It’s been a big summer for James Wan. The Conjuring was a huge hit and he signed on to direct The Fast and the Furious 7, all while still working on the sequel to his previous hit Insidious. Wan completed his press interviews in July because that was probably his last free moment before prepping Fast 7 for a 2014 release.
Insidious: Chapter 2 picks up right where Insidious left off, with Josh returning from The Further a changed man. Chapter 2 also goes back a little into Josh’s childhood and we see a young Elise (Lyn Shaye) in this history. We got 10 minutes to chat with Wan about his latest horror film, which opens this weekend, and his plans for Fast 7.
Some minor Insidious: Chapter 2 spoilers follow, regarding title cards, voiceover and practical effects, but hopefully vague enough that you won’t know what we’re talking about until you see it.
CraveOnline: The opening title of the film just says Insidious after the prologue. Is this still aesthetically part of the first Insidious?
James Wan: I don’t know, I was just playing with format I guess. It was one of those things where we played with it and just trying to mix things up. Not anything specific. I just thought it was cool.
Is Chapter 2 constructed more like a heroic adventure, building up to when we find Josh in The Further, and when Elise has her entrance?
It’s definitely constructed in some ways, people love Elise from the first movie and so we wanted to bring her back but by nature, she’s already dead, right? We wanted her to get a hero’s entrance and basically when I’ve seen the film with other people, people love it when she shows up. It is a slightly different flavor to the first movie, that’s for sure. It definitely plays more like a dark fantasy fairy tale compared to the first one, which the first one was in a lot of ways as well.
Now that this is your fifth horror movie, do you have a sense of “I got this?”
I think I got a certain type. I think I got a certain type, that’s what I got. I think I know what works to some degree and I know what doesn’t work to some degree. That’s where I am with things right now.
What was the decision to let Lin Shaye do the voice for young Elise, and did you avoid showing her mouth as much as possible?
I remembered a long time ago when A League of Their Own came out and they had the opening sequence with an older Geena Davis. We all just thought it was amazing but you find out it actually wasn’t Geena Davis, it wasn’t makeup. It was basically finding an actress that looked like her and then Geena just dubbed her voice. So when I went into this, I wanted to give Lin more presence, but I knew that she couldn’t play, to be fair, it’s hard to get anyone to play 40 years younger. It’s just not realistic. We found someone that was close to her, that was her personality, that had her vibe and then basically experimented with Lin Shaye’s voice and see how that came out. I thought it just added, once again, to the quirkiness of the Insidious world.
Then why didn’t you want to have Barbara Hershey do her young voice?
Well, because I think Lin had such a distinct quality to the way she speaks, the way she sounds. With Jocelin [Donahue], I felt like Jocelin really captured what Barbara was all about, like she was a young Barbara Hershey in a lot of ways. So I could just let that be that. Put it this way, I was willing to experiment with one, but I didn’t want to do two because I think that would be so hard to do if everyone was lip-syncing.
Since we know that Josh comes back changed, to say the least, did you have fun with Patrick Wilson doing creepy poses?
Yeah, I kept saying the template that I pulled from, or rather the world that this one plays in is: the first movie is a twist on the supernatural genre. This one is more a take on the domestic thriller. In so many ways, without giving anything away, it’s a lot like our version of a Stepfather basically, but one with a supernatural element to it.
How do you make the dice show the right letters? Is that a simple practical trick?
It is a combination of practical effects with more involved effects involved in it. The key was trying to make it seem somewhat off kilter but yet is invisible so to speak. The trick is invisible.
In The Further, how do you pull the actors back into the enveloping darkness? Is that just a simple wire?
Once again, everything’s practical. It’s all done in camera. It’s all old school technique that’s been around since Georges Méliès made movies. It’s as simple as sitting your actors on a dolly and then sliding them away, or doing a picture switch where one camera sees an actor in the distance but it’s played by someone else dressed as that character, and then the camera would move around a pillar and then that character would now be in the foreground for example. Now that’s where you would place your real actor. I brought in a lot of the same sort of trickery from the first movie in this one.
Now everyone’s joking that you’re going to turn Fast and Furious 7 into a horror movie. Am I the only one who’s saying, “It’s the director of Death Sentence?”
[Laughs] Yes, everyone jokes about that big time and I sort of laugh along, but I will say this. My goal is I want to bring my stamp to it. I love what I did in Death Sentence but that was a low budget action film. Now I get the chance to do bigger stuff and I feel like I have the money to play with in a bigger sandbox and so I think my action will be pretty damn cool. At least I’m hoping to. The stuff I’m designing, I want my action scenes to be intense. I want them to be suspenseful and scary in that respect. It’s not ghost scary but in the same way when you watch the first Die Hard, the action scenes were actually really tense. I know it doesn’t quite fully fit into the world of Fast and Furious but I want to bring some of that flavor to this.
Are you sort of inheriting a script? They already outlined what Jason Statham set up in the last one, and you came onto it very quickly.
Yeah, in some ways, on a lot of my movies, I’ve always had the chance to develop them much further but this is a different one. This is me coming into a world that is very established. It’s very much laid out from what the last movie what the world is going to be, so I have to come into this sandbox and play this game with them, but hopefully at the same time I can put enough of my own input into it.
Will there be any faster, more furious movie next year than your Fast 7?
Come on, Fred. You know the answer to that question.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
