INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Upgrade tells the story of Grey Trace, a man in the near future who left quadriplegic after a car accident and mugging.
Following an
interlude that sees Grey struggling with his new disability, an experimental computer chip called Stem is placed in his spinal cord, where
it doesn&t just give him control of his limbs again — it turns him into something close to a superhuman, ready to track down the men who
paralyzed him and murdered his wife.
The film, which comes out today in the United States, may sound like a straightforward revenge plot,
but it was written and directed by Leigh Whannell, who best known for writing Saw and Insidious
(More recently, hemade his directorial debut with Insidious 3.) He explained that he wasn&t interested in turning this into a superhero
Instead, he wanted to tell the &Taxi Driver version& of this story.
Without getting into details, it fair to say that Upgrade doesn&t feel
that far removed from Whannell horror films
It also includes plenty of visceral action scenes and touches on bigger questions about our relationship with technology.
I met with
Whannell in New York City last week to discuss the film, and an edited transcript of our conversation follows
There one passage that gets a little spoiler-y, but I&ll warn you when we get there so you can skip ahead.
Whannell shot Upgrade in his
hometown of Melbourne, Australia, so we started by talking about the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne.
Leigh Whannell
Leigh
Whannell:I&ve lived in L.A
for 12 years now, so I no longer care about Sydney-Melbourne
We shot this film in Melbourne but we actually edited in Sydney.
I was in Sydney for a few months and I absolutely loved it.I insisted on
living in an apartment on Bondi Beach, which was not practical at all to the location of the editing room, but I didn&t care because I was
like, &Look, if I was going to walk on ice, then I&m going to tap dance.& If I&m going to live in Sydney, I want to live on Bondi
Beach.
TechCrunch: So the big science fictional idea of Stem, where did that come from
Whannell: The idea really just came into my head, the
It a very random process, and in its randomness it frustrating, because I feel like I&m always trying to think of movie ideas.And most of
the ideas aren&t good, and they instantly get filed away in the drawer for terrible ideas.
Every now and again, something will pop into my
head when I&m driving or I&m in the shower, you&ll just get an image and it stays with you
It doesn&t have to be much, it doesn&t have to be a story, it could just be an image
But it won&t leave your head and that when you know you&ve got something.
That how this started
It wasn&t like I read a magazine article about where tech is going
I was in my backyard, I remember that, and it was a nice day like this, and I just suddenly had this image of a quadriplegic in a wheelchair
who stood up out of the chair and was being controlled from the neck down by a computer
That image and that scenario wouldn&t leave my head and I started reverse engineering a story into it
I kept writing away and making notes and then, cut to many years later, I&m sitting here talking with you.
TechCrunch: It interesting that
it came from your imagination, because in some ways it feels very prescient
We had our own robotics event a couple of weeks ago and one of the big moments onstage was someone in a wheelchair who was able to take a
few steps thanks to an exoskeleton.
Whannell: So the exoskeleton that helps people with paralysis walk and move, this movie is the
internalized version of that, where it goes one step further and there nothing exterior
It a chip.
It has been interesting to watch the world catch up to my script
Because when I wrote the first draft of this script, automated cars and smart kitchens were still science fiction
And in the ensuing years, they&ve become ubiquitous
I mean, my wife car parks itself and talks to her
And my daughter thinks it perfectly normal to have a voice talking to her in the kitchen, and she asks it to play songs and it does
So in a way I feel like I&m living in the world of the movie I wrote all those years ago.
TechCrunch: And when was that
Whannell: God, the
first draft was probably at least six years ago.
TechCrunch: You said a lot of ideas will come to you, and you&ll think: Some of these are
bad, some of these are good
Obviously, you&re known for horror, so in this case, when you think of a science fiction idea, does that create any trepidation
Whannell:
There was a bit of trepidation on my part as I was gearing up to direct the movie
Not so much when I was writing it
But I started to worry about science fiction fans because I&m very well-versed with horror fans, I&ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of
them, I feel like I&m in that community, and I was a horror fan myself
But I realized that science fiction has its own community of these staunch fans who pick apart things like Star Trek and Star Wars
And I did remember having a moment where I thought, wow, are they going to see this and think that I&m a fraud, that I&m a tourist in this
world
I&ve just gone through a two-week trip around the country, screening the movie in different cities, and afterwards I&ll always chat to
And in the acceptance of the movie, I realize that these genres, they&re not the province of any one type of person
What I feel like science fiction fans respond to is just people trying to hit them with something new, something they haven&t seen
And if you do that you&ll be okay.
TechCrunch:When you were directing [science fiction], did you feel like you were using a different skill
set
Whannell: The mechanics of making a horror film are so specific that I obviously wasn&t using any of that
Those quiet moments in a horror film where you really lean on the anticipation of things, this movie wasn&t using any of that
But I felt like some of the rhythms and filmmaking beats that I&d learned in horror, I think they&re just naturally ingrained in me.
So, for
instance, I liked creating moments of silence that were suddenly punctuated by action
And I think I must be subconsciously looking for that vocal reaction that you get from a horror film
It almost like I was putting those horror beats into a sci-fi context: Build, build, catharsis
So maybe that in there, just ingrained.
[Skip the next few paragraphs if you don&t want to be spoiled for an early scene in Upgrade, as
well as the general direction of the film.]
TechCrunch: That certainly true to my experience
For a lot of it I was incredibly tense, and the moment when his head gets cut open, I just screamed.
Whannell: [laughs] In the
operation
TechCrunch: No, in the first kill.
Whannell: Ah, yes, the Pez dispenser!
TechCrunch: God, yeah
That was very upsetting.
Whannell: If you look at that scene and you analyze the structure, there is kind of a horror-esque metronome to it,
where it quiet, it tense and then there an explosion of something.
And in watching it, it been interesting to see that that scene gets a
It not the same reaction that a horror movie gets, that sort of scream in the audience, but it almost like an adrenaline rush, and when he
gets up off the floor, I see people clapping along
I&m like, &Oh cool, this is a spectator sport, they&re getting into it as participants.&
TechCrunch:When I read the description of the film
— obviously, the marketing is emphasizing this dystopian, almost horrific element, but you still think, &Oh, he basically going to become
this superhero, and there maybe going to be this dark side to it, but it still going to be this ultimately triumphant story.& Whereas
throughout the whole film, there this darker undertone that feels very different.
Whannell: I feel like the superhero version of this movie
where somebody is given something — a power or a computer chip, whatever it is — that been done, especially in this age we live in, it
So I found what was more interesting was to do the Taxi Driver version of this, to do the version where you realize the bad guy is in your
body and the fight is not between you and external forces
It actually two entities fighting over the same physical body
That was interesting to me.
[End spoilers]
TechCrunch: One of the things you also mentioned in the press materials was this idea of having
the freedom of an independent film but also having the scope of a larger science fiction film
I don&t know what the budget was, but I assume it wasn&t Avengers-scale.
Whannell: [laughs] Very low.
TechCrunch: What was the overall
approach you took to saying, &Well, we don&t have all that money but we&re still going to try to build a world that has scope&
Whannell: It
just been a real goal and a dream of mine to do that
To make a movie that enjoyed the worldbuilding of sci-fi but took advantage of the creative freedom of an independent
The problem is that one is supposed to cancel the other out
You&re supposed to need studio money if you&re going to go off and make the future-set action movie
So I really was trying to have my cake and eat it, but I was obsessed with doing it.
As a model, I used &80s sci-fi films that I grew up
with.I used the original Terminator as a great example, because if you really study that movie scene-by-scene, the science fiction and the
tech is doled out very judiciously and sparingly
It kind of this lean-and-mean, slash-and-stalk movie that is dressed in this sci-fi skin
And I loved that.
I feel like, if they can achieve that sort of sleight of hand in the &80s, then we could do it now
Especially with the new advantage that they didn&t even have back then, of CG
We could use CG to augment some of the scenes
We couldn&t go bananas with it, but we could utilize it at certain moments
And I guess I&m too close to the movie, I&ve spent too long with it to know if we really succeeded, but I&m hoping that audiences feel like
they&re watching a bigger movie, you know That they&re part of a bigger world.
TechCrunch: Right, and there a couple of things in the
beginning that feel very big —
Whannell: Like, here the world!
TechCrunch: Which, if I go back clinically and watched it, I would see that
those are doled out very strategically
And it also is an interesting constraint because it means that in a lot of the other scenes, you have one or two science fictional elements,
but you&re using primarily a real-world location or set, rather than a created world.
Whannell: Absolutely, and that was something that was
a very conscious decision
Not just budgetary, but a creative decision for me was: Let set this movie in the very near future
Let build a world that the audience can see themselves in.
Also, the world doesn&t change completely overnight, it happens incrementally
In 30 years time, you&ll still have buildings from the 1800s in New York City
They&re not going to knock them down and build a glass tower
So what you&re going to end up with in 30, 40 years is a landscape in Manhattan that is the future sort of jammed on top of the past, and
it&ll be this hybrid.
And people will still be driving older cars! That another thing that you see in a lot of future movies, all of a
sudden everyone on the road is driving the future car
And I&m like, well no, there will still be people 20 years from now driving around in early &90s Hondas, crappy cars, you know That scaling
of the world was important, but a bonus prize was that it helped us budgetarily.
TechCrunch: You mentioned that this is something you
started writing six years ago
In that time, the technology has evolved, but also the ways in which we talk or think about disability, and the ways we talk about being
quadriplegic or paraplegic has changed
To what extent was that part of your research, things like talking to disability activists
Whannell: I didn&t talk so much to activists
When I was writing the film, I wanted the idea that a chip could cure paralysis, I wanted that to be a tangible thing and I talked to a
surgeon and he said, &Look, what you&re talking about is hypothetical, but in theory, it could be done
That gap between our brain and our nerve endings could be bridged by a computer.& And that was great to walk away with, the knowledge that
the tech was credible.
Certainly when we were preparing to shoot the film, we took the quadriplegic side of it very seriously
Logan [Marshall-Green], who plays Grey, he worked with a guy who was a quadriplegic who was nice enough to spend a lot of time with Logan,
share his life with him, talk to Logan, let Logan see what his daily rituals were like, let him actually use a chair.
And Logan had a lot of
He felt he owed this gentleman that he had worked with the responsibility of portraying that realistically, and he was really watching it,
the way he held his hands
It not a long moment in the film that he spends as a quadriplegic, but it was important for us, for that moment to have as much integrity as
anything else in the film
Especially with something that in real life, people are experiencing
You don&t want to push back at them some wonky cinematic version of the real thing.
TechCrunch: Part of what I&m getting at is, is there
this opening image that you mentioned of him rising out of the chair
It this incredibly moving scene because you&ve been through all of these terrible things with him
But at the same time, you can imagine somebody who is quadriplegic watching the film and you don&t necessarily want them to look at
themselves and think —
Whannell: Them thinking, &Oh, you&re presenting this as triumphant, as if that much better.& Yeah, that
interesting, that is part-and-parcel of putting films out into the world, isn&t it The world reflects back at you and I think you just have
to take those slings and arrows
Nothing was done with any malice.
And I don&t think we were trying to present the idea that quadriplegia is this hellish situation that only
being able-bodied can cure
What I think we were doing is speaking to the story of a guy who hates technology becomes technology
The way that we were enabled to do that in the story was through his condition, his quadriplegia
So it the result of an accident, he given this chip, and now he completely reliant on it, you know It totally a story point for
us.
TechCrunch: And again, without getting into too many spoilers, you said that this is the Taxi Driver version of the story
How much of that was trying to express your own concerns about people becoming more automated
Whannell: I think a lot of it
First and foremost, I&m trying to tell this genre story, I&m trying to build a unique movie
And then the themes and the questions of the film sit underneath it.
But I have a foot in both camps with technology
Especially in researching the script and reading books by Ray Kurzweil and authors that talk about the singularity and the point at which
humans and tech will merge
Because I didn&t want to make a robot film
A robot film has been done before and I wasn&t really interested in that
I was interested in human beings putting tech into their bodies voluntarily
That was something I felt I hadn&t seen a lot of.
Through my research and reading these books, I saw both sides
I saw the wonderful side of our reliance on tech in regards to medicine
If we can install something in our bloodstream or our bodies that cures cancer, that obviously going to be an amazing, wonderful thing
But there the other foot in the other camp, which is our overreliance on automation
I&m wondering if our cars do the driving for us and our kitchens do the cooking, are we actually designing ourselves into irrelevance That
an interesting road to look down
It seems to me the human instinct is to always make things easier
We&re always leaping towards convenience: &Oh, wouldn&t it be better if a machine could do that&
I&m wondering where that road ends
The movie was definitely a reflection of that, too.
TechCrunch: The last thing I&m going to ask, which I think I&m sort of required to ask,
is to what extent is this meant to be a completely standalone experience Have you thought about a potential sequel
Whannell: I haven&t
The thought enters my mind and I push it away
Because this is an independent film, and it really hard in today media landscape to get people to pay attention to things
We&re releasing the movie in summer, surrounded by giant movies
I can&t imagine what the marketing budget for the new Han Solo movie is
To compete against that is almost foolhardy, so I feel like planning a sequel is an assumption of success that I&m not ready for.
Sitting
there being vexed about where to go with a sequel would be a great problem to have.
TechCrunch: Well, it certainly doesn&t feel like a movie
that was written with a sequel in mind.
Whannell: No, it definitely wasn&t
I remember when James Wan and I did the first Saw movie, a lot of people would say to us, &Well, you left the door open for a sequel.& And
we would say, &No, we literally closed the door!& We thought it was a nice ending
Little did we know that the producers had other ideas once the film was a hit.
To us, the ending to that movie, in our opinion, was the very
definition of a cut to black, no more story
But then we got a lesson in commerce.
