DIRECTOR RESEARCH
James Wan
James wan is an Australian film producer, screenwriter and film director of Malaysian Chinese descent. He was born in February 26 1977 in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. he graduated from RMIT with a Bachelor of Arts in Media in 1998. He is widely known for directing the horror film Saw (2004) and creating Billy the puppet. Wan has also directed Dead Silence (2007), Death Sentence (2007), Insidious (2010), The Conjuring (2013) and Furious 7 (2015), The Nun (2018), Lights out (2016).
Before his success in the mainstream film industry, he made his first feature-length film, Stygian, with Shannon Young, which won “Best Guerrilla Film” at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF) in 2000. Prior to 2003, Wan and Leigh Whannell had begun writing a script based for a horror film, citing inspiration from their dreams and fears. Upon completing the script, Leigh and James had wanted to select an excerpt from their script, later to be known as Saw (2004), and film it to pitch their film to studios. With the help of Charlie Clouser, who had composed the score for the film, and a few stand-in actors, Leigh and James shot the film with relatively no budget. Leigh had decided to star in the film as well.
After the release of the full-length Saw (2004), the film was met with overwhelming success in the box office both domestically and internationally. The film ended up grossing 55 million dollars in America, and 48 million dollars in other countries, totaling over $103 million worldwide. This was over 100 million dollars profit, over 80 times the production budget. This green-lit the sequel Saw II (2005), and later the rest of the Saw franchise based on the yearly success of the previous installment. Since its inception, Saw (2004) has become the highest grossing horror franchise of all time worldwide in unadjusted dollars. In the United States only, Saw (2004) is the second highest grossing horror franchise, behind only the Friday the 13th (1980) films by a margin of $10 million. In 2007, he went on to broaden his filmography with another horror movie, Dead Silence, and the action drama Death Sentence. Having worked on his last three films back to back, Wan told Crave Online that he is ready for “a bit of time off just to chill, but at the same time I’m using this opportunity to write again.”
Overall he is quite a modern director with many different and new ideas which link very well to the conventions of the horror genre. Examples of his work include the iconic Clown Puppet known as “Jigsaw” from the Saw Franchise, “Billy” the puppet in Dead Silence, and the well-known “Annabelle” Doll in the Conjuring. All these uses of puppets and dolls are examples of James Wan’s idea of using somewhat inanimate objects and putting a twist on them making and giving them a deadly and generally quite scary feel, very much like the “Chucky Doll” that was used in the 1988 movie Childs Play. This is a rather unique turn compared to the typical use of scary monsters or masked serial killers that old horror films tend to use. Altogether the use of these dolls is what makes much of his movies very memorable as they are very unique in their style and really evoke certain fears and ideas that weren’t as explored yet. Across all his movies James Wan uses a whole range of techniques and styles to really engage the audience into the film they’re watching. Especially in his horror films he uses a wide range of camera shots and cuts to really grab the audience and immerse them into the movie. Examples of this are the constant close ups on character’s faces to really get and see the emotion of the character at that current moment. This really gets the audience to in many way empathize with the character, making them feel their fright and fear.
Also the use of rapid sequencing in many of his films as tension builds up within the narrative really makes the audience feel on edge. Specifically in “The Conjuring” James really liked the idea of having a horror movie be based on a true story with real life events that happened to people that are still around today. This is why during the Conjuring he set out to make it as scary but also as realistic as possible so he worked alongside Lorraine Warren, a supernatural investigator and the person who the film is based on.
Wan’s point speaks to that old Hitchcock adage about letting audience imagination do the extra work: suspense lies in the anticipation, not the reveal, and the reveal is best built through sound rather than a solitary reliance on the image. Wan and his longtime writing partner Leigh Wannell explain in this interview how they’re not fans of “false scares,” of creating arbitrary moments of suspense that don’t serve the overall arc of the horror story. This is a particularly instructive lesson for movies. Too many false scares reveals the inherent falseness of being scared in a movie theater, of being affected by what amounts to a series of flickering images of staged events projected onscreen.
False scares are gimmicks, and the audience and filmmakers know it. So, if you can’t be sincere about your scares, you aren’t sincere about your movie, and your audience won’t treat it seriously in turn. Wan here wrestles with the fact that one can grow as a filmmaker with subsequent works whether or not those subsequent works are received or seen as constitutive of a filmmaker’s identity. Death Sentence may have been a more polished directorial effort for Wan, but he was more closely associated with Saw. It wasn’t until the success of Insidious that other people saw him how he saw himself: as a filmmaker genuinely and thoroughly interested in mastering stylistic tools to build suspense, not creating cheap shocks for audiences with gore.
This really helped him recreate the events of her story but also add the intensity and conventions that the horror genre is known for. This ultimately making a generally scary film and did very well in the box office. With Insidious and The, Wan found himself the modern master of the supernatural haunted house thriller. James Wan is the successful director helming his first sequel, Insidious Chapter 2, and Wan has signed on to make the next entry in the recently revived Fast/Furious franchise. Point being, Wan has proven himself against the limitations of the subgenre constraints he helped create, showing that he is a filmmaker interested in appealing to mass audiences through a variety of popular genres.
Wan’s career is, in many ways, an index for the trials and travails of working in both independent and studio filmmaking. But the good thing is that his tale is also a success story demonstrating that true talent can prevail over the aforementioned constraints. Wan is certainly a filmmaker who has learned a great many of his own lessons over his career, and we’re the ones who benefit from that knowledge.
Amna Faheem 