STACK #188 June 2020

FILM FEATURE

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STACK caught up with writer-director LeighWhannell to discuss his innovative take on H.G.Wells’s classic tale. Words Scott Hocking

T he Invisible Man is Leigh Whannell’s latest collaboration with US production company Blumhouse, following the sci-fi/action hit Upgrade in 2018. Back home in Melbourne to promote the film, the Aussie actor- turned-filmmaker – who became a hot export in Hollywood following the success of Saw in 2004 – reveals he didn’t know what he wanted do next after completing Upgrade . “I knew I had been bitten by the action movie bug,” he tells STACK . “There’s something very fun and addictive about putting car chases and fight scenes together; that very kinetic, visceral kind of filmmaking. So I thought, now I’ll do the big budget version of Upgrade if I’m lucky enough, and then The Invisible Man came out of nowhere. “It was suggested to me; I wasn’t thinking about the Invisible Man in any way, shape or form,” he continues. “I had a meeting with

Australia – something he wasn’t anticipating. “When I wrote the script for The Invisible Man , producer Jason Blum said, ‘Okay, so we’re going back to Australia, right?’ because he’d had such a good experience with me shooting Upgrade in Melbourne. I hadn’t really been thinking of it as a film that would be shooting in Australia, but as an Australian, I’ll take any excuse to be here. “When you make a film, you’ve got to be here for five months, so I got to know Sydney in a way I never have before. And the crews you can get access to in Australia are like A-grade athletes – people who have worked on films for Martin Scorsese and George Miller,” he says, adding that it was gratifying that the ‘best of the best’ were working on his film. “Big films like Fury Road only come along once in a while, so they plug the gaps with independent films and that’s how you get access to these people.

Blumhouse and Universal and they started asking me what I wanted to do with that character and I kind of started making things up on the spot. But when I left the meeting, the ideas stayed with me and started growing like a

I wanted the audience to be uncomfortable... and holding their breath for two hours

tumour over the next few days; I could see the direction, and now here we are.” With production taking place in Sydney, Whannell jumped at the chance to return to

18 JUNE 2020

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