James Wan on Finishing ‘Aquaman’ Sequel, AI Fears and Where ‘Saw’ Came From

James Wan has become the example he never had.

Born to Malaysian Chinese parents, Wan immigrated with his family from Malaysia to Western Australia when he was 8, and by then he had already fallen in love with film through Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper’s supernatural horror classic Poltergeist (1982). That feature includes something that would become a staple of Wan’s later work (more on this later), but the journey to this point was by no means an easy one. Wan’s hometown of Perth is one of the most remote capital cities in the world, and his childhood dream of becoming a mainstream genre director in Hollywood felt even more out of reach when he quickly realized that there were virtually no Asian filmmakers making studio genre films in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Wan’s life forever changed when he met aspiring Aussie actor-screenwriter Leigh Whannell at Melbourne’s RMIT University, and their shared love of genre films would lead to their indie horror hit Saw (2004). “From the first moment I met James Wan, I knew he was going to be a successful film director,” Whannell recalls. “There was nothing cocky or boastful about him. He simply had the quiet confidence of someone whose work spoke for itself, and as someone who was not confident in himself at the time, I reveled in being near someone whose future success seemed inevitable.”

As a director, Wan has gone on to release 10 films across horror, action and superhero genres, grossing more than $3.7 billion at the worldwide box office. His résumé also boasts the Fast Saga’s highest-grossing film in Furious 7 (2015), and the highest-grossing DC film in Aquaman (2018), and he co-created three of the most successful horror franchises of all time: The Conjuring, Saw and Insidious. Wan is keenly aware that he has become that all-too-rare example and success story for budding Asian filmmakers, and he strives to clear a path for his community whenever he can through his production company, Atomic Monster, which is in advanced talks to merge with Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions.

Actor Patrick Wilson, who shares a dozen credits with Wan, chalks up the filmmaker’s success to one particular quality. “One of the most Wan-esque scenes to me is a simple scene in The Conjuring under the hood of a car. There’s no scare, it’s just character-building,” Wilson says. “I’m sure many people wanted it cut, but James doesn’t work like that. He leads with his heart. He knows that no scare or action sequence can make up for a lack of character setup.”

While finishing Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Wan, 46, talked with THR about when he felt he had cracked the code on the horror genre and reflected on the unenviable task of finishing Furious 7 after the tragic death of Paul Walker during production and the uphill battle he faced when trying to cast Asian actors early in his career.

If you were to make your version of The Fabelmans, what eye-opening moviegoing experience from your childhood would you likely dramatize?

Poltergeist left the biggest impression on me, and it scared the hell out of me. I was about 7 years old when I saw it in theaters, and I was still living in Malaysia, before my family emigrated to Australia, when I was 8. It made me realize the power of the horror genre, but also the magic of filmmaking in general. I don’t think I was the appropriate age to see the film. It definitely scarred me for life and made me terrified of dolls and clowns, but since then, I’ve become extremely fascinated by creepy dolls, as you can see in all my work.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, there were virtually no studio filmmakers who looked like you. Did that lack of examples give you any pause about chasing this dream?

Definitely. It made me feel more removed, and I already felt so removed from the rest of the world by living in Australia. Most of the filmmakers that I grew up idolizing are Americans, and the Chinese or Asian directors that I admired made movies out of Hong Kong. So, as an immigrant with a Chinese Malaysian background who’s growing up in Australia, I hoped that I could turn that dream into a reality one day, but I was really reaching for the stars.

As your ambition snowballed, was your family supportive of the idea?

I have my mom to thank for what I have today because she was very supportive from day one. She grew up loving movies, so she was the one who really introduced me to all kinds of cinema, from Asian cinema and American films to Italian and English horror films.

As to your higher education, what was most valuable about those years? 

The best thing about going to university was meeting like-minded people. I went to an art school [RMIT], and I met Leigh Whannell in our first year. We were both 17-year-old kids straight out of high school, and we became good friends with very similar interests. We’re big genre fans, and we would always geek out about it in between classes and during lunch breaks. At the time, Leigh wanted to act and write, and I just wanted to focus on directing. And collectively, we felt we could put our brains together and come up with something.

When did the idea for Saw enter into the equation?

It was the mid-to-late ’90s, and Leigh and I really wanted to cut through the noise of all the indie movies that were coming out at that time, so we spent a whole year thinking about story ideas. And one day, as I was in the shower, I thought, “What about a movie with two people stuck in a bathroom with a really grungy toilet? They have no idea how they got in there, and they’re chained to opposite sides of the room.” So I only knew the rough setup, and then I knew how I wanted the story to end with Jigsaw, this person who put them in that situation. And so I pitched a really simple setup and finale to Leigh, and he was like, “Oh, wow. Let me think about it.” So he went off, and he came back to me with Saw.

What led you to create a Saw short first?

We spent another year writing the screenplay, and then we spent another year trying to get the movie made in Australia. And then our manager, Stacey Testro, said, “Hey, I passed your script on to an agent friend of mine and he wants to meet with you guys.” And at that point in our lives, Leigh and I were bummed out by the whole process of getting so close to getting the movie off the ground and then it not happening. So the idea of flying thousands of miles from Australia to L.A. to meet with someone that we don’t really know, I just thought, “Why don’t we show these guys that I’m a filmmaker and that you want to act? Let’s pool our money together and make a short that represents our vision for the script, and we’ll see what they think.” So we shot that little sample short that really got the film off the ground.

Once you took that short around town, a potential deal was contingent on you being the director and Leigh being lead actor?

Yeah, we made the short to really showcase that we have the vision for it. We were young and hungry. So the short really helped give filmmakers and producers a little bit of confidence in who we were — given that we were nobody at that moment. There was no YouTube at the time, so the idea of using a short to sell us was still pretty novel. But we stuck to our guns, and we did a bunch of rounds around town. There were studios and producers that liked the potential of the project, but they didn’t feel comfortable with me and Leigh being attached to it. And then Mark Burg, Oren Koules and Gregg Hoffman saw the potential in it. They were the very first people we met with, and they were the ones to say, “We will give you guys the opportunity to do it. We’ll make it for a really low budget so we can own the film, and you guys can be a part of it.” And Leigh and I just stepped out of that meeting, saying, “Did that really just happen? Our first meeting in Hollywood, and someone actually wants to make our film?”

In 2004, Saw grossed $104 million at the box office on a budget of slightly more than $1 million. Did your life immediately change in the way that one might imagine?

When Saw became this mainstream indie hit, life did change in a big way. It put Leigh and I into the spotlight as these two young guys with genre film ideas that were worth rolling the dice on. So we were very fortunate that our first movie was such a big film and has gone on to become one of the biggest franchises ever, not just in the horror genre, but Hollywood in general. So we’re very thankful for what the Saw franchise has done for us.

Was the term “torture porn” a thorn in your side for a long time?

It was because that wasn’t the goal. Leigh and I didn’t just write a shocking movie for the sake of being an exploitation, schlocky movie. There was a lot of thought and craft put into the screenplay, and so it felt like a derogatory term to describe it. It was eventually used to describe the subgenre that it became — and Saw was a big part of that particular movement — but I definitely wasn’t too excited about that term. But now, in hindsight, I look back at that time period with a little bit more of a rose-tinted view. Saw was very much a reflection of the era in which it was made, post-9/11. We felt that the movie, in some strange way, was kind of relevant to that sociopolitical period of time. There was a lot of torture going on in the world. So, from a historical standpoint, I’m OK with it, but it also helps that Leigh and I have gone on to do many other things. We are not defined by just that one thing.

In 2007, Dead Silence was the first of two films to release to little fanfare. What did you learn from that setback?

Well, Dead Silence, my second movie and first studio film, was really me responding to the reaction that Saw was getting, meaning that people were harping on the torture aspect of Saw. So I made a very conscious decision to move away from that style of film and into something that was more of a haunted house, ghost story, which is a genre I love. But, of course, Saw made such a strong impression that it carried into Dead Silence. A lot of people were expecting something similar to Saw, but it wasn’t. Ultimately, it didn’t do that well, financially, and at the time, people didn’t really like it. But now, strangely, so many fans reach out to tell me how much they love Dead Silence. And it’s the same for Death Sentence as well.

Were you discouraged by the back-to-back responses to the movies you did after Saw?

Yeah, I was still young, naive and a bit ignorant, and I didn’t realize that I was technically in directors jail after those two movies did not do well financially. So I just took a break to reassess what direction I wanted my career to go take, and Leigh and I both realized that we needed to go back to our indie roots. We needed to do [a] Saw again to rebrand ourselves and reinvent ourselves in the same genre, but in a different way. So we went back to our love of haunted house movies and classic ghost stories, and that was how we came up with Insidious.

In 2010, Insidious became one of Blumhouse’s early low-budget success stories, grossing $100 million. What made the stars align?

Insidious was the first movie that Jason Blum branded with Blumhouse Productions, and we really just wanted to again make a movie that was fun to make. We shot Saw for $700,000, and then Lionsgate came in and gave it postproduction money to soup it up a little bit, making the final budget $1.2 million. And with Insidious, the budget was just over a million, so it was a very low-budget indie film. But it was fun, and we didn’t have the pressure of a studio behind us at that point. We just wanted to make the best movie we could, and then take it to a film festival and sell it. And that was what we did [at TIFF]. So, being allowed to make it that way really translated into the final product.

In 2013, The Conjuring became your next critical and commercial smash. Did you feel as if you’d cracked the code at that point?

At that point, yes. Insidious was a big turning point. I remember having a conversation with producer Don Murphy, and, very fleetingly, he said to me, “What you did with Insidious is now what you need to do on a studio film.” So that stuck with me, and I just decided to take the haunted house element of Insidious that people liked the most and make that my next movie. And if you’re a fan of the paranormal and the supernatural, then you would’ve come across stories of the Warrens at some point in your life. So I knew about their life story, and I followed the rights, which led me to [producer] Peter Safran and then, eventually, to New Line [to make The Conjuring]. And I told them, “I want to do Insidious, but I want to overlay it onto a ‘true life’ story.”

That same year, Insidious: Chapter 2 became your first proper sequel and yet another box office win. What made you say yes to an Insidious sequel but no to a Saw sequel?

Jason Blum was very adamant. (Laughs.) He said, “James, you have to come back and do Insidious 2.” And I was like, “All right, Jason. I’ll come back.” To be fair, I had such a great time making the first movie. Insidious gave me this resurgence, so I just really felt like I owed it to the franchise. I was basically saying thank you to it.

Furious 7 (2015) was your first foray into the big-budget action genre, and midway through production, the heart and soul of the franchise, Paul Walker, died in a car crash. What’s your perspective on that experience now that you’re eight years removed?

It definitely was the hardest movie of my career. I’ve done technically challenging movies since then, but Furious 7 just hit on so many different levels, especially an emotional one. It was my first big-budget movie. I made The Conjuring for $20 million, and then Furious 7 was hundreds of millions. But the size of the production did not turn me off; I actually embraced it. I really wanted to create a movie that had the look and smell of their franchise, but I wanted to design set pieces that were a bit more tense, suspenseful and scary. The first thing that I pitched to Universal’s Donna Langley in the room was the scene where the bus is going over the edge of the cliff, and Paul Walker’s character, Brian, has to climb onto the side of the bus and run to jump off. Two years later, that became one of the highlights of the trailer.

When the passing of Paul Walker happened, we were like, “Do we just shut the movie down for good?” But we collectively felt like this movie needed to be Paul’s legacy. So we wiped our tears away and sat around in editorial, going, “All right, how do we do this?” Thankfully, I had shot certain stuff with Paul, like his ending action stuff, but there were still many bits missing in the film that needed Paul. I shot only half of what I needed from Paul before his passing, and then we worked with visual effects to salvage what we had. To complete that movie now, in today’s world, with AI technology, it’s so simple. But we did not have that kind of technology at our disposal. So we had to really dig deep into our bag of tricks to make it work, and one of them was having Paul’s brothers [Caleb and Cody Walker] step in and shoot the other half of the movie. We then pulled different words that Paul had spoken all through the franchise to create sentences for us.

What day comes to mind as being most emotional? 

The hardest part of that movie was editing the ending of the movie where we say farewell to Paul. It was very tearful. It was hard to watch the ending that we put together and not cry.

2016’s The Conjuring 2 performed very similarly to the first film in terms of reception and box office. Did that experience rejuvenate you on a mental and emotional level following Furious 7?

Yeah, after Furious 7, I wanted to go back to something more familiar and just enjoy the process from an emotional standpoint. I wanted to work with Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga and the team again, and continue expanding the story of the Warrens. And it was right about there that we started branching out even more with the Conjuring Universe.

Besides the MCU, the Conjuring universe is arguably the second-most successful cinematic universe. Was there always an ambition to launch a universe, or did it just happen organically? 

It happened organically, but in the back of our minds, we always knew that the Warrens investigated so many different cases and that they had a museum of haunted artifacts. So, even while working on the first movie, we would spitball ideas, like, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could do a spinoff movie or a TV series where we touch on the different haunted artifacts in their museum?” And that was really how the idea for Annabelle (2014) came about. Annabelle is the crown jewel of the Warrens’ collection, and so a spinoff movie was a natural stepping stone. And after Annabelle became successful, we realized that The Conjuring could become the mothership to spawn other stories.

You then ventured into superhero territory with 2018’s Aquaman, which, at $1.14 billion, is currently the highest-grossing DC movie of all time. How much adjusting have you had to do to December’s sequel, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, to fit DC’s reset by way of The Flash?

I’ve had to make adjustments all along the way. The DCU has been through lots of different versions, and one of the things that was challenging about this film was keeping track of what’s going on. Fortunately, the Aquaman universe is pretty far removed from the rest of the world. We’re going to many different underwater kingdoms that are not necessarily related to what’s happening with the other movies and characters, so we’re stand-alone in that respect. So I can just tell my story on its own without being affected too much, but at the same time, I have to be mindful of what’s been happening.

Do you have an idea of when you will finish post?

I hope to finish it up soon-ish. We have the DGA thing [contract negotiations] coming up next month, and so there’s just some stuff that we have to finish. It’s a big movie. It has a lot of visual effects and moving parts, but we’re moving in that direction, and I cannot wait for people to see it. I think people are going to be excited to see that this movie is quite different from the first movie in terms of tone. It’s a little bit more serious, and we’re dealing with issues like climate change. We’re not afraid to lean into that in a big way, because the Aquaman comic book, even way back when, has always been environmentally conscious. He’s always been someone who’s fought to keep the ocean clean, and it feels more relevant in the world that we’re living in today. So this movie has something to talk about, but it’s still a fun action-fantasy movie.

2021’s Malignant developed a cult following despite very little press for the film. Do you think that decision had a hand in creating such a rabid fan base?

Well, the movie came out at the height of the pandemic, and Warner Bros. had put its entire 2021 slate of movies onto HBO Max. I understood why they did what they did, but it was a strange time for our movies to come out the way that they did. But I would tell people that knowing as little as possible about Malignant is the best way to go into the film. We were also very conscious about the trailer not giving too much away. I purposely wanted the movie to feel like you were coming into a typical James Wan-type horror film, only to then pull the rug out from underneath you toward the end of the movie. And that either turned people off or it made them completely reassess the film in a different light. So it got a very strong reaction.

As your body of work shows, you are now an example for aspiring Asian and Asian American filmmakers, a role model that you never really had as far as the studio system is concerned. Do you strive to open doors whenever possible?

I definitely strive to open doors for filmmakers and actors, especially ones of Asian heritage. Diversifying more has been a great thing, because, even as successful as I was, a big struggle in the early part of my career was convincing producers and studios to let me hire people of color — specifically, Asian actors. While I would never ever get the outright no, I would always hear, “We’ll think about it,” and then nothing would happen. So that would always really piss me off. During Saw, I had to find a way to do it covertly, so I had Danny Glover [as a detective], but his partner was Ken Leung. With every film I’ve made, I would have to covertly insert someone of Asian heritage, and it’s horrible that I had to do that and that people didn’t just willingly embrace it. But in recent years, the perspective has changed dramatically, and I’m able to push for a lot of projects that are geared in that direction. We are developing a project about an Asian detective called The Good Asian, and it’s based on a comic book by an Asian creator [Pornsak Pichetshote]. There’s another project that I’ve been developing for many years, and it’s a ghost story from Southeast Asia. It’s called Pontianak, and it’s basically our version of La Llorona. It’s our version of a vampiric ghost, and it’s one that I’ve been developing with a great Indonesian filmmaker.

What prompted the launch of your company, Atomic Monster?

I’m a big believer in paying it forward, and so one of the things that drove me to create Atomic Monster was finding young filmmakers and helping them get their films off the ground. The very first filmmaker we helped out was David F. Sandberg with Lights Out, and we’ve also had an amazing time working with [Malignant and M3GAN screenwriter] Akela Cooper, who’s really broken out in a big way. So, Atomic Monster wants to continue going down that path of giving young filmmakers, writers and actors the opportunity to collaborate with us.

Is Atomic Monster’s merger with Blumhouse still inching its way to the finish line?

It is. These things just take a long time. As you can imagine, when you put two pretty defined companies together, there’s a lot crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s to do, but we are getting closer. Jason and I are just very much in line. We really complement each other. Jason is really great with this stuff, and I’m really good with that stuff. Hopefully, we can yin and yang each other, and we’re hoping to do a lot of cool stuff together.

You produced 2022’s AI-centric horror film M3GAN, and since then, the conversation around AI has only intensified, especially now that it’s a sticking point in the WGA contract talks. Where do you stand on the subject?

I really believe AI is gonna change not just our business, but many other industries and the world that we are living in. The WGA — and then eventually SAG and DGA — will be fighting to create parameters of how to use it and what we should and shouldn’t do with it. So, what the unions and the guilds are negotiating for is so important. If we don’t start talking about it now and addressing it now, this runaway train could be so far down the track in four or five years’ time that we may not be able to put the genie back in the bottle. What everyone is fighting for is a good thing, and it has ramifications outside our industry in a big, big way.

Your longtime collaborators Leigh Whannell and Patrick Wilson have both made their directorial debuts by way of the Insidious franchise. Are you proud to have helped create those opportunities? 

Well, I love making movies with people that love cinema, and Patrick and Leigh just love all kinds of movies. In between setups, we would stand off to the side and just geek out about John Carpenter, Star Wars, Star Trek and really obscure horror films. So that’s why I have such a great time making movies with them, and I can really see the filmmaker in each of them. They’re not just actors or writers; they have a bigger view of the story that we’re telling together. And so, when they came to me and said, “Hey, I would like to direct a movie. Maybe I can direct the next one?” it felt like a no-brainer to me. It felt like it was something that they’ve been gearing up for their whole careers.

What’s the one that got away?

I have turned down a lot of projects, but I don’t really have any regrets about anything that I’ve walked away from. That’s the honest truth. When I read the script for Disturbia, I remember thinking that it would make for a really good movie, and if someone did something really good with it, it would be successful. And sure enough, it came out and it was. So, even though I never pursued it, that was probably the closest.

Returning to The Fabelmans, there have been a number of filmmakers in recent years who’ve made semi-autobiographical films about their childhoods and love of cinema. Is that something you would tackle?

I would. Coming from Malaysia and then Australia, I grew up with so many great horror ghost stories and superstitions, and I can see those elements being worked into my movies. I just love the idea of a semi-autobiographical movie that’s seen through the lens of a genre horror film. So that could be something interesting down the line, but I’m not quite there yet.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

A version of this story first appeared in the May 31 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.