David Goyer Interview, The Invisible

Posted by: Sheila Roberts

MoviesOnline caught up with David Goyer, the mastermind behind Blade Trinity and Batman Begins, at the Los Angeles press day to promote his latest film, The Invisible. The Invisible is a chilling supernatural thriller about a teenager who finds himself trapped between two worlds – invisible to the living and all too close to the dead. Goyer turns from the action thrills of Blade and Batman Begins to a story cut through with ghostly mystery, emotional drama and taut suspense. His latest effort is based on the novel by Mats Wahl. The original screenplay and film was written by Mick Davis, while a re-write was done by Christine Roum.

A high school senior with a bright future, Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin) is suddenly attacked on a dark night, his shattered body left for dead. Now, caught in a haunting limbo where he can observe the world of the living but they can’t see him, his only chance at a future is to figure out the mystery of what happened to him and why before time runs out. As Nick attempts to uncover the ominous truth behind his ghostly condition, the trail leads from his mother (Marcia Gay Harden) to his best friend, Pete (Chris Marquette), to a shady criminal, Marcus (Alex O’Loughlin), to the tough, troubled girl, Annie (Margarita Levieva), who Nick comes to realize may hold the key to his awakening from the unexplainable.

Coming into the project at the earliest stages, Goyer brought to The Invisible his own original vision of how to tell the story of Nick Powell’s life through the lens of Nick Powell’s death. He viewed the story as being not just about Nick’s fight to return to the living but also about Annie, who, haunted by Nick in more ways than one, begins to find her own salvation. "I saw the film starting out as a supernatural thriller, but then gradually evolving into a redemptive love story,” Goyer says. "I envisioned a movie that wouldn’t necessarily follow the standard Hollywood conventions, a film that is woven through with all kinds of subtle themes, and that interested me.”

Playing with the whole idea of invisibility also appealed to Goyer. "Being invisible, first of all, is a tremendous allegory for adolescence and growing up – because it’s a time when you truly feel like nobody really sees or hears you. Nick is not only invisible but a kind of a ghost who is trapped in this privileged place where he can do something we all fantasize about -- be a total voyeur, listening in on his friends’ and family’s most private conversations. Watching from this other space, he catches all the characters with their masks down and sees sides of them that nobody else ever sees. It happens with his mother, with his friend Pete and especially with Annie. And that builds on one of the story’s biggest themes, which is that people tend to wear all these masks that keep others from seeing them for who they truly are.”

While Goyer’s experiences on Blade and Batman Begins had taught him a lot about how to deftly handle the mix of suspense, emotion and dramatic surprises, for this film he also envisioned a different kind of style – one that would be more understated with all the emphasis on the reality of the characters and visceral action, with only a few key visual effects. "The main idea was that I wanted the film to feel entirely real and naturalistic, to have a strong verisimilitude, which would belie the eerie events that are taking placing within it,” the director notes. "The visual effects almost entirely involve Nick’s invisibility – but not in the classic H.G. Wells sense. Instead, we focused on Nick’s inability to affect the material world around him. I think these are the best kind of visual effects, the kind that feel seamless, where the audience is unaware that any kind of effect is actually happening.”

Goyer has assembled an impressive behind-the-scenes team that is led by director of photography Gabriel Beristain (The Ring 2, Blade: Trinity), production designer Carlos Barbosa (Lost, 24), costume designer Tish Monaghan (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, An Unfinished Life, Insomnia), and editor Conrad Smart (Blade: Trinity).

David Goyer is a sensational writer and director and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about his new movie, The Invisible, as well as the latest on Supermax, Dark Knight, the Blade franchise, The Flash, Thor, and Scanners:

MoviesOnline: Mick Davis, the original screenwriter, said that when he first came to town to pitch the remake, your company was one of the companies that was interested in the film, then Spyglass came in but you ended up directing it. How did that happen?

DAVID GOYER: I had seen the Swedish film and I really liked it and I had my agent call around and say, ‘Does anyone represent the rights to this movie or anything like that?’ and they said, ‘Well, as a matter of fact, yes, and the writer of the original movie is in town. Why don’t you meet with him?’ and I did. At the time I had a first look deal at New Line so I was allowed to take it into New Line but not other studios, and New Line didn’t buy it and Spyglass bought it. A couple years later, I was having a general meeting with Spyglass and I was asking them what they were doing. They kind of brushed past this one, not because they didn’t like it but because they thought I wouldn’t be interested in it. And I said, Well actually I’ve seen the original movie’ and all of that and that’s how it happened.

MoviesOnline: Why did they think you wouldn’t be interested?

DAVID GOYER: It’s so different from Blade or Batman or the things that I’m known for. Hollywood, as you well know, has kind of tunnel vision when it comes to people and they think ‘well, he’s done that so he can only do that’ and that kind of thing. I was really anxious to do something different.

MoviesOnline: What about the relationship between Justin Chatwin and Margarita Leveiva off screen? What was the process you used to get them together and make them feel comfortable working together.

DAVID GOYER: It’s funny. Because Nick and Peter are such good friends in the movie, I wanted Justin and Chris to hang out a lot together. So two or three weeks before the movie, I instructed them to just go out every night and hang out on the weekends. I paid for them to have dinner a bunch of times because I wanted them to be close, but I actually forbade Margarita to talk to Justin and told them I didn’t want them hanging out together and I didn’t want them asking questions about each other. I didn’t want them to know each other and I didn’t want them to be comfortable around each other and they weren’t at the beginning. It was great.

They were actually kind of adversarial which is what I wanted. You never know. You have to employ all sorts of different methods when you’re working with actors. There’s such a wide gamut in terms of their training. Someone like Alex O’Laughlin who plays Marcus, he’s Australian and he was trained in the Shakespeare company and really traditional English and then Australian theater, so he has a completely different way of working. People like particularly Justin didn’t have any real kind of training per se so you couldn’t necessarily employ the same methods to direct them. That was the way that I decided to… I wanted the two of them separate and apart and it worked.

MoviesOnline: How different is the original script that was being shopped around town to what was finally shot?

DAVID GOYER: The two biggest differences are the ending, only we didn’t go the clichéd route of tacking on a Hollywood ending. It’s the right ending for the movie, but I don’t think it’s necessarily an easy ending. Depending on your audience members, some people find it a really sad ending, but a satisfying ending. That was different and then also the relationship between Marcus and Annie.

If I have one criticism of the original film, it’s that that’s kind of a very simplistic relationship and we made it a much more complex relationship. She’s a minor. He’s not. Even though it’s not spelled out, it’s there. The focus of the film shifts protagonists from Nick to Annie. I thought it was really important to bring a female writer into the mix and that’s how Christine [Roum] got involved.

MoviesOnline: Can you talk about how you used music to drive the film?

DAVID GOYER: I knew that this film is a teen melodrama and it was meant to be that, and so because of that I wanted to use music, but I also wanted to have the film go from a more naturalistic gradually to a more surrealistic or magic realism if you will. We did that with the visuals where at the beginning it’s a lot more hand held and naturalistic and by the end of the film it becomes much more expressionistic. In the digital intermediate, we pushed all the colors and crushed the blacks a lot more and things like that, but I wanted to do the same thing with music. I decided at the outset that the first half of the film would be scored with songs and the second half of the film would be scored with traditional orchestral score and it would gradually transition from one to the other.

What I was able to do in this movie which I hadn’t done before was I brought the music supervisor on before we started shooting, and we culled through thousands of songs to come up with a sound track for the film, and then I burned a 3-D set for all the cast and crew and gave that to them before we started shooting. Often I would play the songs before the appropriate scenes. I would say about half the songs in the film ended up being songs that we had chosen and then the other half were just songs that emerged over the next year or so, newer songs that emerged that hadn’t existed before that. That was really cool. And then in some cases I was able to get bands to re-record things or record things specifically.

There’s a song called 220 Boy in the movie by a band called Suicide Sports Club and I’m a pretty avid music fan. There was also an opportunity, largely because we didn’t have the kind of music budget that Spiderman would have, you know, which is an unlimited budget. We had to pick bands that were more up and comers and a lot of the bands that I like aren’t your Top 40 kind of bands. They’re alternatives, so I was able to pick songs and acts that had a certain amount of integrity, but in the instance of this song by Suicide Sports Club, it was perfect for the scene, but that original song was called 220 Girl. We called the band and said, ‘Would you re-record it as 220 Boy?’ which they did. That was kind of fun.

MoviesOnline: I asked Jonathan Nolan recently if in the Dark Knight we are going to see more of the detective side of Batman…

DAVID GOYER: Dude, I’m not going to say anything about that. Did he say anything? I doubt it.

MoviesOnline: He said he was hoping to see more of the detective side and that you guys had to take a crack at the script afterwards.

DAVID GOYER: I won’t say anything largely out of respect for Chris. On the first film, Chris just wanted to keep everything under lock and key and I think at the end of the day we all really respect Chris as a filmmaker. He doesn’t want anything said to the fans, so we won’t say anything.

MoviesOnline: Are you now directing Supermax?

DAVID GOYER: Not directing. Producing.

MoviesOnline: Writing and producing?

DAVID GOYER: Not writing. Producing.

MoviesOnline: Any word who might be writing?

DAVID GOYER: A young writer named Justin Marks who I’d read a spec screenplay of his. He’s very young. He’s 22. I thought it was great and he just started writing a week ago.

MoviesOnline: Is it going to be kind of dark like Batman?

DAVID GOYER: Oh yeah, he goes to prison.

MoviesOnline: What other heroes or villains are we going to see?

DAVID GOYER: I can’t say. I can’t say. But we’re culling not just from the Green Arrow mythology. We’re culling from the whole DC universe so anybody could show up. That’ll be part of the fun.

MoviesOnline: By anybody you mean either heroes or villains could show up?

DAVID GOYER: Yes, that’s all I can say.

MoviesOnline: Blade, are we done with that franchise? I was disappointed with the TV series not continuing because it was good.

DAVID GOYER: I was too because we kind of got on a roll. I know people were surprised that it was good. But that’s okay, people were surprised that the first movie was good. We’re done for now. The idea of doing another vampire thing right now … You know between the movies and the show, I did 20 hours of vampire stuff. Now obviously Joss Whedon did more, but I don’t know how he was able to do that many of them.

MoviesOnline: What about The Flash?

DAVID GOYER: It’s coming out on DVD.

MoviesOnline: Shawn Levy is now doing The Flash after you put so much time and effort into it. Do you know if they’re keeping with any of the stuff that you were hoping to do?

DAVID GOYER: I have no idea. It’s funny I ended up having lunch with Joss a couple weeks after that, and it was complete coincidence that that happened on the same day. We had lunch and we were talking about it. My relationship with Warner Bros. is great. A month later we did this Supermax Green Arrow thing. Fortunately, I’m in a position where I no longer have to...

If I don’t want to do something, I don’t have to do it. If I don’t like the approach creatively or if there’s a disagreement, then I’d just rather not do it. It takes too long to make the movies. Truly, it became apparent that there was a divergence of opinion as to what the movie should be, so I just said let me do something else and that’s what happened. I have no idea what they’re going to do and I’m not BS’ing you. I just said whatever. I’ll do something else.

MoviesOnline: For the longest time, Avi Arad has said that you were going to be doing Thor. Is that still going to happen?

DAVID GOYER: I’ve never been involved in Thor. I had one conversation with them. I’m friends with all those guys, and I’m friends with Avi and Ari and Kevin Feige, and we get together socially. I think we were having dinner up in Vancouver one night and we were just crossing paths and we had a conversation. Part of the problem, if you will, is that I love all those characters and I like spitballing about them, so I end up in spite of myself sort of saying, ‘What if you did X, Y and Z?’ but then I don’t have the time to do it. Sometimes I end up consulting on various superhero franchises that you haven’t seen my name on. That’s what I do. I come in for a couple days and I say, ‘What about this or that?’ because I don’t have the time to write it.

MoviesOnline: What do you look for in a script? Is it different for a comic book movie than something like this?

DAVID GOYER: I have no idea how to answer that question. You just look for something that sticks. Right? The thing about The Invisible was I watched the original Swedish film. I thought I was going to turn it off after 10 minutes. It didn’t go the way I thought it was going to go. I kept on and after the film ended, I was moved by it and a week later I was still thinking about it and then a week later I was still thinking about it and it just stuck with me. That happens sometimes and you just say, ‘well…’ That’s exciting too. Sometimes I’m overtly a fan of something and I want to do this version of it. The nice thing about this movie is it just came out of a completely different left field. Honestly, to date, that movie was the best experience I’ve ever had making a movie. There was no discord with the studio or the producers or the actors. It was just nice. And it was done within certain budget parameters that allowed us to have creative freedom. We didn’t need to have an A-list movie star. Disney and Spyglass allowed me to cast whomever I wanted, to use unknowns, things like that. Trust me, that doesn’t always happen.

MoviesOnline: Are you still writing Scanners?

DAVID GOYER: Yes, it allows us to work with Mr. Chapman. [Laughs]

The Invisible opens in theaters on April 27^th. You can checkout some great clips from the film below.

The Invisible Making of