[FILM INTERVIEW] WOLF MAN – Leigh Whannell Interview
It is not an overstatement to say that filmmaker Leigh Whannell is one of the men responsible for changing the face of modern-day horror. His screenplays introduced us to the world of Saw and Insidious while his directing skills have brought us the fresh and creative Upgrade while The Invisible Man took him to a whole new level when he received both critical and fan acclaim.
Now Whannell dips back into the well of Universal Monsters by tackling one of its most respected and loved creatures – the Wolf Man.
“This all started right after The Invisible Man came out,” explains Whannell as I talk to him about when the Wolf Man journey started for him. “You may remember that the entire world shut down because of a small matter of a global pandemic. Like a lot of other parents at the time my wife, Corbett, and I were locked down in our house with three kids… which made life interesting. It was a very difficult time but I got a call from Universal and they said ‘what do you think about Wolf Man?’ and I said ‘I’m not sure I just did The Invisible Man so maybe it is not right to do another monster movie.’”
“And then they said ‘well what about Wolf Man with Ryan Gosling?’” he says continuing. “And I said did I say no I meant yes! I was so excited and that was what started the journey – I started working with Ryan and they wanted to know what my pitch would be so I spent a lot of time thinking about what would be my way in with this character. Once I came up with that everybody signed off on it, but it was a long journey from there because there were a lot of obstacles along the way. There were strikes, Ryan dropped out as an actor because he was doing Barbie and then he ended up in Sydney doing The Fall Guy, Christpher Abbott came on board. It just became a long journey because of everything that was happening in the world.”
When Whannell sat down to work on the screenplay for Wolf Man with his wife Corbett Tuck they also found out the pandemic started to inspire them in other ways as well.
“Yeah it felt just natural to include all those feeling that we were happening,” he explains. “Like everybody else in the world we felt very cut off and isolated. It was a strange time – even just thinking back to it now there are some elements of it that were beautiful – all this connecting with your family and spending so much time with them and not being so focused on your worklife outside of the home. So there were some things that were great but it was also so disconcerting – you never knew when it was going to end and it felt like it dragged on forever.”
“So we ended up putting a lot of anxieties into the screenplay,” he continues. “So the screenplay ended up being about disease and this isolated family unit and I think without Covid the film may not have been such a chamber piece. It wouldn’t have been about a family being cut off from the world and being isolated, but that is what felt right at that moment in time. That’s how we felt at the time.”
Treating lycanthropy as a disease also allows the film to head into some very touching moments especially between the father (Christopher Abbott) and the daughter (Matilda Firth) and that is something that Whannell says he wanted there from the start.
“Those moments where the family are trying to communicate and they can’t felt very tragic to me,” he says with a meaningful tone taking over his voice. “It is something that a lot of us have had personal experience with as well. You would be hard pressed to meet somebody that hasn’t had a brush with cancer or some other disease – whether it be Alzheimer’s or whatever it is. Even it is one of your parents having a stroke and becoming debilitated – we have all had a brush with this kind of thing and had these bedside moments where somebody’s health is failing. Tragedy brings clarity and often during those times you have that conversation that you have always wanted to have with a parent when you know that they are not going to be around much longer. It is coming for all of us and think that is what made this universal for Corbett and I – we knew that there wouldn’t be too many people in the audience that couldn’t relate to that feeling of helplessly watching a loved one go through something like that.”
Of course the other big challenge facing the film was having leading man Ryan Gosling pull out of the film. That led to Whannell and his team having to cast Christopher Abbottalongside the likes of Matilda Firth and Julia Garner so I asked him if he could talk us through the casting process.
“It was a long process,” he agrees. “Once we realized that Ryan’s schedule just wasn’t working we started to think what are we doing here. And of course the studio had names and everybody has their ideas. But the first name that I had was Christopher Abbott. He was the first person that I talked to – I had a Zoom call with him, well before I spoke to anybody else. So he was always top of my list but you always feel like you have to hear the studio out and it wasn’t that they were against Chris it’s just that Universal is a big studio and they want to cycle through those names.”
“What really tipped them over the edge though was that I travelled to New York and I went and saw Chris do a play,” he says. “It was a very hot ticket in town – it was this Off Broadway show that was packing the house every night and when I went and saw him do it his energy was just so powerful. He was playing this character that was really just a pent up ball of rage and I could see a lot of the Wolf in that character. I could see it there and I was so convinced when I walked out of the theatre that at midnight I wrote everybody an email, I wrote to everybody at Universal and everybody at Blumhouse and just said look we have found our guy, this guy is our guy and they were convinced. I thought there may be more push back or more of a conversation but I remember getting an email from somebody at Universal who were just like right let’s do it.
“That was a pleasant surprise but it was a joy because once I knew I had Chris I has an anchor for the role,” Whannell explains. “Then when I got Julia as well I was like ‘wow what a great foil’ These two have this ability that is so great that putting them in a room together there is only ever going to be a benefit to this movie.”
The other big change audiences will see from previous screen adaptions of Wolf Man is that Whannell has gone for a more natural look to his ‘creature’.
“There are so many different versions of this character is so many different cultures,” says Whannell. “And we all know the traditional character from the 1941 movie but it goes back a long way. This idea of lycanthropy and the myth of man turning into an animal comes from a long time ago and I did want to lean that way. I wanted to ground the character into something that felt real and I wanted to remove a little of the fairytale aspect of it and ground it somewhere where you could see it happening.”
“I tried to do that with The Invisible Man as well,” he explains. “I tried to get the audience into a place where they were thinking this isn’t an outlandish science-fiction concept this is something that could really happen. If you can do that than I think you have done a horror film a good service because suspension of belief is the key to it all.”
Wolf Man is released in cinemas today.