Behind The Scenes Of The Infamous Needle Pit Scene From 'Saw II'

How many needles are needed to fill a pit? More than you'd think. In order to create the most gruesome needle pit possible, the crew had to fill the pit with over 100,000 syringes that were painstakingly altered in order to make sure they wouldn't do actual harm to actress Shawnee Smith. 

The effects crew had people working for days to remove the needles from the syringes before replacing them with fiberoptic needle tips that looked like the real thing. Initially, they thought that 40,000 syringes would work, but that wasn't enough, so they added 20,000 more to the pile. They ended up with 120,000 syringes, foam peanuts, and a bunch of gunk to make the pit look all the more gross. If you look closely at the syringes in the pit, many of them don't even have needle tips. This wasn't an oversight, but rather something to save time.

Obviously, the makers of Saw aren't in the business of hurting their actors – just the characters. In actuality, the needle pit was a fairly safe place to be. Not only were the needles replaced with fiber optic tips that looked like the real thing, but the syringes also sat atop a dense layer of Styrofoam padding.

The walls of the pit were made of crash pad material, which is what stunt people use when they're landing, so if Smith slammed into the walls she wouldn't hurt herself. From the behind-the-scenes footage, it looks like the pit was easy to move around in. Crew members are seen walking around in the pit with ease, and even though it was incredibly safe, it doesn't look like people were aching to jump around in there. 

In order to make Smith look like she suffered severe needle damage after falling into the pit, the special effects team not only used prosthetic anchor plates with plenty of makeup to make it look like she had needles jammed into her skin, but they also built a prosthetic arm that they could use in some of the close-ups. 

The prosthetic anchors dotting Smith's arms, legs, and back were attached to actual needles to give the scene some extreme realism. In the close-up shots where Smith and her fellow captives are removing syringes from her arm, they're actually removing needles from a silicone arm. Rather than attach a fake arm to her, the SFX team simply had her hold her real arm behind her back while putting the prosthetic arm in frame. It's a simple effect, but it looks so good. 

Everyone has seen a movie where characters have a ticking clock that they have to race, but more often than not, the scenes don't take place in the time allotted. They're either much longer than the given time or much shorter. Saw II does the opposite and carries out its needle pit scene in the two minutes that the characters are given by Jigsaw. 

From the moment the clock starts counting down, Smith is thrust into the pit and tasked with finding a key in the needles, although the task was meant for a different co-captive. Even though there are some slow-motion sequences and a couple of jarring cuts that go hand-in-hand with the Saw franchise, the scene is one of the few in film history that actually plays out in the time they say it's going to take. 

It's hard for any actor to find the capactiy to throw themselves into a needle pit in a role already fraught with stress, and it's hard to imagine anyone who's pregnant tossing themselves around in a dank hole regardless of what's in it.

Before the film's release, actress Shawnee Smith admitted that she was four months pregnant while filming the scene, but that she didn't mention it to anyone. She explained, "With that scene alone, I knew I couldn’t divulge my secret on set. The males would’ve freaked out."

It's safe to say that even people who aren't afraid of needles don't want to be thrown into a pit of them, whether they're real or fake, but actress Shawnee Smith had major reservations about the scene due to her fear of syringes. She explained:

I'm not [into needles]. I remember when I was a kid, I literally ran out of the doctor's office. It took them an hour to find me. I was like two floors down, under the desk of some doctor's office. And he walked in and he's looking at this kid under his desk, and I'm going, "Ssshhh!"

Smith goes onto say that, aside from a few bruises, she was totally fine during the scene, and that the people who were most tormented by the needles were the "poor, abused people" who had to remove the real needles from the 100,000-plus syringes and replace them with prop needles.