Leigh Whannell didn’t believe Chris Rock when he first heard he wanted to make a ‘Saw’.
The filmmaker – who created the first movie in the horror franchise in 2004 with James Wan – had met the actor at a party at Palm Springs Film Festival when their agents introduced them, and it seems the 54-year-old star already had plans in mind for his reboot.
Whannell told Collider: "I think I said something lame like, ‘I’m a big fan’. And he has that 100 times a day, and he was like ‘OK’. As he was walking away, his agent said to him, ‘That guy wrote Saw’.
"He like stopped in his tracks, came back and was like, ‘You wrote Saw?’ Suddenly he was interested! And he said to me, ‘I would love to make a ‘Saw’ film’. I thought it was something you say at a party, like ‘I’d love to dye my hair pink too.’
"You just say it because the person’s got pink hair, you don’t wanna make them feel bad. Turns out he was serious – that was not an offhand thing that he said. He really did want to make a ‘Saw’ film!"
Rock has written and will star in ‘The Organ Donor’, and Whannell – who is at the helm of the new ‘The Invisible Man’ movie – admitted he had his own brief reservations about taking on a character with such a rich history.
He said: "Maybe for a second, but I realised I could put my own spin on it. I could take this iconic, beloved character and wrap something around it that felt like my film.
"You kind of have to ‘Jedi mind trick’ yourself into thinking that this is the first time an Invisible Man story has ever been told. I don’t want to think about all the other versions of this character that have gone before, whether it’s TV shows, movies.
"I just wanna forget all that and think, how would this movie play if this was the first time this story was being told?"
Leigh Whannell didn’t believe Chris Rock’s Saw reboot plans
