W W W.SCI FI N OW.CO.U KKILLING
MACHINE
KILLING
MACHINEMACHINE
| (^053)
KILLING
MACHINE
UPGRADE
Killing Machine“I’ve seen the fi lm so many times that when we
do a screening I don’t usually sit in, but there’s
certain moments in the fi lm that are always
enjoyable to watch,” he enthuses. “It seems to
be a real audience participation movie. I guess
I’m addicted to that visceral vocal response from
movie audiences, it’s what I’ve grown up with
in the fi lm industry. The fi rst fi lm I was involved
with was Saw and watching Saw was a contact
sport with audiences! They would yell at the
screen and scream and stand up and I think I’ve
become addicted to that crowd participation,
and maybe I’m subconsciously fi shing for it
when I write.”
The moment we’re talking about occurs
during the fi rst scene in which our quadriplegic
hero Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) fully cedes
control of his actions to a cutting edge AI system
installed in his body named STEM. See, Grey
lost the use of his body from the neck down
following a violent encounter with a gang of
thugs which also left his wife dead. Just when
he’s lost all hope, Grey is approached by a tech
whiz kid who offers to make him the guinea pig
for a revolutionary AI that will help him walk
again. But that’s not all STEM can do. It can
help him fi nd the men responsible for taking
his loved one away, and it can help him
become a one-man army.
“It was an idea I had about six or seven years
ago at least,” remembers Whannell. “Pretty
much 24 hours 7 days a week my brain is
churning away trying to think of movie ideas,
98% of which are crap and go in the fi ling
cabinet for crap ideas. But every now and
again I have an idea that I can’t stop thinking
about and this was one of those. I was sitting
in my back yard one day and this image of
a quadriplegic person who had a microchip
installed in their neck to control their body
just popped into my head and I couldn’t stop
thinking about it. I started building a story
around that image and years and years later I’m
now chatting to you about it!”
The story represented a signifi cant shift away
from the kind of material we’re used to seeing
Whannell work with. Sure, there’s a generous
serving of gore as previously mentioned, but it’s
a sci-fi thriller that represents an entirely new
playground for the fi lmmaker and a defi nite shift“This fi lm tends to get a lot
of ‘fuck me!’s out of people,”
laughs Leigh Whannell. We’ve
just told the writer-director
about a particularly vocal
response that someone in
our screening of his new fi lm
Upgrade had to one of its
most grisly moments, and he’s
delighted to report it’s not an
isolated incident.