'The Invisible Man' cast members Elisabeth Moss, Storm Reid, Oliver Jackson-Cohen and writer/director Leigh Whannell discuss the upcoming film in this interview with CinemaBlend's Eric Eisenberg. Find out behind-the-scenes details on filming stunts and more.
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00:00 - It just doesn't make any sense.
00:02 - What?
00:02 - Adrian wouldn't kill himself.
00:04 (dramatic music)
00:05 - Listen, you're getting your freedom back, okay?
00:08 Don't let 'em haunt you.
00:10 - Hello?
00:12 (dramatic music)
00:15 - Considering your arc,
00:21 Cecilia's arc from the beginning of this film,
00:23 you start at like a tension stress level of nine.
00:26 - I know.
00:27 - And maybe one or two scenes for you're kind of relaxed.
00:29 - I know.
00:30 - But it just makes me wonder,
00:31 like by the end of this production,
00:32 what state were you in?
00:33 (laughing)
00:35 - I was tired.
00:36 - Yeah?
00:37 - But I was sad that it was done
00:38 'cause I had such a good time making it
00:40 and I wanted to go back and start at the beginning
00:42 and do it all over again, honestly.
00:44 - Would you say that the emotional stuff
00:45 was as taxing as the physical stuff?
00:47 'Cause you have been in pretty equal balance in this one.
00:48 - Yeah, for sure.
00:50 I'm more used to the emotional stuff,
00:52 but emotional while doing physical stuff is different
00:54 and so for me, that was definitely a big challenge
00:57 and having to really take care of myself
01:00 in a different way physically
01:01 and kind of warm up before I did a scene.
01:03 I don't usually warm up on The Handmaid's Tale, you know?
01:06 (laughing)
01:07 - Are you okay?
01:08 - Someone's sitting in that chair.
01:10 (dramatic music)
01:13 When I was reading the script in my kitchen,
01:15 I realized that one, this was gonna be a very scary movie,
01:18 but two, it did have those powerful message in it.
01:22 It was purposeful and impactful
01:24 and I try to choose my projects very strategically
01:28 and I know that I don't wanna be a part of anything
01:30 that isn't trying to have a bigger conversation.
01:33 - I think it was a real no-brainer.
01:35 The first time I read the script,
01:36 I also think Lee is such a clever
01:39 and exciting writer-director
01:42 and so I remember watching Upgrade when it came out
01:45 and just being like, "Who is this guy?
01:47 "This guy's incredible."
01:48 And then when this sort of came across my desk,
01:51 I was like, "Oh yeah, this guy."
01:54 I just think if you're gonna take property like this
01:56 that is so kind of well-known, this is the way to do it.
02:01 You ground your story in, I mean, you base it in reality.
02:06 You ground it.
02:08 This movie is also incredibly cool
02:09 just coming after Upgrade.
02:10 Obviously in Upgrade, it's a person
02:12 who's not in control of their own body.
02:13 - Right, yeah, totally.
02:13 - In this one, you're fighting against an invisible foe.
02:15 - Yes.
02:16 - Did you find kind of similarities between those two?
02:17 - Yeah, it's funny because when I took the job to do this,
02:21 I wasn't thinking of that stuff.
02:22 I was just thinking, "Oh, this is a cool character
02:24 "and there's an opportunity here to modernize it
02:26 "and make it this suffocating, tense thriller."
02:29 It was during the writing and the pre-production
02:32 that I started to see all the parallels with,
02:34 you know, it's funny, even the little things like,
02:36 I seem to have an obsession with houses on the water.
02:39 If you remember from Upgrade,
02:40 the guy had the house on the coast.
02:43 And that is not by design.
02:44 I think that there's something in my subconscious
02:46 that gets through and I'm drawing all these parallels.
02:49 You're talking about tech being used to
02:53 suppress and torture somebody.
02:57 So I think there's a real paranoia about tech
03:00 that lives inside me that just keeps coming out
03:02 in these screenplays, but it's very subconscious.
03:06 - Wasn't there kind of an extra challenge too?
03:08 Because he loves long shots.
03:09 He loves just keeping that camera rolling.
03:11 - So do I.
03:12 I love that, yeah, I really do.
03:13 It's better for performance a lot of the time
03:15 to not break it up as much as possible.
03:17 So I love that.
03:19 When he told me he wanted to do that whole sequence
03:21 like in one shot, I was like salivating.
03:24 I was like a film nerd, a camera nerd.
03:27 I was like, oh my God, yes, please.
03:29 - That's awesome.
03:30 What was the process of deciding to film it that way?
03:32 And also, what would you say was the most difficult shot
03:34 to put together?
03:35 - I mean, the process, it's a lot of thinking about it
03:37 during the screenwriting, but then also
03:40 during the pre-production period,
03:42 I would chat to the cinematographer
03:44 and I would always be talking about
03:46 what can we do that's different?
03:47 One thing was let's turn the lights on.
03:49 You know, in a lot of horror movies,
03:51 the lights are off, it's very dark.
03:52 I wanted to turn them all on.
03:54 - 'Cause what's the difference?
03:54 - Yeah, exactly.
03:55 It doesn't matter for The Invisible Man.
03:57 And then we started talking about
03:58 how do we convince people this is real?
04:00 The Invisible Man's kind of an outlandish concept.
04:02 One way to convince people it's real
04:04 is to film it in these long shots
04:07 so people never see the cuts.
04:08 You can't hide from a one-shot scene.
04:12 So we did that, and then finally,
04:15 we just decided to use the camera
04:16 to explore empty spaces a lot.
04:19 So it's all about the audience's paranoia
04:21 driving their enjoyment of the film.
04:23 - One thing that strikes me as different
04:25 between this and just going back to the original,
04:26 the 1933 version, which I love also,
04:28 but what's cool about this version
04:30 is that Griffin is driven insane
04:32 by the serum that he takes.
04:34 For here, in this movie, it's very much
04:36 the kind of technology is almost
04:38 accentuating Adrian's kind of insanity.
04:40 I'm curious if that's kind of a dynamic
04:41 that you were kind of approaching
04:42 when you were considering the part.
04:43 - What was really interesting
04:45 is doing an awful lot of research
04:46 into personality disorder and into narcissism.
04:50 Sorry, my brain's just suddenly gone a bit slow.
04:56 Into narcissism, and what,
04:58 I saw this really interesting,
05:01 well, it was actually a really disturbing interview
05:03 with this woman that had been
05:04 in this relationship with a narcissist,
05:06 and she was saying that the worst thing is
05:08 is for a narcissist, if you leave them,
05:11 the rage and revenge that comes with it
05:14 is incredible, and so that was the kind of
05:19 sort of reading up about that,
05:23 and reading about, because it's to do with
05:25 you hurt me, how dare you hurt me.
05:28 - Like the shattering of the,
05:30 you didn't know that you could be hurt.
05:31 - Exactly, and so that, for me,
05:34 was the driving force of why Adrian does what he does,
05:37 and it's a loss of reality, and it's about power,
05:42 and if you lose that power, you know.
05:43 - He's not a good guy, but it felt important.
05:47 It felt important that we show what these people,
05:50 these men are like, and I know for a fact
05:54 that so many people have experienced
05:57 horrific relationships like this,
05:59 so it felt necessary.
06:02 - He said that wherever I went, he would find me,
06:07 walk right up to me, and I wouldn't be able to see him.
06:11 - Can you talk about filming those action scenes?
06:12 Because I mean, I presume you're working
06:14 with somebody in a green screen outfit?
06:16 Is that how it works?
06:17 - Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of different elements
06:19 to go into it, combination of VFX,
06:22 and real effects, and stunts,
06:24 and we had an incredible stunt team,
06:25 and a great stunt double for Ollie,
06:28 and a great stunt double for me,
06:30 deserve a huge shout out.
06:32 They're just superheroes, but we did a lot of stuff.
06:35 I mean, I did a lot of stuff.
06:36 Lee asked me at the very beginning
06:37 before I went to Australia, he called me,
06:39 and he said, I would like you to do as much as you can,
06:42 and I said, I'm down, I'm down to try it.
06:44 (grunting)
06:47 - What were the kind of experiences like
06:52 working in scenes with the Invisible Man,
06:54 like just executing those sequences?
06:56 - I mean, it was fun, but he wasn't there, so.
07:00 (laughing)
07:01 I mean, Ollie is great, and he's super talented,
07:04 but I didn't really get to work closely with him,
07:07 'cause he was invisible, he wasn't supposed to be there,
07:11 and I had to really work by myself
07:13 when doing those dramatic scenes,
07:16 but I can't wait to see it all come together.
07:17 - This movie never tries to make you feel
07:19 like Cecilia's crazy, like it never has
07:21 that kind of ambiguity where it's like,
07:23 oh, maybe it is all just in her head,
07:24 and ultimately, I think that is really strong,
07:26 just because it really provides,
07:27 it adds to kind of the perspective of the character,
07:29 but I'm curious if that was ever something
07:31 that you kind of went back and forth on.
07:33 - You know, it's funny, early on,
07:35 there's this idea of the movie could maybe exist
07:39 as just a purely paranoid movie.
07:41 You know, if you think about classic paranoia movies
07:43 like Rosemary's Baby, the question is there,
07:45 like what's really happening, you know,
07:46 is she imagining it?
07:47 Right up until the end, you're thinking,
07:49 is this real or not?
07:50 But I feel like I've done that, you know,
07:52 I've written the haunted house movie
07:54 where the person isn't being believed,
07:57 so I was like, you know, I have to be a bit sensitive
07:58 with this topic of these relationships,
08:01 so I just wanted to present Elizabeth Moss's character
08:05 as the central character and the audience surrogate.
08:08 So you spend the whole movie in her shoes,
08:10 you never step outside her viewpoint, you know,
08:13 and it's really a one-woman show in that way.
08:15 - Yeah, and very powerful, 'cause you're just with her
08:17 emotionally through the entire process.
08:18 - Yeah, yeah, she goes through the ringer,
08:20 you go through the ringer.
08:21 - I saw it by myself in a screening room in New York,
08:24 mainly 'cause I didn't know I could invite anybody,
08:26 and apparently I may have been able to, but I didn't,
08:29 so I saw it by myself in a theater,
08:31 which is like, if you see this movie,
08:33 you're gonna be like, that's insane to do.
08:35 And I was legitimately scared,
08:37 I was legitimately jumped out of my,
08:38 I knew we had the script and I knew we had the drama,
08:41 but the scares and the fear and the visual effects
08:46 and everything, that's what I hadn't seen yet.
08:48 So I was so, so relieved and moved and proud.
08:52 (upbeat music)