James Wan

James Wan
James Wan attending Comic Con, 2007.
Born	27 February 1977 (1977-02-27) Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia
Occupation	Film director, producer, screenwriter
Years active	1999 – present

James Wan
Traditional Chinese	溫子仁
Simplified Chinese	温子仁
Transcriptions Mandarin - Hanyu Pinyin Wēn Zǐrén

James Wan (born 27 February 1977) is a Malaysian-born Australian producer, screenwriter, and film director of Chinese heritage. He is widely known for directing the horror film Saw and creating Billy the puppet. He also directed Dead Silence, Death Sentence and Insidious.

Life and career

Wan was born in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia of Chinese ethnicity. He was raised in Perth, Western Australia from a young age. It was his dream to make films from the age of 11. He went on to study at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, completing his Bachelor of Arts degree.

Before becoming popular in the film industry, he made his first feature film Stygian with Shannon Young, which won 'Best Guerrilla Film' at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival in 2000.

He met future business partner Leigh Whannell while studying at RMIT. He would later go on to co-create and direct the 2004 horror film (and franchise), Saw with the help of Whannell, who wrote the script. Wan and Whannell made a short version of the film to showcase the script. Whannell played the role of David in the short film, and the leading role of Adam in the feature film. The three producers who saw the short film and read Whannell's screenplay agreed to produce the film before Wan and Whannell even landed in Los Angeles. Wan and Whannell decided to forgo upfront salary in return for gross profits. Shot for a low US$1.2 million budget, the producers had a straight-to-DVD release in mind. However, Saw was to become a surprise record breaking theatrical horror franchise, earning Wan and Whannell much more than they had originally predicted.^{[citation needed]}

Since creating the franchise, Wan and Whannell have served as executive producers to the sequels Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI and Saw 3D. He has been busy creating other works with his film school partner Leigh Whannell. In 2007, he went on to broaden his filmography with another horror movie, Dead Silence, and the action drama Death Sentence. Having worked on his last three films back to back, Wan told CraveOnline that he is ready for "a bit of time off just to chill... but at the same time I'm using this opportunity to write again." Wan also directed a trailer for the survival horror video game Dead Space.

It has been announced that James' next film will be an adaptation of the graphic novel Fall Night, about a criminal sent to a Texas prison run by vampires. According to IMDB the film is titled 'Nightfall' instead of 'Fall Night', it is unclear which is the official title. As well as this, Leigh Whannell has stated that he and Wan are writing another project together called X Ray and described it as a film noir horror film. It has been reported that James Wan's next project will be Spectre a supernatural thriller and will star Nicole Kidman.

Wan's current film, Insidious, premiered at the 2010 Toronto Film Festival and began its theatrical release in April 2011.

The horror film news website BloodyDisgusting has confirmed that Wan's next film will be titled The Warren Files and will centre on the real life exploits of Ed and Lorraine Warren who were a married couple that investigated paranormal events. The film will reportedly focus on the couple's most famous case in which they investigate a witch's curse on a Rhode Island family farm. The film was to be originally titled The Conjuring.

Filmography

Year	Film	Director	Producer	Writer
2003	Saw (short film)	Y	N	Y
2004	Saw	Y	N	Y
2005	Saw II	N	Y	N
2006	Saw III	N	Y	Y
2007	Dead Silence	Y	N	Y
	Death Sentence	Y	N	N
	Saw IV	N	Y	N
2008	Saw V	N	Y	N
2009	Saw VI	N	Y	N
2010	Saw 3D	N	Y	N
	Insidious	Y	N	N
TBA	Fall Night/Nightfall	Y	N	Y
ТВА	House of Horror	N	Y	N
ТВА	Spectre	N	Y	N
TBA	The Warren Files	Y	N	N

External links

• James Wan at the Internet Movie Database