Director Leigh Whannell on the Invisible Man, Aquaman and why he wants to scar audiences for life
Forget the hokey floating hats and sunglasses of previous film versions, Saw co-creator Leigh Whannell has brought The Invisible Man back to life in a radical reinvention, and the Melbourne director says he won’t be happy until you’re left sleeping with the lights on.
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If Frankenstein and Dracula are the Batman and Superman of the monster world then who does that make the Invisible Man?
Melbourne filmmaker Leigh Whannell — whose modern reimagining of the hard-to-spot antihero dreamt up by HG Wells more than century ago opens this week — ponders the question before finally agreeing that the answer is probably … Aquaman.
“Absolutely,” he says during a recent visit to his home town to promote the horror hit in the making starring Elisabeth Moss, which Universal Studios had enough faith in to merit a trailer at the Super Bowl alongside Black Widow and the next chapter in the Fast and Furious franchise.
“I don’t feel the Invisible Man has the same cultural footprint as those other characters. So there’s less baggage. If you’re making a Dracula film there’s so much baggage, you know you’ve got all these different iterations of that character.
“So many iconic performances and actors — Gary Oldman, Bela Lugosi — but with the Invisible Man, I felt there was a freedom there to kind of mess with it a little bit.”
There’s a certain symmetry to the Aquaman comparison too. Whannell’s old mate from RMIT film school James Wan, with whom he created the hugely successful Saw franchise, turned DC Comics’ little-known Atlantean superhero into a surprise billion-dollar hit so it was only natural that he would be a source of wisdom and a sounding board in how to make a peripheral character take centre stage.
Indeed LA-based Whannell, whose previous directing gig Upgrade was shot in Melbourne on a modest budget, got a front-row seat into the art of the effects-driven blockbuster when he had a cameo as a helicopter pilot on the Gold Coast set of Aquaman.
“I wanted to see what those movies were like,” says Whannell. “And I wasn’t disappointed by the way. I got off the plane, went straight to the studio on the Gold Coast, and they walked me into a giant sound stage. And this is what I saw — this huge, 10-storey tall blue screen and then in the middle of this empty studio is Nicole Kidman standing on a pier. And I was just like, ‘Wow, what a surreal vision’.”
It also gave Whannell the chance to pitch to his mate — now a heavy-hitter in Hollywood horror — his vision for The Invisible Man, which radically reinvents the original character from Wells’s 1897 book and the hokey floating hats and sunglasses of previous film versions.
In Whannell’s mind, the title character needed to be the villain of the piece, and instead took a psychological thriller approach in which Moss’s heroine is gaslighted by an abusive husband and made to question her own sanity.
“I said ‘I’m thinking of doing this movie and here’s my approach’,” says Whannell. “He was sitting there thinking — and he’s not shy about telling me when he thinks something is not worth pursuing — and he said, ‘That’s really good’. So it was almost like I got the stamp of approval from him.
“I wanted to make something that was a bit clinical and cold and stressful. I was really trying to make a film that was uncomfortable for the audience to watch. The example I keep using is I wanted the film to be suffocating, like you had a bag on your head that was just slightly draining the air from the very first frame.”
Whannell says he adopted a similar “Trojan horse” approach to the one used by Todd Phillips in the Oscar-nominated Joker, which took a character with a long-established history and then subverted the audience expectations of what it could and should be.
“You get the people in the theatre because it’s called Joker,” says Whannell. “And once they have got their bum in the seat, then it’s like ‘well now you’re in, I’m in charge’. And that’s kind of what I wanted to do with this.”
The Invisible Man was initially supposed to star Johnny Depp as part of Universal Pictures’ “Dark Universe”, a series of interconnected films akin to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but using the studio’s roster of monsters including Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
But when Tom Cruise’s The Mummy misfired badly in 2017, the star-studded, big-budget approach was shelved, opening the door for Whannell’s imaginative take in partnership with Blumhouse Productions, which had also produced his Insidious films.
The modest (by Hollywood standards) $10 million budget for Sydney-shot The Invisible Man was more than twice that of Upgrade, but Whannell says that being part of a big studio felt like a step up — in a good way.
“There was something about Upgrade that felt like a little bit of a secret like, ‘we’re over here, the kids have got the house to themselves, the parents have gone out, we’ve broken into the liquor cabinet’. We were down here in Australia and they were over there, so far away.
“This didn’t feel like that. This felt like the eyes of the world were on us and there were definitely people on high who were interested in on a day-to-day basis in what we were doing and I felt that. But I never felt micromanaged.”
Despite some of the twisted horror scenarios he has helped dream up — the deadly, demented traps of the Saw series, and the spooky, demonic visions of the Insidious movies — in person father-of-three Whannell is animated and affable.
But he admits that the darkest recesses of his mind have been his go-to source for creativity ever since he was a kid. He recalls having a book about animals as a five-year-old which had a picture of a huge tarantula that terrified him, but he couldn’t stop looking at.
“Clearly there’s something in my brain that wants to look at the thing that you don’t want to look at,” he says with a laugh. “And that’s where my mind goes when I write. I want to give people that same feeling I had with the spider, the same feeling I had when I first watched Jaws. I remember I was so traumatised by Jaws, that I couldn’t take a bath. I remember my mother, having to convince me to get in the bath and I’d be like ‘but Jaws is in there’.
MORE:
WHY LEIGH WHANNELL SWAPPED SAW’S HORROR FOR SCI-FI
ELISABETH MOSS ON THE FUTURE OF HANDMAID’S TALE
TODD PHILLIPS ON THE JOKER BACKLASH AND SEQUEL
“David Fincher has this quote that he’s like, ’I don’t want to make memorable movies I want to make movies that scar people for life’. And I think that quote applies. It’s like, if I can unsettle people and make something that they have to sleep with the lights on for a month, I’m a happy man.”
The Invisible Man opens tomorrow.
Originally published as Director Leigh Whannell on the Invisible Man, Aquaman and why he wants to scar audiences for life