Interviews
Leigh Whannell on the Gory Practical Effects Kills In ‘Upgrade’!
When quadriplegic Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) gets a new technology that can make him walk again, STEM (voice of Simon Maiden) seems like a godsend. But STEM has a mind of his own and can completely take over Grey’s body. This enables Grey to fend off bad guys like an efficient martial artist, but when STEM kills, it is graphic and on screen. That’s what happens in Upgrade, the new horror/sci-fi from Leigh Whannell.
“What I was thinking of first of all was I wanted to make something visceral and violent,” writer/director Leigh Whannell said.
“Those ‘80s sci-fi movies would get kind of raw. They kind of went for it. They weren’t yet going for that four-quadrant hit that has to appeal to everybody. You have to sanitize those movies down into a vanilla because everyone likes vanilla. Some of those ‘80s sci-fi films I grew up watching were just like a boot to the throat. In that spirit, I wanted the film to be brutal.”
Grey looks on in horror as his own body is responsible for brutal carnage.
“Storywise, I thought it made sense because I was trying to say that these computers, in their sociopathy and their regard only for ending a problem, they would be very brutal,” Whannell continued. “For Grey to watch himself do something like that and be horrified, he’s not going to be horrified if he just knocks someone out. He will be horrified if he cuts their damn head off. Everything I thought was justified within the story. I’ve read a couple of reviews that were like, ‘Leigh leans on his Saw tendencies.’ I’m like not at all. A, Saw wasn’t that gory, the first one. B, it was all relevant to the story to me. A guy watching with horror as his body does brutal things and the computer thinks its fine. It’s like, ‘But you wanted the problem finished. I finished it. What’s wrong with that?’ So I had to tell that story in a brutal way.”
At first, Whannell thought he should have pushed it further. It turns out, Leigh Whannell holding back is still plenty gory.
“Funnily, you don’t have to do a lot for people to have a strong reaction,” Whannell said. “I remember thinking I didn’t go far enough. I was like some of these fight scenes I really should have gone there and just had cracking fractures. It’s amazing now watching the film people are saying whoa, it’s so violent. So a little goes a long way.”
The graphic kills are also practical makeup effects. Marshall-Green worked with the real thing on set.
“One of the things Leigh did which I think sets the movie apart and is an homage to those [‘80s] movies, they were practical,” Marshall-Green said.
“They were real, beautifully designed and created prosthetic that we took a real chance at. When you hear ‘money shot’ called on set, everybody’s aware this has got to work. It was working on a real brick and mortar level you don’t see anymore in movies.”
Everything you see in Upgrade is the final cut. Whannell said the MPAA never imposed cuts to get an R-rating.
“We knew we’d get an R-rating but there wasn’t really anything that they said, ‘You’re going to have to lose this scene,’” Whannell said. “I’ve had that before obviously. On Saw, there was a couple of things, but this one was okay.”
The fighting itself has a sort of mechanical, inhuman look to it as well.
“I wanted it to look strange,” Whannell said.
“The question I asked myself was: how would a computer fight? Because computers are linear and they take the path of least resistance to solve a problem. Human beings are bouncy and sloppy. A computer takes the path of least resistance and wants to end the problem as quickly as possible. If you don’t have a conscience, you’ll just rip someone’s trachea out just to end that problem instantly. On top of that, we shot the fight scenes in this interesting way where we strapped a phone to Logan under his clothes. The camera locks to the phone so that wherever Logan goes, the camera moves with him and he becomes the center of gravity. It kind of puts you a little off kilter. I hoped that visually that would communicate to the audience the idea of a computer fighting and how it sees the world, even just a little visual cue like that can help.”
Marshall-Green said fighting as STEM had subtle differences to normal screen fighting.
“Most human fighting techniques load punches,” Marshall-Green said. “When you’re in fight choreography, that’s doing many things. That’s showing the audience a physical story of what’s about to happen, what is going to happen. It’s also telling your scene partner, ‘Get ready. You have to sell this punch. You’re going to have to wear it.’ For us, it was just wrong. There’s no need if everything is efficient and perfect. Even how the fists are. There’s no horizontal fists the way you normally see. They’re all just little hammers, little nasty nightsticks coming at you. For me, it was just about getting it absolutely – the economy of movement and keeping him more bamboo so it isn’t brick. He bends like bamboo at times to avoid. Of course, on top of it all, you’ve got a guy who’s watching the whole thing.”
Meredith reviewed Upgrade for Bloody Disgusting out of the World premiere and called it “breathtakingly violent.” It opens in theaters this Friday, June 1.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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