the short film Wan and Whannell made to sell the script. Whannell had played Amanda in that short.
Something about that detective character at that particular point attracted me to it
That is Danny Glover on taking the role of Tapp.
Michael Emerson signed on as Zep Hindle because he found the writing “masterful” and the twist “jaw-dropping.” Tobin Bell took Jigsaw. Elwes read the script in one sitting, drawn in by its “uniqueness and originality.”
Eighteen Days, One Sundance Screening
Wan and Whannell wrote the script in 2001. Australian producers passed. They went to Los Angeles and shot a low-budget short from one scene to attract backers. It worked in 2003. Producers attached, formed the horror label Twisted Pictures, and the feature shot in 18 days on a small budget.
Saw premiered at Sundance on January 19, 2004. Audiences responded, Lions Gate picked up distribution, and a planned straight-to-video release became a theatrical one on October 29, 2004.
The Elwes Pay Dispute
In August 2005, Elwes sued his management firm and Evolution Entertainment, the film’s producers. He alleged breach of contract and unjust enrichment, saying he was promised at least one percent of the producers’ net profits and never got it. He claims he received $53,275 and a salary of $2,587.20. The case settled out of court. Elwes returned to the role five years later in Saw 3D.
A Franchise Built on One Room
Saw’s reputation rests on that bathroom, and it earns the reputation. The hacksaw reveal, the 6:00 deadline, the corpse holding the recorder — cheap, precise, and they work. The nonlinear structure is messier. The Tapp and Sing material plays as setup for a mythology rather than as story, and the back half spends more energy building a franchise than tightening the room.
What holds is the premise’s honesty. Jigsaw does not torture people. He hands them a choice and lets them refuse it. That is a colder idea than most horror films of its era were willing to have, and it is why the sequels kept coming.
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