Best of 2020 (Behind the Scenes): The Invisible Man director breaks down that shocking restaurant scene
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Mark Rogers/Universal Pictures
In the last movie that many filmgoers saw in a theater, one horrifyingly tense scene was burned into our brains. Here, writer-director Leigh Whannell reveals how he cooked up the shocking restaurant scene in The Invisible Man.
Horror-thriller The Invisible Man contains many jaw-dropping sequences as Elisabeth Moss’ heroine, Cecilia, is terrifyingly harassed by her psychotic ex-boyfriend, Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), the titular unseen gent. But none were as shocking as the scene in which the invisible Adrian uses a knife to slice the throat of Cecilia’s sister, Emily (Harriet Dyer), in a crowded restaurant while Moss’ character looks on in horror.
Writer-director Leigh Whannell (Upgrade) chose to set the scene in a busy eatery to lull cinema-goers into a false sense of security.
"I start any screenplay with a notepad, that’s my tradition," says Whannell. "I have a stack of notepads dating back to when I was 18-years-old, my first year of film school. I still have them sitting in my office, this pile I’ll sometimes leaf through. It has to be a brand new notepad for each new film. I just start doodling, I start writing random things down, bits of dialog, character names, ideas for scenes, sometimes it’s drawings. Sometimes I’ll cut pictures out of magazines that are inspirational. I just try to fill the notepad with a collage of inspirational stuff. The restaurant scene in The Invisible Man was born out of that process. I was sitting down with my notepad thinking, Okay, how do you exploit invisibility? With each villain you have to think, what are the best ways to exploit this villain? What can this villain do that others can’t? What is the most frightening thing about this villain? And with invisibility it was pretty clear to me that a scene where you realize that someone had been standing over your shoulder the entire time that you're having an intimate conversation with somebody, never realizing that the person you're talking about is right behind you, I mean, that’s how you exploit invisibility. So, the restaurant scene was born out of that. I started thinking, where would be the most surprising place for somebody to sneak up behind you? If you’re in a darkened scary house, the audience almost expects that something’s bad going to happen. I decided to put the scene in a crowded restaurant. I wanted something that felt very safe to the audience, so that when the throat slashing happened, the audience would be knocked on their arse."
The director shot the scene at est., a restaurant in Sydney. "They graciously let us take it over," says Whannell. "It was a functioning, working restaurant and we changed it into a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. So, we used the basic bones of the restaurant, but changed the décor around to make it look more like a Chinese restaurant, and then of course we had to fill it with extras. It’s a surreal thing to me on movies to change a space, to take a room that is an auto mechanics shed and turn it into a police station. It never ceases to tickle me and makes me happy."
At the start of the scene, an irritating waiter attends to the sisters, leading the viewer to believe that Whannell is playing the scene for laughs rather than terror.
"Any film involving tension, whether it’s a thriller or a horror film is a lot like a magic trick, it’s all about misdirection," says Whannell. "Having the waiter being kind of urbane and annoying and having the scene come after one where things had been fairly intense, audiences are coached into this rhythm of like, oh, now we get a chance to relax. Knowing that, I thought I could exploit that. I wanted everybody to think, this is the scene where you eat your popcorn and check to see if you've got any text messages. [Laughs]. I wanted everything to feel safe and then for that to be suddenly interrupted."
Dyer’s graphic neck wound was a prosthetic appliance. As for the knife, it was in part controlled by an extremely visible green-suit-clad man, who was removed in post-production.
"A lot of it is practical," says the director. "There’s some CG involved because you’ve got a man in a green suit holding a knife. It’s really a combination of everything, but I like to do as much as I can practically. On the set it was quite funny, to have a green stick holding a knife or to have someone in a green suit standing there, it’s comical. The actors are cracking up continuously. The throat cut was all done practically. So, there were all these factors that were quite funny. Elisabeth Moss and Harriet Dyer, who played the unfortunate victim in that scene, they’re both very funny ladies at any moment, but they go into overdrive when there’s a man in a green unitard crouching under the table and there’s fake blood being pumped through a prosthetic neck. I mean, they were just losing it, crying laughing."
No one was laughing, however, when a test audience watched the scene for the first time.
"I always knew that scene was going to be a gasper, you know?" says Whannell. "When we first test-screened I was waiting around for that scene. I’m not a big fan of watching a test audience. It drives the producers crazy, because they love to sit in there, and listen to the audience, and they do not understand why I have to wait outside. It’s just too nerve-wracking for me, it’s like open-heart surgery. But there are certain moments where I do like to be there. I know the timing of the film so well that I can duck my head back into the theater pretty accurately five minutes before the scene happens. Sure enough, that’s what I did and it was exactly the reaction you would hope for. It was funny how it would go in a ripple. It happens so quickly that some people don’t even know that it’s happened. So, you get the first bunch of people saying, Oh my god! And then slowly everyone catches on and it kind of ripples throughout the audience. It’s very fun to see that kind of audience participation."
The Invisible Man was released in the U.S. on Feb. 28, 2020, meaning it's the last film many people saw before cinemas began to close because of the pandemic.
"So many people have told me it was the last film they watched in theaters before theaters shut down," says Whannell. "I was thinking, god, if theaters never open again, it will always be this footnote in history. The last film! That's not a mantle I want to carry. I want movie theaters to open again once we get a handle on this virus. I miss movie theaters. It’s interesting that you're talking to me about the restaurant scene in the middle of this global pandemic, when movie theaters are shut down, because that scene is custom-built for movie theaters. It is not a scene that’s built for someone whose watching at home. Not that I dislike people watching it at home. I watch plenty of films at home myself. But it’s such a movie theater scene. It’s not intimate, it’s designed for a few hundred people to scream in unison. That’s what I was thinking of when I wrote it."
A version of this story appears in the January issue of Entertainment Weekly, on newsstands Friday or available here. Don't forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.
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