cult cinema
Upgrade054 | w w w. s c i fi n ow.co.u kaway from the horror movies with which he has
made his name.
“I’m totally fine with being known for horror,
I love the horror genre, but as a director I want
to make all types of films,” he tells us. “Making
Upgrade was a real statement of me and the
types of films that I love, and in a way, I think of
it like my first movie. I’ve written a lot of films and
I’ve directed one other film but all the films I’ve
written were done in collaboration with James
Wan and the first film that I directed, Insidious 3,
was still attached by the umbilical cord to James.
I felt very comfortable with it, but Upgrade is
really the first Leigh Whannell film if you will,
that has no connection to James or anyone else.
It’s my idea and my script, so in a weird way I
feel like I’m starting all over again and Upgrade
is my debut film. It seems strange to say that
after I’ve been working in the film industry for
so long but it kind of does feel like a coming out
party for me personally.”
It’s certainly a bold step away from the
shadowy scares of the Insidious universe.
Upgrade takes place in an unspecified near
future, distant enough for some fun tech
(self-driving cars, AI houses, constant drone
surveillance, weaponised implants) but close
enough to be very recognisable. It’s also not
a clean, sparkling future, and making sure the
whole thing was grounded and real was hugely
important to the filmmaker.
“Yeah, I just love these types of gritty sci-fi
films,” he enthuses. “I’m a fan of all sci-fi and likeevery other kid in the world I grew up obsessed
with Star Wars and collecting Star Wars figures
and losing Star Wars figures about ten seconds
after taking them out of the box! But if I were to
narrow down the specific sub-genre of sci-fi that
I love the most, it’s not actually space operas
and intergalactic warfare, it’s sci-fi noir. I love
stuff like The Terminator, eXistenZ, Blade Runner,
Looper, films that are really gritty and kind of
connected to our world.
“I didn’t want to do a flying car movie, I didn’t
want to do a movie that was set 200 years in
the future with robot butlers running around,”
he continues. “I wanted it to be something that
the audience could look at imagine being real
about five to ten years from now. When I was
world-building I was always policing the reality
of it and making sure that nothing in the film
was ‘too futuristic’. Flying cars was the metaphor
I used, they would bring me a gun that would
look too future-y and I’d say: ‘No flying cars!
Just make it look like a gun!’”
That grounding not only makes for a cool
visual aesthetic as Grey makes his way through
some bad neighbourhoods, dive bars and
hacker hideouts in his hunt for the truth, it also
makes it plausible that the course of justice
doesn’t run smoothly and forces our hero to
take matters into his own hands. There’s a real
humanity to the lead character which becomes
increasingly important as STEM shows the kind
of incredible violence it’s capable of and Grey
essentially has to watch it tear people to pieces.“Yeah, I didn’t want someone who was an
action hero,” agrees Whannell. “I wanted an
everyman who was being controlled by this chip
and is actually watching himself do this stuff.
A lot of critics have referred to this movie as a
revenge movie which is interesting because that
was never what I was going for. I wanted the
revenge part of the story to be an engine to get
it started but I wanted the film to pretty rapidly
evolve away from revenge and I wanted Grey
to realise that he didn’t actually want revenge,
he didn’t want to be doing the things he’s doing.
He’s a blue collar guy who has probably been
in a handful of fights in his life and he’s actually
horrified by all the stuff he’s going through.”
While Grey is giving up control to STEM,“i’m addicted to that
visceral vocal response
from audiences”
LEIGH WHANNELLWhannell has shifted
away from horror.STEM and Grey don’t
always get along...