‘The Invisible Man’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Hi, I’m Leigh Whannell. I’m the writer and director of the film, “The Invisible Man.” A lot of the film deals with paranoia and whether or not Elisabeth Moss’s character is really seeing something. And this is a scene where she’s actually dealing with physical presence and a physical threat. We don’t get to meet our antagonist, Adrian. You don’t have to learn a lot about him as the film goes on. And so I wanted the threat to suddenly become very real. And I thought it would be an interesting way to shoot a scene like this where two people are fighting, but you can only see one of the participants. [RUNNING WATER] And I could see that in my mind’s eye. I could see what that would look like if we pulled it off well. Turns out it was quite hard to achieve. It took a while to get there, to get the thing on screen that I could see in my head when I was writing. But we got here, eventually. [LOUD NOISE] There’s obviously moments in this scene that Elisabeth Moss could not perform. She’s not a trained stunt performer. She cannot be thrown across a table. So then the question becomes, how do we shoot Elisabeth Moss and then cut to somebody else? So in the middle of the shot, we have to match frame a stunt person in. And then, so she’ll do the actual throw and she’ll get thrown, and then she’ll land, and we have to freeze her and then match frame Elisabeth back in. And it was very technically difficult when she was interacting with the stunt performer in a green suit and when she wasn’t. Because as we found out when we did visual effects, it’s kind of easier to add something to a frame with CGI. It’s hard to remove something, especially a human body in a bright green suit. Like if this person is moving and blocking the other actor, and what are we going to do with that moment where the stunt performer’s arm is blocking Elisabeth’s face. But I know that the visual effects guys, a company called Cutting Edge, in Sydney, had a lot of sleepless nights to get it looking amazing. [BREAKING DISH]