It was only a decade ago that the first feature film to entirely shoot in Saudi Arabia was released — and it was directed by a woman. 2012’s Wadjda remains an excellent film, and initiated the slow-drip of a New Saudi Cinema that has included the phenomenal pictures The Tambour of Retribution and The Perfect Candidate. Netflix just released a Saudi film, Alkhallat+. Politics aside, the kingdom is obviously transforming itself through a cultural renaissance of sorts, a modernizing effort that is attracting businesses and artists alike. Darren Lynn Bousman is now one of them.

Bousman is the director behind four films in the Saw franchise, the bombastic horror musical masterpiece Repo! The Genetic Opera, underrated recent films like Abattoir, and genuinely innovative immersive theater experiences like One Day Die. This Midwestern horror maestro is not the first person you’d expect to embed himself in Saudi Arabia and make an Arabic film, yet that’s exactly what’s happened. The Cello is a surprisingly classical-style horror film that follows the death and destruction which lands on Nasser’s doorstep after he acquires a cursed musical instrument.

Aside from the excellent Saudi cast (Samer Ismail, Muhanad Al Hamdi, Elham Ali, Souad Abdullah, Mila Al Zahrani, Baraa Alem, Ghassan Massoud, Basheer Al Ghonam, Mohammed Altoyan), The Cello also stars Tobin Bell and Jeremy Irons. Will surprises never cease? You can read the synopsis below:

“Accomplished Saudi cellist Nasser has aspirations for greatness, though he feels like he’s held back by the old, dilapidated instrument he’s forced to play. When Nasser is offered the chance to own a gorgeous red cello by a mysterious shop owner, he finds new inspiration both for his playing and for his composing. What Nasser doesn’t realize is that this cello has a nefarious past. As he prepares for an important audition with a prominent philharmonic, that past shows itself in the form of an ancient conductor and the suffering and death of those close to him. Nasser must now decide if achieving his dreams is worth the horror that comes with playing such a perfect instrument.”

Bousman spoke with MovieWeb about how the hell this all started, the surprises of filming in Saudi Arabia, the unique music of The Cello, and his admiration for Tobin Bell.

Filming The Cello in Saudi Arabia

MovieWeb: There’s an obvious international and classical flair to The Cello which seems truly global. At the same time, it’s ultimately a Saudi Arabian production. There are a lot of preconceptions about the kingdom. How did you get involved in this? What was the experience like, and was it anything like you expected?

Darren Lynn Bousman: The whole story about this is weird — I think as most Hollywood stories are — it’s a weird series of events that led to it. Originally, we were shooting this in Egypt, and I was in Egypt for about three weeks. And the initial idea was that we were going to shoot in and around Egypt. And then after we were there for some time, securing the locations became problematic. There was a lot of very intense politics that posed extreme challenges, and there was quite a while that I thought they were just going to shut it down, because it was just so hard to navigate. If you’ve never been to Egypt before, it’s chaos, it is bustling with just an insane amount of people.

So I got a phone call to meet with the writer, Turki Alalshikh, who said, “Listen, why don’t we go to my home country, and you could shoot anywhere you want.” I said, “Well, where is that?” And he goes, “It’s Saudi Arabia.” And I said, “Absolutely not.” He goes, “No, no, just trust me, come for 24 hours.”

Darren Lynn Bousman: I agreed to go 24 hours and see it. And I think at that point, the only thing that I knew, the only perception in my head was what I had seen on the news, and it was the only time in my life that I think I experienced true culture shock. You know, I’ve been lucky to travel the world. I’ve shot in Japan, I’ve shot in Prague, I’ve shot in Barcelona and in Bangkok. In the very end, it takes a few minutes, but then it’s just like anywhere else. So I get off the plane for Saudi Arabia and Riyadh, and it was exactly what I thought it was going to be in that moment. Talk about a fish out of water, like it was overwhelming. Everything about it was overwhelming.

“Now let’s cut to 15 minutes after we’re outside the airport, driving through the desert, and then all of a sudden, boom! There’s Riyadh, and Riyadh is this modern, bustling, extremely — I won’t say futuristic city, but everything is new. And we get into the center of Riyadh, and all of a sudden, there’s a Four Seasons, AMC, H&M, McDonald’s, Starbucks. Literally, it felt like I was in any place in America, outside of the heat. The heat was oppressive.”

Related: Emoji Movie Is First Film After Saudi Arabia Lifts Decades Long Cinema Ban

Darren Lynn Bousman: I had this thing that I was scared for the first couple of days because of everything I’d heard. It was so insane to me, because it felt like I was standing at the center of a renaissance occurring around me, and what I mean by that is, I’m very — what’s the word I’m looking for? — I have blinders on. I don’t do a lot of research on the globe. So what was crazy, what I learned is that about five years ago, they basically did these huge changes in the country where they basically opened up the country to art and music and theater and movies, and that was not there before, it was very regulated.

Now all of a sudden, you have AMC movie theaters showing Spiral, you have 50 Cent coming in doing concerts. And for the first time, you’re seeing all of these people exposed to these things, and there was this palpable sense of excitement which was infectious. I’ve shot a lot of movies in a lot of places, but there’s always at the very back of my mind a kind of jaded feeling […] There was none of that here. There was just excitement.

Darren Lynn Bousman: So we shot four weeks in Saudi, four weeks in Prague, and then we went to Ireland. So it was crazy. I mean, in essence, it was a small foreign film, but I felt like I was making a Mission: Impossible movie with some of these locations that we were at.

MovieWeb: What about the language barrier? I read that you would rehearse scenes in English and then film them in Arabic. Were you ever worried that something would get lost in translation?

Darren Lynn Bousman: Luckily, this wasn’t my first foreign film. I did a show back in 2016 called Crow’s Blood. The whole thing was in Japanese. This was a lot easier in some respects, because when I was in Japan, they did not speak English and I had translators all around me. And here, for the most part, everyone spoke English. The challenge for me became cultural and societal differences. Concepts that work here with us did not translate over there. Some of the concepts over there did not translate over here. So it was trying to figure out and navigate what would work in both regions, what would work in both places.

I was tasked with making a movie that was for a Middle Eastern audience, but still would work for an English-speaking audience and a western audience. And so, trying to do that balancing act was tricky.

What Changed Everything for Darren Lynn Bousman

MovieWeb: You said in a statement that filming in the Middle East opened you up in a way that was different from shooting in the U.S. Could you elaborate on that?

Darren Lynn Bousman: I’m from the Midwest; I’m wearing my Kansas City shirt right now. I have a Midwest mentality, and I think a lot of who I am comes from what I was exposed to when I was growing up. Then I moved to Los Angeles. To my family, some of whom are very proud rednecks, I became this, “You got brainwashed by the liberal media, blah, blah, blah.” So my center is Midwest and the West Coast, that’s my mindset. Now you go over to Saudi Arabia, which could not be any further from the Midwest or the West Coast, and it was eye-opening.

Darren Lynn Bousman: But to me, where everything changed, it was a — I don’t want to say spiritual moment, but it definitely changed everything. I was at a bowling alley, and it was the second day, third day we were there. We went to a bowling alley in a shopping mall, and we were in the center lane. And on one lane to the right of us was what I would think you would say, traditionally, what I expected there to be. It was women that were dressed head to toe and very conservative, abayas they’re called, and then the men had thobes on, which are the white long robes. But next to us on the other lane were teenagers wearing very modern western clothes, and then there’s us, who are fully Western.

Darren Lynn Bousman: And I kind of glanced over and the very traditional family had a kid, and you could tell what the kid didn’t want to be there and was over it. And the mother handed the kid a phone and I looked over, and the kid was watching Peppa Pig. Now, my daughter watches Peppa Pig constantly, and I don’t know how many times we’ve been in a restaurant where I’ve given the phone to my daughter to calm down, “Here’s Peppa Pig.”

And looking at that moment, it was such a human moment that I realized we’re all the same, that we want the same things, we want protection for our family, we want to put food on the table, we want to live in peace. And that moment kind of changed my entire perception of that event.

Darren Lynn Bousman: And so that was like the first kind of really big change that I had over there. But also, you’re working with an international crew. And this was not a crew made up of Westerners. It was a crew that came from Saudi, from Lebanon, from Germany, and each one of them brought their own style of filmmaking into it. I mean, the DP, Maxime [Alexandre] is an Italian DP, but I’ve been a huge fan of his forever.

Darren Lynn Bousman: So you’re looking at this kind of mishmash of cultures and languages all coming to make this movie. At that point, I as a director am only as good as the people I’m surrounded with. And so you’re looking at all these countries and all these cultures that have different styles and ways of filmmaking. I felt like it was almost like making my first film again. It was a crash course in me relearning things and picking up things, and I’m like, “Oh sh*t, we don’t do that over here. This is awesome. I’m going to take this back with me.” So it was pretty fantastic.

Painful Decibels and Tobin Bell

MovieWeb: There’s a long history of musical obsession in horror films, dating back to The Hands of Orlac. The Cello is situated at the intersection of two of your biggest passions, horror cinema and music. Could you discuss the music here and how important its role was for you?

Darren Lynn Bousman: I think in another life, I would have had a career as a musician or as a studio engineer or something. But the reality is, I have no musical talent whatsoever. So I think that anytime I can live vicariously through the world of music, that’s why I responded to Repo, why I responded to Devil’s Carnival. I always talk about how scores and composers have a lot more effect over me than sometimes actors do. You look at a movie, and I’m going to kind of run the gambit here, something like Suspiria.

When I go back and think of Suspiria, I don’t think of the actors in Suspiria, I think of Goblin. And when I go back and I watch Requiem for a Dream, it’s not Ellen Burstyn that I love (and I love Ellen Burstyn), it’s Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet. So for me, the music is such a driving force of the DNA of a movie.

Related: Here Are Some Amazing Middle Eastern Horror Movies

Darren Lynn Bousman: One of my real regrets about filmmaking today and things that I hate — and this is a douchey filmmaker artist thing I’m gonna say that I feel like when I read it in the trades, I get mad at the filmmakers saying it, but now I’m gonna jump on that bandwagon — I wish people had the ability to see this in a theater with proper sound, because you will never get it on a laptop speaker. You will never get it in stereo. The 5.1 mix of what was done with The Cello is insane, because not only did Joe Bishara, who’s the composer, record everything live, but the sound design of what happens to the cello distorts it and becomes ominous. And then we mix it with specific decibels that, if you hear it in surround sound, it will make you uneasy.

“[Like in Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible, there’s] a decibel level that was scientifically proven to make an audience member or make someone who’s hearing it feel apprehensive. And so Joe and I tried to do that as well with it. So yeah, that side of getting to work on the movie was something that I was very excited about.”

MovieWeb: Tobin Bell is great as usual here, bringing that intimidating gravitas. He just had a lot of success with Saw X. Would you want to return to the Saw franchise and make another film with him?

Darren Lynn Bousman: I mean, listen, I think you always say, “Never say never.” I said “never” before and I came back. But honestly, I don’t think I ever would at this point, come back to a Saw movie. I think I can take the mantle and honors of having the most successful solo movie and the least successful solo movie. I think I’m gonna leave it there. I don’t need to be the middle successful Saw movie if I come back, and it doesn’t hit again. So I was very lucky. I was able to be a part of two, three, and four in the early stages. Now as part of the latter stages, I leave it to other people at this point.

Tobin, though, is someone that I will always work with. I f*cking love that guy. He is a very good friend. He is an amazing creative partner on anything he does, and there is never anyone that I’ve ever worked with that takes as much pride or passion in what he does than Tobin Bell.

Darren Lynn Bousman: There is that phrase, ‘there are no small parts, only small actors,’ whatever that phrase is. Tobin proves that. He could take 10 lines, and he’s got more than 10 lines here, but each one of those are so f*cking powerful, and it’s because he put so much thought and work into those 10 lines, that there is history and there’s backstory in every single word that he does and says.”

The Cello opens nationwide today, December 8. You can learn more at the website for The Cello here.