Audio Interview: James Wan And Leigh Wannell For INSIDIOUS

I don’t usually do roundtable interviews anymore. Since Badass Digest isn’t just a movie site, it simply isn’t worth my time to do this stuff when I could spend that time bringing you interesting non-movie content. But the Insidious press day made me change my tune because it was held at LA’s fabled Magic Castle.

A member’s only haunt for magicians, the Magic Castle is one of the coolest places in LA. There’s no obvious door - you have to speak a secret phrase to a statuary owl to get in. The Magic Castle usually has a number of different magicians performing in different rooms at any one time. They serve gourmet food and a strict dress code is enforced. Even cooler, the Magic Castle was Bill Bixby’s home in the TV series The Magician (a much cooler show than The Incredible Hulk, honestly).

So I attended for purely selfish reasons, so that I could finally look around one of the most exclusive and coolest clubs in LA. But I ended up getting some really good stuff out of the press day. While this interview cannot rightly be called a Badass Interview - I did not do this interview alone - you’ll hear that I’m a big question hog, and you’ll also hear that Wannell and Wan give some good, funny answers.

You’ll know these two from the original Saw. Their new film, Insidious, which Wan and Wannell wrote and Wan directed, is a haunted house movie where the house isn’t haunted - rather the young child at the center of the activity is haunted. In a lot of ways the film is a mash up of Poltergeist and Disney’s The Haunted Mansion ride. The best part of Insidious, for me, is the fact that so many of the effects are achieved practically, not relying on CGI. Which is where we start the interview, right after James Wan - who read some of my Twitter complaints about his movie and references them later! - confuses me with everyone else who attended SXSW.

[audio:http://www.badassdigest.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/insidiousintvw.mp3|titles=insidiousintvw]