Saw (2004) on Netflix
Adam Stanheight wakes chained in a dilapidated bathroom. Across from him is Dr. Lawrence Gordon, also chained. A tape orders Gordon to kill Adam by six or his family dies.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.6/10517,062 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes49%
Trailer
Plot summary
Adam Stanheight, a photographer, wakes in a dilapidated bathtub with one ankle chained to a pipe. Oncologist Dr. Lawrence Gordon is chained across the room, and a corpse sprawls between them, a suicide victim with a handgun and a tape recorder. Each man finds a tape in his pocket. Adam's urges him to survive. Gordon's tape gives him until six to kill Adam, or Alison, his wife, and Diana, his daughter, will be killed. A bag in the toilet holds two hacksaws, but the blades do not free them. Gordon recognizes the methods of the Jigsaw Killer, who makes his victims prove their will to live through deadly games. Months earlier, detectives David Tapp and Steven Sing questioned Gordon after his penlight turned up at the scene of one of those games.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Saw (2004)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jigsaw came out of Leigh Whannell's own fear. Stuck in a job he hated and suffering migraines, he convinced himself he had a brain tumour, and while waiting for an MRI he wondered how someone told they were dying would react.
- Unable to sell the script in Australia, Whannell put up A$5,000 to shoot the jaw trap scene as a short film, playing the man in the reverse bear trap himself, with cameramen he and James Wan knew from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation helping out.
- Wan and Whannell turned down better offers from studios such as DreamWorks and Gold Circle rather than risk losing Wan as director and Whannell as lead, and the producers took a second mortgage on their Highland Avenue headquarters to raise the $1 million budget.
- Saw was shot in 18 days on a $700,000 shooting budget at a Los Angeles production facility, and the bathroom was the only set that had to be built; other scenes used places where earlier productions had left similar sets standing.
- The bathtub scene was shot on day one, and Whannell realized there was no money left for a stuntman and had to do it himself. The bathroom scenes took six days and were filmed in story order to keep the actors in character.
- Cinematographer David A. Armstrong shot the entire film with the camera on his shoulder, using no dolly or tripod, while Wan kept Dr. Gordon's shots steady and controlled and made Adam's shaky, to match the two men.
- The film's admired surveillance-camera style was a repair job. Short of usable takes, Wan and editor Kevin Greutert invented shots in the edit, faking security footage and cutting to still photographs and newspaper clippings to cover the gaps they had never shot.
