I’m a self-confessed fan of the Saw series. One of the very first things I wrote for Flicks as a dropkick intern was a retrospective on the entire series (back when I used MS Paint like the non-professional I was). The torture saga was essentially my Friday the 13th, and while it varies from stupendous to suckage, the whole horror heptalogy holds a special place in my movie heart.
So I was naturally giddy to talk to Marcus Dunstan – who wrote Saw 4, 5, 6 and 7 with collaborator Patrick Melton. Dunstan is also director of home invasion horror The Collector and its sequel, The Collection, which comes out on DVD and Blu-Ray May 22nd and is playing as part of the Academy Cinema’s Monster Fest in June. I had literally just finished watching The Collection and after taking the screener out of my laptop, I got on the phone with Marcus to personally thank him for putting me off red meat for a good month.
“That screening was amazing. Hands were flying in the air, people were clapping and jumping, it was a freak-out”
I made sure to mention how jealous I was not being able to have seen it at Fantastic Fest with a crowd of horror fanatics. “That screening was amazing,” Marcus told me “hands were flying in the air, people were clapping and jumping, it was a freak-out. It was really great.” It was a joyous feeling for the Fantastic Fest veteran, especially given that it was the first film Dunstan had shown at his beloved festival as a director.
The Collection has been labelled the Aliens of The Collector franchise and there’s a lot of truth to that, jumping from a straight-up horror to more of an action thriller. “The first film was done on a modest budget and we were dealing with a very mean story at a farm house,” says Dunstan. “For the second one, I wanted to make a completely different movie. So we took the characters, who we knew were wonderful, and put them in a completely different story. We were able to shoot in 35mm anamorphic film with an amazing practical effects crew to make it ten times the scale of the original.”
Marcus has every right to boast about the practical effects too – it’s one of the most impressive aspects of the film. “That was special effects makeup artist Gary Tunnicliffe,” Marcus proclaims. “Gary was so good, we didn’t need the crutch of CGI at all. He created everything that needed to exist to make it feel like it was coming from a very real place, and that made it work.
“Those sculptures he made for the Collector’s museum are beautiful pieces of art. When people walked past that collection, their jaws dropped and their eyes went big.”
I was curious, “Do you have that collection in your garage now just as a neat little thing to put next to your Ferrari?”
“Ferrari!?” he laughed. “I have a few of them but no Ferrari.”
“Maybe you could try selling them on eBay.”
“Oh yeah, absolutely!” Marcus said with enthusiasm.
Being brought to life in the wake of the torture-porn movement, the Collector is a character often crudely compared to Jigsaw. However, “The Collector was originally called The Midnight Man,” Marcus explained. “We thought of him before the original Saw even came out. As it developed, it became more and more of a horror script and became more ‘Saw inspired’, if you will.”
The geek inside me interjected, “Saw 6 was my favourite of the Saw films you two wrote.”
“Oh, right on! Thank you!”
Josh Stewart puts a lot into his role as Arkin, and I liked Arkin because he’s a character who’s aggressive in his own right but still fully understands his vulnerability in the situation. “We definitely like painting shades of grey or even black,” Marcus adds. “The good girl that never has sex, has never touched a drug or gotten herself into a bad situation, I can’t identify with that person. But I can identify with somebody who has made mistakes. That rings true to me.”
Arkin (left) and the Collector (right).
The other main stars of the movie are the trip wires, rigged doors and pressure pads that trigger devices devoted to mincing humans. Having gained some creative practice with the Saw films, I wanted to get some insight into how Dunstan and Melton developed these Rube Goldberg machines of death. “We’d go to Home Depot (America’s Mitre 10) and walk through and say ‘Oh yeah, I could build that. Oh yeah, that’ll work.'”
Marcus then shared with me a piece of personal history which served as inspiration for a trap in Saw 7 – a chap he knew from school who turned out to be a very vocal racist, “I thought ‘What would be the horror movie equivalence of penance for this guy?’ And then I thought that the racist must skin himself to get out of a trap, a painful moral that we’re all the same colour on the inside.”
- This racist.
Having played a major part in one horror legacy while effectively starting his very own in the torture-porn genre, I had to ask: “When are we going to see The Collector Vs. Jigsaw: Requiem?”
“That would be amazing,” he laughed. “If that ever happens, I’ll get a ticket.”
“Well, if you ever do decide to make it, give me a screenwriting credit please.”
“Don’t worry, that would be my pleasure.”
I’m going to buy so many Ferraris when that film comes out.
