Leigh Whannell Interview Special

The Empire Film Podcast

Bauer Media

Tv & Film, Film Reviews

4.6 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2018

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Leigh Whannell is the actor-turned-screenwriter-turned director behind the likes of Saw (the early, good ones), the Insidious movies, and this week's hard-boiled slice of sci-fi, Upgrade, in which a paralysed Logan Marshall-Green bonds with an operating system that allows him to take bloody revenge on the men who attacked him. And, as it turns out, Whannell is also a dream of an interviewee, sitting down with Chris Hewitt for this extended chat about the journey of Upgrade from script to screen, his feelings on technology, and the comparisons between his film and the upcoming Venom. He's also very, very funny, deploying a number of impressions, including a Steve Buscemi so good we're expecting him to be cast in an Adam Sandler comedy any day now. Oh, and while this isn't an Upgrade spoiler special, you might want to see that film before listening to this in case we give anything away. Enjoy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello pod, I'm Chris Eud and welcome to this very special episode of The Empire Podcast.
0:21.2	Lee Wanel made his bones as an actor slash screenwriter, bursting onto the scene with
0:26.1	the grizzly ingenious horror saw which he made with his good friend, director James Wan.
0:31.9	Since Wanel has primarily operated as a writer on a couple of early saws,
0:35.6	equals plus the insidious movies which reunited him with James Wan once again.
0:40.2	With insidious chapter 3, Wanel made the move to the director's chair and now having caught
0:44.6	that bug, he's back back back with upgrade, a hard boiled slice of sci-fi rodil and a
0:49.6	pole for Hovens Robocop with his blend of satire, ultraviolence and dark warnings about the
0:55.5	dangers of technology. We used some of that technology to record this extended chat between Wanel and I
1:02.4	when he came into London last Saturday. We covered a fairly wide spread of topics and I laughed a lot
1:10.4	because spoiler alert, Wanel turned out to be one of the funniest people we've ever had in the
1:15.9	pod booth, effortlessly riffing on a screenwriter's lot, deploying a number of decent impressions,
1:21.1	including the best steepishemi I've ever heard, also the only steepishemi I've ever heard,
1:26.0	but that's not split hairs, and generally being a riot. I hope you enjoyed this podcast as much
1:31.2	as I did and apologies and fans because you're going to hear me laughing a lot over the next 40
1:37.1	minutes and some of the discussion is fairly r-rated so please tread softly. Here's Lee Wanel,
1:44.3	enjoy. We're delighted to be joined on the Amproud podcast by the writer and director of Upgrade Lee
1:49.0	Wanel. How are you, sir? Very good. Yeah, good. Good. Good Saturday morning. Yeah, it's good. Good to
1:54.3	be in London. Yeah. Here for frightfest. Yes, indeed. That's going to be a laugh. Sorry, I have to
2:01.6	just keep breaking into my English accent. Good again, really. I mean, that's going to be a laugh,
2:06.8	yeah. It's going to be fun. Is that like a specific region or no, sort of regionless. I can do my
2:13.3	BBC guy. I used to be good at doing my BBC reporter. That sort of like, we're standing not five
	...

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