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You don’t see anything in the Saw films that’s crazier than what you see on TV. Do you think you are competing with TV and is that a bad thing?
“Yeah. 100%. You know, the funniest thing about III was there was only one scene they did not f**k with which caused the most rage after the fact. People were writing the MPAA. It was the autopsy. The MPAA said, ‘Whatever. Sure, let it go.’ This thing where we’re taking his head off, they did not care at all.

They said, ‘Sure.’ That’s because they show autopsies on CSI all the time.

On CSI, I was watching it the other day, they did an autopsy on a guy and it was more graphic than anything we showed on the brain surgery. They show body parts being removed. They show blood hitting the floor. And that’s what I said to the MPAA. ‘There’s nothing more graphic than what we already see on CSI.’ And they let that scene go through. They have more problems with emotional torture. They have more problems with people crying and screaming than they do with someone asleep on a bed getting their brain operated on. If you watch TV, watch any of these shows, the CSI’s and the Law and Orders, you see some f**ked up stuff. There was a Law and Order SVU, the one about rape or sex crimes, they had a 3-minute, non-cut sequence where someone was getting raped. They didn’t show the actual penetration, but they showed her face and that’s as bad in some points. So yeah, we really are competing with TV now which is crazy.”

One of the great things about Saw fans is we don’t really want to know the secrets because we want those to be surprises for us. So what do you tell us when we’re all speculating, “I hope it’s not a twin brother or a flash back?”
“I hadn’t heard about that. [Shouting across tables to Tobin Bell] Tobin! They know about the twin brother idea.”

So what do you tell us without giving stuff away that says, “We’ve got something good here and you’re going to like it?”
“I was adamantly against coming back for many reasons originally. And the first card they used to get me to come back was, ‘Just look at the script.’ And when I first read it, I was on page 85 but I didn’t feel any way about it. I wasn’t pissed or excited really until I got to page 87. When I hit page 87, I was like, ‘God damn it, they got me! I’ve f**king done this for the last three years and they got me,’ and that’s when I knew that I had to come back because everything before that thing took a whole different light to it.

The end this year, yeah, there definitely is something. I’m not saying it’s a huge twist but there’s something at the very end of the movie which made it all. I was saying to someone else earlier I think the Saw films kind of, to me, are like magic tricks. You go in there and you’re looking for the way they’re going to do it. ‘I know what he’s doing. He’s doing this, this, this.’ And then we do the trick and they’re like, ‘S**t, we missed it.’ And then you go back again to watch it again to see if you can see it.”

Do you ever worry the twist endings get to be like M Night Shyamalan where as he goes on…
“This is my Lady in the Water goddamn it! I didn’t say that goddamn it. I didn’t say that. It’s always hard for me to call it. Is it a twist or is it just all wrapped up in this cool little box? We did some f**ked up s**t this year that is exciting to me. The other thing that’s exciting is we’ve been able to keep the Saw secret for this long on IV when no one has any idea what the plot is. So that’s also exciting to me - the constant reveals that are going to be happening in the movie because everyone thinks it’s about X when it’s really about Y and Z over here and that’s very cool.

We’ve taken a much different approach this year than we have in the last two films. It’s much more complicated. In fact, the first time that the script went out to people… It’s hard, you have to read it again and again. I’m watching the edit and it’s extremely easy once you’re visualizing it, but it’s the most complex. There’s four separate storylines going on. That’s exciting to me. It’s not just this simplistic story of, ‘Oh, I’m torturing people. Oh, I’m dying. Oh, I’m dead.’ There’s a lot of s**t going on this year.”

Can you tell us anything about the new characters?
“There are two new characters which I don’t think has been announced yet but I’ll drop this one. There’s two characters, Perez and Strong, who are our two people that we’re following on this one a lot. With Jigsaw we’ve always had cops somewhere in it and again, this issue of cops, I didn’t want to play them as cops. I didn’t want to do that. We’ve seen that story. So I tried to take a different spin on that and the cops [angle] is secondary to who they are.

We’ve actually focused on these quirky characters. We have Scott Patterson in it and Scott Patterson is from the Gilmore Girls and I really knew nothing about him prior to my first meeting with him. The guy is f**king insane and great. We never really had people ad-lib on the Saw films because it wasn’t that kind of platform. Well Scott Patterson, the first day he shows up, he says, ‘I’m going to do something a little different here.’ And I’m like, ‘All right.’ We yell ‘action’ and all of a sudden he started improvising and it was gold. It was like the best stuff I’d ever seen and he’s insane. It really works well for his character considering we haven’t seen him in a Saw film before. There’s a whole new life to this one which is exciting.”

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