In the Shadow of Loss: FFC Interviews Leigh Whannell

by Walter Chaw I met Leigh Whannell through the miracle of social-media DMs a few months into the pandemic, when reaching out was all anyone had to do. His The Invisible Man reboot had landed just a couple of weeks before the first lockdown, and I was so floored by its prescience I had to let him know. We’ve kept in touch. The Invisible Man hit that enviable sweet spot for popular cinema: smart without being an asshole about it; thrilling without sacrificing its depth. I came to it from Upgrade, Whannell’s cautionary tale about artificial intelligence, and then worked my way backwards to Insidious: Chapter 3, his directorial debut, which, separated from franchise expectations, proved shockingly soulful and introspective.

Whannell’s films deal with the loss of bodily autonomy and grief. While they have their conventional shocks (like a throat-slitting at a crowded restaurant, for instance, or the sudden gifting of a Glasgow Smile during a (dazzling) knife fight), his pictures rely on the kind of tension erupting from human failings and irreparable relationships. I knew of his werewolf project before it was greenlit; I’d heard a little about his plans for it but mainly left it to faith that whatever came of it would be personal and part of a distinctive, defiantly independent filmography. I wasn’t disappointed.

It pains me that I can’t in good conscience review Wolf Man, because Wolf Man is a shattering portrait of male grief. It’s extraordinary. I couldn’t imagine audiences embracing it right away, and they haven’t. I asked Whannell if he’d discuss the movie with me on the record–at least then I would have the chance to sing its praises, with the disclaimer that he’s my friend and I love him. I love his films, too. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I started by asking Leigh how he’d contextualized Wolf Man‘s disappointing commercial reception:

LEIGH WHANNELL: I guess time heals all wounds. Like, the further you get… I haven’t found some healthy way to recontextualize it. My failures make me who I am, and you never learn from success and all that, but I’ve just hung out with friends, reached out to my support system. You know, you live your life. It’s like getting over a breakup. Day One is this blast wave of shock: What does my life even look like without this person in it? And then as the days go by, it starts to become the new normal.

FILM FREAK CENTRAL: Did I ever tell you about my experience with The Royal Tenenbaums? I didn’t like it the first time I saw it. I thought it was cluttered. The second time I watched it, I was devastated. I suddenly understood it was about losing a father because I got through the artifice of it. I got through the disappointment of not getting whatever it was that I was expecting.
That’s interesting you bring that up, because I’ve had the exact same experience with that film. The first time I saw The Royal Tenenbaums, yeah, too cluttered. As you know, some movies fire so much information at you that the brain can’t register it all. I had the same thing happen with The Big Lebowski. I remember I ran to that movie because I loved Fargo so much. I sat down and I was so disappointed. Looking back now, I know what I wanted was Fargo: Part Two. I was the disappointed consumer. I’m just glad there wasn’t social media that I would have jumped on to record my bad taste. I remember walking out of the theatre just so disappointed: what was that? It wasn’t anything. It wasn’t funny. And then over the years, all the little details of it start to unpack, and you’re like, “Oh Jesus, this is a masterpiece.” I’m not saying this about Wolf Man.

Well… I am.
(laughs) I had dinner last night with the makeup designer for Wolf Man, Arjen [Tuiten]. He’s a real artist. He’s Dutch. Brilliant. He’s very sensitive, very hard on himself. He was despondent, so we went to a restaurant, and it was very healing to talk with him because he said that a lot of his professional makeup friends have contacted him, people in the film business, and told him they loved what he did, but it would take a while for this movie to be appreciated. Rick Baker called him and said: “Remember two things: one, American Werewolf in London didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, and two: you can’t win.” He asked if he remembered The Wolfman, the film he’d done 10 years ago with Benicio del Toro and how it was slaughtered on arrival. And he goes, “Just remember you can’t win. If you do something new, everybody goes, ‘Oh, you changed the look of the Wolf Man. It sucks. Who do you think you are?’ If you do something old, everybody goes, doesn’t Hollywood have any new ideas? You can’t win.” I know it sounds like I’m equivocating for my movie, I’m not. (pauses) Maybe I am.

What part of the grieving process is equivocation?
(laughs) Hopefully the last one.

For what it’s worth, I’ve seen Wolf Man three times now, and I’m having the same experience with it I had with The Royal Tenenbaums. I can’t hold it together even in the first five minutes when Wade’s dad says, “People get taken from you just like that. It’s not hard to die. We’re all just inches away from it.” Almost every line of dialogue is about unimaginable loss.
It really is only about that. I don’t know if I’ve talked about this anywhere else, but there’s one scene in the film that we ended up cutting that is the only time [on] any of the movies I’ve directed where I’ve ever been really torn. Even now–the movie’s out there, and I’m still not sure I made the right decision to chop it. But there was a scene in the opening when Wade’s a little boy where he goes and talks to his mother, and she has ALS. And she can’t really talk, and she’s on that bed, and I felt like having that scene would really just hammer home in a very upfront way what the movie was about. But we ended up taking it out, and I don’t know how you feel whether it was necessary. I just, I just don’t know whether having that scene in there, would that have made a difference? Would it have cemented what the film was about a little more?

I don’t know that it would. Because ultimately, I think what’s powerful about your work is the father/son relationship and the dangerous inability of men to communicate in any other way but through violence. How that’s the thing that’s communicated. All of your films touch on that. I think you have a different movie if you dilute your trope of the harm done by frightened boys.
I don’t know what your dad was like, but when you would go near–when you would walk close to–the road as a child, did your dad kind of explode?

Oh sure. And then he’d call me stupid. And then my mom would call me stupid. And then I eventually stopped telling them I ever made mistakes or got hurt. I have broken toes from soccer that have never healed properly. I’m excited for the arthritis.
(laughs) Oh shit, that’s terrible. And it’s just because they were scared. Do you think that parents, parents of our parents’ generation, do you think they just didn’t have the tools to express healthily how they really cared? Because what are their examples? Their parents? There wasn’t, like, a lot of this child-raising industry around. Raising Cain! ‘How to nurture powerful girls!’

You have a line in Wolf Man where Wade says that when you’re a dad, your only job is to protect your children, and sometimes you’re so afraid of the things that might scar them that you become the things that scar them.
Are we doing the official interview right now, or haven’t you started yet? You’re one of the only writers working now who pick up on this thing that I really think about a lot, which is that movies are about more than the movie itself. They’re about who you were when you saw the movie and where you saw the movie. I can think about a movie like Stand By Me, right? This is ’50s nostalgia made by people who were kids in the ’50s, but to me, it’s nostalgia for the ’80s, and it reminds me, even just talking about it right now, I get chills thinking about the suburban house I grew up in, in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, and that’s where I saw it on VHS. I know what the VHS looks like. I know what the sticker looks like.

What the VCR sounds like whirring up and the tape pulling in slack.
Yes! There’s so many layers of memory on top of the movie itself. I love the way you unpack that. Movies are personal, really personal.

I think all art is a collaboration between the artist and the observer. It doesn’t actually exist as an extant object, because we change its nature by observing it. It’s like that tree falling in the forest, right? Until you see it… And then there’s an alchemical reaction that happens somewhere between you and the screen, whatever it is. And that’s the thing of it. That’s the art and the aura.
There’s not really an instant object. Which is difficult, right? Because…you’re trying to hit the sweet spot where everybody has a reaction to it and all of them are positive, and then they’re all really ready to hear whatever it is they’re talking about.

How many people do you think in our culture, or any machismo culture in the world, are ready to talk about grief with a total fucking stranger? Ten percent? And how many of those people are in your audience for a Wolf Man movie? And again, I’m not making excuses for you. I’m saying you made a really difficult movie, and people don’t like to be surprised like that. I invited you over for a party, and it’s an intervention about how much of a piece of shit you are. And the dad you’ve always resented for not loving you loved you desperately.
I hear what you’re saying. I accept that there’s even a part of me during the creative process that was wilfully avoiding the expected kind of catharsis. One of the producers on the film actually said to me when we test-screened it after I asked him, “How come we’re not getting the same numbers as Invisible Man?” And this particular producer says, “Invisible Man is a movie where the heroine of the movie who has been abused and put down self-actualizes and has her revenge. It’s a giant dopamine hit. You get that catharsis.” He’s like, “You have denied everyone that catharsis in this movie. It’s not there.” And me, what could I say? “Okay, I see what I did.” It does reflect the time it was made in and who I am now. All my films do. How can they not?

You made a movie about an invisible killer keeping us in our house just before Covid.
(laughs) I know. What’s funny is, that movie was written before Covid. Wolf Man was written during Covid, but sometimes, sometimes… Yeah, it’s interesting.

“I realize after this experience…that when you’re making things, you sort of have to divorce yourself from how others will interpret the result. You don’t really have control over that, you only have control over your truth and how much of it you’re brave enough–or stupid enough–to share.”

Tell me about your brother-in-law.
Chandler. We lost him. I lost my brother-in-law two weeks before we started shooting. He killed himself. We had a memorial service for him here in L.A., and then I went right down to New Zealand, where we shot in this kind of fog, and I thought maybe the timing was actually good, you know? I told myself, “This would be great. This will be cathartic for me to make a movie, get all these feelings out.” I think as long as I live, when I look back at Wolf Man, it’ll only be reflective of this sensation of loss for me.

I asked an actor about this movie he did once, and he said something like, “Oh man, all I remember about that movie is how much pain I was in.”
I felt that on set every day. I felt (pauses) heavy. Haunted. The movie is dedicated to him, it’s dedicated to Chandler. When you talk about the movies being personal… I don’t watch my own movies, but for as long as I live, Wolf Man will be the movie about how much we, my wife and I, love and miss Chandler. It’s infused with the loss of him. Every frame of it. Every pore of that movie is sick with grief.

A different movie for you at that moment would be, and feel, dishonest. Whatever we say about “popular audiences” or whatever the fuck, I’ll say that you can’t fool them. Not that way.
A lot of events, a lot of the movies we love, we cherry-pick the ones that we bind ourselves to out of all the thousands of things we discard in our lives. It’s like when, uh, when people talk about the Nineties, they’ll say: Nirvana! Nevermind! And that was one album.

When we talk about the ’60s, we’re really talking about, like, 18 months.
Right! The Summer of Love. That’s funny. I read the Chuck Klosterman book The Nineties, and it’s my favourite book of his, because obviously he’s this writer who can get lost in the details of things, and sometimes I’m like, “Oh, I don’t need to read three chapters about a Britney Spears song.” But I felt like in this book he managed to crystallize his observations into these powerful little hits. And it’s probably because that’s the decade that was for him where he was at his most acute and most articulate.

And vulnerable.
He had this interesting thing that decades don’t always start and end where you think they do. He thinks that the Nineties ended on September 11^th. He writes beautifully about that: when the Towers came down, it was the end of what we know as the Nineties. He just, I would highly recommend it, Walter, if you haven’t read it, because he captures what it is to be the end of the last generation that will experience things without the intermediary lens of the Internet. I guess what I’m saying is that timing is everything, and what’s conducive for one thing may not be for another. Pain’s not always conducive to pleasure.

I do think people seek out pain in film, though, for release. I know I’ll watch things that I know will make me cry when I need a good cry. It’s like Holly Hunter in Broadcast News, I’ll schedule a couple hours of Walter-is-a-hamster time. But, you know, those people need time to spread the word that that’s the kind of movie Wolf Man is.
I have to hold on to that, the hope that if there’s an audience for it, that they’ll find it and whatever is going on right now with streaming and exhibition, that the good news at least is that people will find it if there’s something to find. You remember in the ’80s and ’90s how, as a horror-movie fan, you likely had to do it in isolation, like maybe even hide it from your friends and definitely your folks. Maybe you got a mail-order copy of FANGORIA, but there was no way to connect with a larger community of people who were as interested in this stuff as we were. I distinctly remember that feeling of being a fan of things in isolation. Now, you can gather in these online spaces, and it would have been a dream for me when I was growing up in suburban Melbourne–but now I’m not so sure it’s all healthy and good.

Yeah, I mean, there’s good and bad to everything, right? But it seems like most fandoms now are right at the critical mass of becoming toxic if they’re not there already.
I love the horror community.

I do, too. Or, rather, I always have. But it’s getting hairy in there. Gatekeepers defining what horror is and stratifying it along arbitrary class lines and subgenres–red lights just flashing everywhere. It’s human nature to be jealous of a precious resource.
Scary. Look where it’s got us.

Talk to me about fear. Your films engage a lot with loss of physical and emotional autonomy. Is that a fear you’re grappling with?
Yes, for sure. I’ve always had an irrational fear of disease. It’s not so much death itself that I’m afraid of, it’s the process of dying. In my early twenties, I was having these intense migraines, and I remember going through a phase where I was getting CAT scans and tests it felt like every day. I was sure I was dying. From that experience, I developed a dread of diagnosis–of a doctor saying, “I’m sorry, mate, we found something bad on your scan.” Part of it’s the cruel banality of the way it actually happens when you go through a major illness. I just visited a friend of mine who is suffering from brain cancer, and he cannot communicate. He was trying to communicate but couldn’t. That holds the most fear for me. Just loss of autonomy, right?

And it’s creeping, because it’s going to happen to all of us if we live long enough.
Yeah, exactly. Also, it’s the things that we take for granted. The friend of mine that I’m talking about, he was someone who talked a lot. He was great at it. He was really articulate, he’s still super smart. We would have these long conversations about films, and I loved listening to him talk, because he always had fascinating theories and he had such a warm voice. To see him unable to express a thought was (pauses) itchy. When sitting here talking to you, I’m taking for granted that I can think a thought and it comes out of my mouth and it’s communicated. And you back to me, the same. When the things we take for granted–the ability to walk, the ability to talk, the ability to eat–when these things are taken away from us, I think that is the cruellest thing. It’s when the thing that you give no thought to is taken from you. I don’t know. That’s terrifying.

Is it partly because it’s a reminder of how we failed to live in the moment?
Maybe that. That idea of “I’m still in here, but everything’s breaking down around me.” I think, I think if you’re suffering through one of these diseases, like cancer or whatever it is, Parkinson’s or ALS, something degenerative and inevitable, I wonder if it can get to a point, certainly with cancer patients, where the actual death is relief.

I want to think it was that for my mom. So much physical pain but also a loss of dignity at the end.
So much. So much. It’s not so much the… It’s not so much the death part I’m afraid of. It is the body breaking down, and I think you’re right when you say that that recurs in a lot of my films. On a subconscious level, for me, it never completely goes away. I’m always drawn to [that], and you have to use yourself as a barometer and say the thing that terrifies me on a core level is what I have to work in, because it’s not the window-dressing of horror that really speaks to me, right? There’s a ghoul behind me! That’s fun. That’s fine. But what is the ghoul? What is behind it? What’s underneath it? What’s the thing you’re actually expressing? Is it just a manifestation of a process? Of a trauma? Of difficult emotions like grief? I’m always rethinking my approach to what the point of a movie is–mine or anyone’s–because I feel like each movie has to justify its own existence.

This idea of resisting traditional catharsis is the opening of Wolf Man again, where you see breath vapour rising behind the deer blind. But no flash of what you expect.
For me, the fear of that moment is the father’s realization that he can’t actually protect his kid from the wolf in the woods. It’s primal, and we all go through that as a kid, when you realize your parents aren’t Superman. And then, as a parent, you realize your kids are going to lose their innocence, and you can’t save them. And how do you deal with that grief except to put one foot in front of the other? I realize after this experience, just in regards to what we’re talking about, that when you’re making things, you sort of have to divorce yourself from how others will interpret the result. You don’t really have control over that, you only have control over your truth and how much of it you’re brave enough–or stupid enough–to share. I don’t know if I’ve mastered it yet, but I feel like you can only make the thing that’s true to you. And I think you said before, once you release a movie, it belongs to other people. I really think that’s true. It is going to, it is going to be laundered through all these other people’s experiences, personal experiences–all of them valid and none of them privy to me. Some movies don’t connect. They don’t have a second life, and they disappear. And some movies do have another life. I have to get better at letting go.

You’re talking about grief.
I am, aren’t I? It’s the same process in a lot of ways. I look at the four movies I’ve directed, I’m like, “Oh, each one of those is super personal to me.” When I let them go, it’s letting a loved one go. At least I have that to stand on, though. I can always stand by how personal they are. It’s a very small number of people who just got to make what they wanted to make.