HIDDEN DEPTHS
With the invisible Man, horror pioneer leigh Whannell and star elisabeth Moss not only resurrect an old Monster, but give him a deeper, darker, More timely spin
Blumhouse used to be a bank. The building housing the offices of the horror production company, on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, does not bring attention to itself. The inside, where the films are edited, is even more nondescript. And in one little hovel, at the end of a staggeringly unassuming corridor, sit director Leigh Whannell and editor Andy Canny, giving Empire an unglamorous welcome.
“This room has all the ambience of a Chechnyan coroner’s office,” deadpans Whannell. “Big Hollywood movies starring impossibly beautiful people are always put together in rooms that look like morgues.” Indeed, it’s the sort of shadowy hideout that, in a film, might suggest something awful is about to occur. And in a way, it is. For on the many monitors on the desk, there is terror. It is early November, and for the past two months Whannell and Canny have been holed up in here editing The Invisible Man.
The sequence they’re working on today involves Elisabeth Moss’ character Cecilia being stalked by the Invisible Man — more of whom later — and she’s panicked, shooting her gun at, seemingly, nothing as she frantically scans a car park. It’s tense, but Whannell wants it tenser. If he gets it right, the film could be one of the boldest and freshest reinventions in years.
THIS FILM WAS NEVER MEANT
to exist at all. 2017’s The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise and Sofia Boutella, heralded the start of Universal’s ‘Dark Universe’, which would see their classic monsters return, and was announced with a photoshoot featuring the A-list stars of each instalment: Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, Javier Bardem as Dr Frankenstein’s creature, Russell Crowe as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Then, though, it stumbled. The Mummy was more bloated action than horror, and despite making $409 million worldwide, it felt like a creative misstep, and the universe was jettisoned in favour of unconnected one-offs. For The Invisible Man, Universal approached Whannell, a move in itself signifying a U-turn from the aborted tentpole direction.
Whannell and his film-school friend James Wan, both from Australia, co-wrote the grisly horror short Saw in 2003 before turning it into
a Wan-directed feature a year later. It did well: the ninth Saw film is out this May. Whannell left after the third, co-creating and writing 2010’s Insidious with Wan, which also did well, with the third film serving as Whannell’s directorial debut. He followed that up with 2018’s rollicking sci-fi action thriller Upgrade. After inventing so much, resurrecting a hoary old monster was not his plan — but after being called in to talk to Universal, Whannell had some thoughts. If they’d let him do it his way, he was in.
“I said to Universal, ‘I want to make an R-rated horror film,’” he says. “‘Something that’s really scary. I don’t want to make a four-quadrant, PG movie. And I want to make something that is its own movie — I don’t want it to have cameos from Dr Frankenstein. And I don’t want it to be an action movie. I want it to be something very quiet.’ And they said, ‘Fine. Do it.’ And then I was free to do exactly what I wanted.”
In marked contrast to James Whale’s 1933 film, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel in which the transparent terrorist roams around Sussex in bandages, and indeed to most takes on the character, including Paul Verhoeven’s Cgi-heavy thriller Hollow Man, Whannell’s idea was to tell the story through the eyes of the victim. That is architect Cecilia, trapped in an abusive relationship with wealthy scientist Adrian (Oliver Jackson-cohen). He commits suicide, but she’s convinced it’s a hoax, believing he has achieved invisibility and is stalking her and hunting those around her. Nobody believes her, and her sanity is questioned.
When he began writing it, Whannell’s aim was “just to make a really tense movie, something terrifying”. But focusing on Cecilia gave him the opportunity to explore the social issues springing out of his set-up. More than just a sociopathic scientist, his invisible man became a metaphor. “It was really important for us to honour the idea that, in an abusive relationship with physical abuse, there is also deep damage done by psychological and emotional abuse,” Moss tells Empire. “And to represent the fear that a manipulative person like that sets in you. For the purposes of our story we had to make sure that Adrian was as threatening as he could possibly be, that he had that physical violence. But we wanted to make sure that that emotional and psychological abuse is very present, and that’s something that can be incredibly scarring.”
And if the invisible man represented abuse, the reaction to Cecilia’s experience of him is surely a nod at people’s tendency to often disbelieve women who allege abuse. “Oh, 100 per cent,” says Moss. “You literally have a man who is invisible, you can’t see him, she’s saying he’s there, that he’s attacking her, abusing her, manipulating her, and everyone around her is saying, ‘Relax. It’s fine.’ And she keeps saying, ‘No, he is — he’s alive, he’s doing this,’ and no-one believes her. The analogy is incredibly clear.”
The script came together quickly. Some of it came from research: as Whannell’s ideas began to tumble out, he visited a Los Angeles organisation that helps survivors of abusive relationships. “I knew I needed to talk to somebody to get some insight,” he says. Being a male, who’s never been in that situation,
I didn’t wanna just write blindly and make it up.” There, he spoke to counsellors, discussing the ways in which the women they work with had been gaslit and manipulated. “That was really disturbing, and I wanted to factor it into the movie.”
Whannell cast Moss as Cecilia, he says, because he needed an actor who could ground the admittedly wacky concept of an invisible man in reality: “I knew she could make this film credible.” And Moss has been a keen horror fan since she was 11. “I don’t scare easily,” she explains. “I have a very high threshold for darkness. I get quite the thrill out of the genre.” After a supporting role in Jordan Peele’s Us last year, she was hungry to play a horror lead, yet was confused when she got word of an Invisible Man script coming her way. “But then, when I read it,
I understood immediately why they were asking me to do it. Leigh’s take on it of being this feminist empowerment story is really interesting. It’s a modern and relevant way to do it.”
He wanted her input with the script, too. “‘This film rests on your shoulders,’” he remembers telling Moss. “I said, ‘I’ve written this character, but I’ve only written 70 per cent of it. It’s not a flesh-and-blood human being.’ And she was awesome. She said, ‘Let’s go.’” From there, the pair would meet regularly to discuss the script, working on scene and structural changes too — for example, explains Whannell, Moss suggested moving a moment in which Cecilia has a breakdown to a place which made more emotional sense.
That process continued, says Moss, throughout the shoot in Sydney. “We would sit for hours in a room, just he and I. Going back and forth, and writing things in the script, pitching ideas to each other. Literally dialogue. Shooting out all the bad ideas until we got somewhere that we liked, and then we’d both go home and write it out and put it in the script.”
Moss didn’t have to do any research — she’d been doing it for years anyway. “I’ve had quite a bit of experience playing characters who are dealing with various types of abuse,” says the lead of The Handmaid’s Tale and Jane Campion’s sexual assault drama series Top Of The Lake. “Whether it’s emotional, physical, sexual, it’s something that I’ve dived into quite a bit. So
I was able to bring that knowledge to the role. Also, I think just being a woman and being a person who has been in relationships, being a person that has been on this side of the coin — bringing that perspective I think was really helpful. Being able to say to Leigh, ‘That’s not exactly how that would feel.’”
In terms of her performance, Moss wanted Cecilia to have “fragility”. This is not Ripley in Aliens, Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 — a badass woman going after the monster. Even in The Handmaid’s Tale, says Moss, June “has become quite a strong character, a sort of murderer herself. It was important for me with Cecilia that she was very damaged, very fragile and really broken by that relationship.” Partly, she says, because she and Whannell wanted to be authentic. “Women tend to think, ‘I’m strong, I’m a feminist, I would never be in that situation, in that relationship, I would never let that happen to me, I would walk away, I would leave him,’” she explains. “I think the reality is very different. And we wanted to give a space for those women as well. Being in a relationship like that doesn’t make you not a feminist, not a strong person.’”
Such input was exactly what Whannell needed. “This film really was a collaboration with Lizzie, it was us together as a team,” he beams. “We were Cagney and Lacey making this film together.”
As fantastical As the
concept seems, Whannell wanted the film’s invisibility to be grounded too. Everything in the film needed to enhance the thematic ideas, to put us in Cecilia’s shoes, so the potentially ridiculous needed to feel real. “I wanted to convince an audience that this idea is very achievable,” says Whannell of Adrian’s technology. And during his research, he found that invisibility is not as outlandish as we may think, and that many companies are working on it. “I didn’t want a cackling mad scientist drinking down some potion. I wanted an Elon Musk, Steve Jobs type who was actually making this a reality.” The film’s special effects had to reflect this reality too. Bar some CGI — breath, some outlining in the rain — Whannell’s gone minimal.
“What initially interested me,” he says, “and made me want to make the film, was the idea of photographing nothing and making it threatening. To point a camera at an empty room and make it threatening. To make a film where you don’t see anything. When most people think of the invisible man they think of these floating sunglasses. The trenchcoat and the hat. I wanted to make a film that completely disowns that and concentrates not on what it looks like when the invisible man is wearing something — therefore making him visible — but focuses all of its energy on nothingness.”
This inclination to move away from the obvious speaks to his approach in general. “I’ve been involved in a lot of horror films,” he says. “And there’s a feeling that I’ve exhausted a lot of the traditional horror tropes. I’ve made haunted house stuff with Insidious, and I’ve done gory, more intense stuff with the Saw movies. And I’ve had a lot of fun, I love horror films. But after Upgrade, I had this feeling of freedom. Upgrade was such a wild genre mix, it was sci-fi and body horror and all these things. Then once I made the decision that I wanted to make The Invisible
Man, the next decision I made was that I wanted to move away from how I had done horror before.”
One choice he made was to step out of the shadows. “I said to the cinematographer [Stefan Duscio], ‘This is not gonna be one of those dark horror movies where the lights are off.’ I wanted to make a film were the lights are on because obviously the Invisible Man doesn’t need darkness to hide in.” Atmosphere, says Whannell, is king here. “My goal with this is to have people feel like the whole film is a vice,” he says. “Almost an oppressive experience.” He brings up Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby as a reference point, discussing the feeling of paranoia, and the challenges of communicating that. But he has also drawn from more recent work.
“A lot of times I feel like filmmakers reflexively cite older films because maybe it sounds more distinguished,” he laughs. “It doesn’t seem very elegant to say, ‘Well, this movie that I’m making in 2019 is very influenced by Hereditary.’ But I was influenced by Hereditary. There is a certain type of horror film being made now that has a lot more freedom and artistic integrity than the horror films we grew up with in the ’80s, when they were peddling out cheapy slasher movies.” This is an evolution.
EMPIRE NEXT SPEAKS TO
Whannell in mid-december. The film is nearing the final stages of post-production, and then will begin test-screening, a process Whannell does not enjoy. “It’s like a colonoscopy by a doctor who has hooks for hands. And no anaesthetic.” He is, though, in high spirits. “I’m really happy with how the film is turning out,” he says. “I’m excited to unleash it on people.”
It’s already been successfully unleashed on one person: its star. “I watched it by myself in a screening room,” Moss says, “and I was a little bit nervous because I worked very hard on this movie and I wanted it to be good. But — and this was what excited me the most — I literally jumped. Like nine times. I was actually out of my skin. I had those classic jump scares that we were going for. That was the most important thing to me, ‘Please, please, let it be scary!’ And then the second thing I was happy about was to see that this is just a really good movie. A thrilling, character-driven film.”
Above and beyond all of the issues it explores, this is what was paramount to both of them. “Even [The Handmaid’s Tale author] Margaret Atwood has said,” explains Moss, “that you can write something that is incredibly meaningful and important and has a deep message, but if you don’t make it entertaining, no-one’s gonna give a shit. And that’s what we tried to do with this film.”
And all this because audiences didn’t really go for The Mummy. This is not your regular studio-driven reboot. The Invisible Man has more layers than ever.