Making Bad Choices With ’13 Sins’ Director Daniel Stamm

The bloody thriller stars Mark Webber as Elliott, a down-on-his-luck, poor sap whose just lost his job – which is kind of a problem when his fiancee is pregnant, and both his racist father and mentally challenged brother are forced to move in with them. But then Elliott, gets a mysterious phone call inviting him to a game that could change his life: all he has to do is perform 13 tasks for the faceless caller, and he’ll be rich.

All he has to do is not lose is soul – or his life – in the process. The remake of the 2006 Thai film 13: Game of Death is a little bit of The Game-meets-Se7en.

The director and I spoke via Skype while he was in Vancouver shooting episodes of the BBC America supernatural conspiracy series Intruders, where he’s allowed to be somewhat removed from the reactions to 13 Sins.

Stamm was surprised to see the online commentary to the escalation of Elliott’s actions in the film. Some of the Twitter commenters had trouble getting on board with Elliott’s plight and willingness to go to extremes to get out from under the game. “Morality is a luxury that we have,” Stamm says. “Get me into a plane crash in the mountains and would I eat my best friend? Yeah, I probably would if I get hungry enough.”

Stamm asks me if I thought Elliott’s arc from put-upon nice guy to someone who might have to kill to survive was believable. I said it largely worked, but there was a moment about halfway in where the character gets cocky and like a switch, Elliott seems to embrace the game as just that.

That moment, says Stamm, was an addict’s high for Elliott. “We modeled the script on drug addiction. We met with a drug expert who talked us through the stages of drug addiction. At first, the drug affects you in a positive way and puts you in touch with sides of yourself that you never knew existed and then you become a different person.” If only Elliott had gotten out of the game around the seventh challenge, Stamm says, the poor guy’s life might have worked out better in the end (he says that he doesn’t see Elliott as a bad guy at thestart of the film, just a weak one).

Describing those first few challenges for Elliott as moments of trespass that he and co-writer David Birke created in a way which would allow the audience to empathize with their hero. He’s either been pushed to tackle the next task or it’s presented as fun and games.

And the director pinpoints a late-movie scene as the point of no return for Elliott, where Webber’s character actually commits an unmotivated act of violence in the middle of a busy hospital. “You want your audience to misunderstand [the arc of the lead] and then 20 minutes later, in this complete darkness… the audience has to be right there with him in the punishment phase.”

Figuring out how far to take that punishment for Elliott extended all the way to the final scenes in the wake of a bloody climax in a dingy apartment. Stamm says they shot two separate versions of a confrontation between Elliott and another character representing the game – in one, Elliott shoots first and in the other, the antagonist shoots. Stamm joked that as an anti-death penalty European, he didn’t want to have Elliott commit a retributive act, but that the U.S. team said that it was a stronger moment to have the character shoot an unarmed person.

“Elliott needs vengeance. It’s not that we leave our protagonist on a moral high point,” Stamm says. “it’s a complicated, yucky ending.”

Could he seem himself revisiting this world or trying to fill in the backstory for the game? “I would be too cowardly to do it,” he laughs. Getting serious, Stamm says he was disappointed in a scene in the original where a character explains everything about the game to the hero. “If you raise the curtain with a big reveal, you better have something that the audience didn’t come up with in an hour and a half of making up scenarios in their own head.” With 13 Sins, he says, “We only wanted to push it to the point where the audience stops expecting more explanation.”

13 Sins is in theaters this week.