CraveOnline: Can I ask what that ending was, since it’s not relevant anymore?
James Wan: [Thinks.]
Can you allude to it, maybe? Was it more final, or…?
It was more like the movie built towards setting up for more future installments. There was a lot of that kind of stuff, building up to a bigger picture of that kind of world. We felt like that is no longer cool to be doing. That would be wrong if we had done something like that. So now the ending was all about building to an ending that was finding the most smooth and elegant way of saying farewell to Paul. So we really threw that out, went back to the drawing boards, and kind of [redesigned] how this movie was going to end.
“I feel like I’ve never done this before and I landed a burning plane.”
That must have been brutal, man. I can only imagine how hard…
I use the analogy of, even if I get reviews that just kind of say, “Meh, the movie’s okay,” I will say, “You guys have no idea how hard it was just to get it to the ‘meh’ stage!” Just an “okay” stage…!
Right? Talk about a stacked deck.
I know, it was like… I think the biggest compliment I could take away from people’s reaction is, I feel like I’ve never done this before and I landed a burning plane. That’s the biggest thing I can take away from this, and it was something that I knew I had to do. I had to do that for Paul.
And good on you, man. Seriously, that’s a tough gig.
Thank you.
Let me divert from the horrifically serious and ask, now that you’ve done Furious 7, do you still want to do MacGyver?
You know, I love MacGyver. I do! What kind of sucked was, and not fully sucked, I had to give MacGyver up to pursue Furious 7. So that was what I had to give up.
You gave it up entirely? You can’t come back now?
Well, I don’t know. I [think] New Line, that I was going to do it with at the time, no longer has the rights to it. So yeah, I don’t know where it is at this point. Yeah, I love the concept behind MacGyver, and I love the direction that we were going with it.
Can you tell me a little bit about it? Like in the alternate Fringe universe, what we would have seen?
[Laughs.]
Because it sounds cool! I want to see James Wan do MacGyver.
Yeah […] I never got into it too much but my initial concept was I wanted to do a young college MacGyver who went to Boston, one of the great universities, who’s really brilliant, right? He’s a really smart guy but he’s so smart he could never feel like he fit into a construct, or into a world that is an establishment. So he’s always a bit of an outsider. So he’s very crafty, he’s very smart, all kinds of science and mathematics and engineering. To cut a long story short, the idea here is I wanted to put my MacGyver story around something like a North by Northwest.
Oh, that could be cool…!
That context, yes. So in the context of the story he gets blamed for something that he had designed, something really big that’s something everyone wanted, and now someone has weaponized it and everyone’s coming after him. He’s running for his life and he’s trying to clear his name, not quite unlike the structure of Enemy of the State. So imagine Enemy of the State, if Will Smith had the brains of MacGyver.
