MODERN TAKE ON THRILLER
WHAT YOU DON’T SEE CAN SOMETIMES BE THE SCARIEST THING OF ALL
Sometimes the scariest thing is what you don’t see and Australian filmmaker Leigh Whannell takes that idea and runs with it in his latest film The Invisible Man.
Elisabeth Moss stars in his modern reimagining of HG Wells’ science fiction novel of the same name.
The director is no stranger to thrills and scares, making a name for himself as the creator and star of the Saw franchise and going on to become a regular collaborator with Blumhouse Productions.
“I start each movie by sitting down with a notepad and pen. I start filling it up with thoughts and it becomes a scrapbook of the movie. I’ll cut pictures out of magazines, write down phrases, snatches of dialogue just to build picture,” he says.
“It takes me a couple of months and during that process (for The Invisible Man) I drilled down on the idea that the camera would be a character unto itself. I loved the idea that the camera would become disinterested with the actors and stare down an empty corridor. I really felt that was a technique which could be really interesting so I just pursued it. When I first had a meeting with Stefan Duscio, the cinematographer I worked with on Upgrade,I said ‘We’ve got to find a way to make empty rooms scary’.”
Rather than an experiment gone wrong, this adaptation reframes the story around a woman (Moss) trying to escape her abusive husband.
When Cecilia’s ex takes his own life and leaves her his fortune, she suspects his death was a hoax. As a series of coincidences turn lethal, Cecilia works to prove that she is being hunted by someone nobody can see.
“He’s this mysterious other. I didn’t want you to know too much about him,” Whannell says. “I think horror villains are more scary when they’re unknowable. The more you see of a villain, the more you demystify that villain. There are exceptions, like Hannibal Lecter.”
The idea for an Invisible Man reboot started more than a decade ago as part of Universal Pictures’ planned Dark Universe reboot of its classic monster films.
But after Tom Cruise’s The Mummy was met with a lukewarm reaction, the studio shelved its other big-budget monster projects before announcing last year that it would instead focus on stand-alone, characterdriven stories.
“It was a case of them pitching me the title; not a story, just a suggestion of the title and them asking me what I would do with it,” Whannell says. “At first I thought ‘This is not really my thing’. I wanted to make a big action movie, I’d just made Upgrade, but then I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. I kept seeing all the possibilities for it and it snowballed into what it is now. The film is the result of that first idea I had on that first day.”
Moss delivers a powerful, harrowing performance as a traumatised woman increasingly isolated from her loved ones as she struggles to prove her ex isn’t dead but instead stalking her while somehow remaining invisible.
“When I finished the script I knew casting would be crucial. I didn’t have the idea of Elisabeth in the role, but I knew it had to be someone who could make this outlandish script seem grounded,” he says. “She was on that list of actors who can deliver powerful, truthful performances. The script went to her and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Sometimes you submit scripts to actors and you don’t hear anything for six months and then you get a no from their agent and you question if they even read it. But in this case I got a response pretty quickly.
“She doesn’t have any airs and graces about who she is. She just wants to get into it. Looking back, I can’t imagine anyone else in the role.”
Whannell ran into an unexpected problem while shooting in Sydney – finding a magazine-worthy home from which to stage the film’s tense opening scene.
“I had a very specific idea but I realised Australia doesn’t specialise in those cold, concrete boxes,” he says. “I live in LA and if you throw a stick you’ll find one of those cold concrete boxes with a sociopath billionaire living in them.
“All the houses we went in were too warm and nice. We finally found this beautiful home where we felt we could nail this feeling where you don’t hear from the villain. I needed viewers to learn a lot about him from his house.”