By Fred Topel | Image property of Buena Vista Pictures.
The Invisible
The Invisible may seem like a simple story about a ghost watching his friends and family try to find his dying body. With no overt special effects, it seems like a character drama. But pay attention and you’ll see that many magical things happen in a single camera take. He can destroy a window and find that he hasn’t affected anything, but the audience sees an instant repair that cannot possibly happen short of the existence of real ghosts.
Goyer Tries Going Invisible
“I had no idea until we started filming how complicated it was going to be,” said director David Goyer. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be a nice little melodrama.’ But once you realize, because we did our first scene and nobody can interact with the lead character but nobody can make eye contact with him. And especially when you’re dealing with scenes sometimes when you’ve got 50 or 60 extras and takes would be ruined because that person was looking at him, things like that, then after a few days, you realized ‘Oh my God, this is actually really complicated.’”
Aside from the frustration of ruined takes, the intentional challenges were monumental. “Plus we did all sorts of in camera trickery. I didn’t want to do a lot of overt visual effects where he phases through walls or he looks like a spectre or anything like that. But we did a lot of in camera trickery with motion control and things like that where he’s on one side of the room and then the camera moves over and there he is on the other side of the room. Obviously he broke the laws of physics to get there but we didn’t show it. So yes, there’s a scene in the movie where he gets angry at his mom and he throws the chair through the window, and we pan back to him and pan back to the window all in one shot and the window’s not broken. We did a number of things like that.”
A remake of a Swedish film with the same name, Goyer’s Invisible added the visual complexity. “The Swedish version didn’t do anything in camera like that. It was all in cuts but I thought that was kind of fun. I don’t know if you noticed, the first three minutes of the movie are all one shot. Most audience members don’t notice but that was fun.”
For fans of Goyer’s comic book inspired work, he threw in a little nod for those watching the background. “The only Goyerism really is that in the garage scene, the character of Marcus is an auto mechanic and when he gets a call from Annie, if you look in the background, they’re working on the Blade car behind him.”
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