Jigsaw is back and up to new terrifying tricks in Director Kevin Greutert’s horror-thriller, Saw X.
In this continuation of the franchise, Greutert’s film tells the story of John, a sick and desperate patient who travels to Mexico for a risky and experimental medical procedure in hopes of a miracle cure for his cancer only to discover the entire operation is a scam to defraud the most vulnerable. Armed with a newfound purpose, the infamous serial killer uses deranged and ingenious traps to turn the tables on the con artists.
On October 31, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Greutert discussed the making of Saw X during a Q&A moderated by Director Marcus Dunstan (All My Friends Are Dead), who had scripted three previous installments of the franchise. During the conversation, Greutert revealed how a change in scheduling rescued the film when it was on the brink of cancellation due to the difficulties setting up the crew.
“They said, ‘We simply can’t do this. We haven’t cast all the characters and we need to do life casts of all of them and it’s gonna take at least six weeks after making the life casts to create all the infrastructure for the prosthetics to do all this stuff.’ And they pulled the plug on the movie. I got that call on a Thursday. Then on Monday I went into the office like, ‘Surely someone else will come in.’ And of course, it was our amazing production designer Anthony Stabley, Nick Matthews the DP and Barbara Cole, our 1st AD, and were just like, ‘We’re gonna figure this out.’ We laid out a shooting schedule that had three weeks to shoot everything that didn’t involve prosthetics. And then we’d take a five or six-week hiatus while those prosthetics were made and resume in January. And we pitched that idea, and they said yes. And it kind of saved it!”
Greutert’s other directorial credits include the feature films Saw VI, Saw 3D, Jessabelle, Visions and Jackals. He has been a DGA member since 2012.