Chris Marquette Interview, The Invisible

MoviesOnline caught up with Chris Marquette at the Los Angeles press day to promote his latest film, The Invisible, a chilling supernatural thriller directed by David Goyer about a teenager who finds himself trapped between two worlds – invisible to the living and all too close to the dead. The film 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.

To play Pete, David Goyer chose Chris Marquette, a rising young star who has won legions of young fans in his role on television’s "Joan of Arcadia” and is now coming to the fore in feature films. Establishing the loyal but unequal relationship between Nick and Pete was key to the intricacies of the story. "Nick is the one who always gets the girl, always the good grades and Pete has been kind of a hanger-on in the shadow of this golden boy,” explains Goyer. "But it is Pete’s cowardice that sets in motion all the events that lead to Nick’s potential death. I thought Chris was amazing in the role. He reminds me a lot of Sal Mineo in the James Dean film ‘Rebel Without A Cause.’ He plays this sad, wounded soul so beautifully.”

Justin Chatwin so enjoyed working with Marquette that the two developed a friendship that added further layers of realism to their on-screen relationship. "Chris was great,” says Chatwin. He really digs deeply into the characters he plays, and right from day one we clicked. Chris and I had mutual friends in common and I had always wanted to do a movie with him. We just had fun in every scene that we worked together in.”

Marquette was immediately attracted to the screenplay’s nuanced depiction of teen lives inside a harrowing tale of suspense. "I thought the story was really unique and I also felt there were a lot of truths in the characters,” Chris says. "To take a concept that’s so out of this world, where you have this otherworldly character wandering around, and then to find a lot of reality and truth in it was really interesting to me.”

Still, Marquette admits it was difficult to play out Pete’s tragedy. "Pete is a weak person,” he explains. "Nick tells Pete that he has to learn to stand up for himself, to hold his ground, but Pete doesn’t quite know how to do it because he’s so scared all the time. He’s constantly letting himself be pushed around and told what to do and all of the sudden it erupts into this terrible situation he never thought he could be in.”

Here’s what Chris Marquette had to tell us about his new film:

Q: It’s a very emotional part you had in this. Did you know David Goyer before?

Chris: Yeah, I’d worked with Ryan Reynolds who is a really close friend from Blade: Trinity so I’d actually heard a lot about it from Ryan and he told David a lot about me and my agent was also a very good friend of his. I think we had met once but it was an interesting mix of worlds for a little while before this happened, almost right before this happened, the first six months before this happened our worlds were combining.

Q: When you tell people you are working on this movie, how do you describe it?

Chris: It’s really hard to do. In my opinion, the movie is a thriller movie about a guy who wakes up and realizes that he might be dead and is trying to figure out a way to save himself to say the least. But, in my opinion, it’s always been about real characters in a very supernatural scenario. What attracted me so much to the script is that they made these people as human as possible in such a crazy circumstance. You would expect this movie to be some kind of ghost story and I don’t think it is really. I think it’s really about these people making big decisions and big changes. It’s a metaphor for a ton of things. I think these people are just living their lives like a lot of people I’ve read about in similar situations. They’re just trying to keep going and survive.

Q: What would you do if you were invisible? Justin’s character doesn’t choose to look at the girl in the shower.

Chris: [laughs] What would I do? Oh man. I would definitely look at everybody in the shower, no, no. I’d have to say I would love to see all the secrets that governments keep. I would love to go into like Area 51 or go into the President’s office and look at secret papers. Or the head of the C.I.A.’s office and read things. I’d end up doing that.

Q: There’s a danger that your character might come off as unsympathetic because of the decisions that he makes and the consequences but yet you like him. How did you approach that?

Chris: I never saw him as a bad kid. He’s not a terrible kid and he actually really loves Nick. He almost wants to be Nick, he has so much admiration for him. He never looked at what he was doing as bad, he’s just not equipped with enough confidence in himself to do anything right. I think he’s constantly letting himself sink, constantly letting himself get pushed around and mashed down. He just doesn’t have the confidence to say to himself ‘no!, no!, no!’. He’s always saying ‘okay, okay’ because he’s a guy who is surviving second to second. Every minute is a struggle. People push him in and all of a sudden, he’s got to find a way out whether it’s lying or manipulating or blaming somebody else; making it easier on himself by making it harder on somebody else. That’s what he does. A lot of people do that. A lot of good people do that.

Q: So you can find that humanity in him?

Chris: Yeah. I think that’s what it is with this friendship because it’s a real friendship. That’s the way I always tried to treat it. This was genuinely his best friend. He just made some really bad decisions along the way.

Q: You are friends with Justin. Did you guys hang out off set while shooting?

Chris: No. We weren’t friends before but we had known each other before. He worked with one of my closest friends so I had seen him every few months. I saw him at a movie theater one time, at a bar another time. My friend’s from New York and he would come in and call his buddies from L.A. and we would all get together and we were always there. We sort of had a small history but, straight off the bat, he and I clicked really well and we did spend a lot of time together. It was nice. Both of our birthdays were in the same month, October, so we both spent our birthdays together up there and it was really cool.

Q: He’s Canadian, right?

Chris: Yeah, he’s Canadian from Vancouver Island, a small town, I forget the name. He’s like a local boy.

Q: Did he show you around?

Chris: Yeah, he did. He was telling me everything about the city. We went on a crazy drive up a mountain one time which we found out was a bike trail but we took like a rental SUV and, all of a sudden, we’re halfway up this bike trail and we realize we can’t go anymore. We had to back down the mountain for an hour and a half. It was absolutely great. Definitely an adventure.

Q: Margarita is really good. She was so tough. What was she like between scenes?

Chris: She’s very different. What a great character she built. I always really admired and respected Margarita.

Q: Did she stay in character?

Chris: Yeah, she did but Margarita’s a very naturally sweet person, a vulnerable person, someone who has a very tough shell and that shows in meeting her but, at the same time, really sensitive to how people feel. Margarita and I were constantly working with each other and I think she gave me the utmost respect as I did her. To say, like ‘This is the way you work. This is the way I work. Let’s do it’. We really clicked on a certain level that I don’t know if I can talk about really. Most of the time we weren’t really talking to each other. It was like ‘you do your take and I’ll give you everything I can and I’ll do mine… everything I can’ and then go back to the hotel, wake up the next morning and do it again. That was it. There were no dinners or anything.

Q: Well, she was always yelling in your face.

Chris: Exactly. At a certain point, it’s an interesting line you cross with people when you have to pretend, pretend to hate somebody. There’s something that resonates in yourself. It’s kind of uncontrollable but, with her and I, it was nice because toward the very end of the movie is when we could feel relaxed and comfortable enough with our characters and what we were doing that we could really open up and get to know each other and we did. It was nice to share all that beforehand and then end it on such a positive note.

Q: Was it a difficult shoot for you?

Chris: Yeah, for me it was. I’m naturally somebody, I don’t like to be pushed around at all. Without trying to sound like any kind of badass or anything. I don’t drive a motorcycle but it was really difficult to shed things and leave yourself so open constantly, on a constant basis, to have to be such a wuss to be honest. After a while, you give so many people power in your life and give them so much room to say and do whatever they want, that becomes a big part of your life. I remember too that, after a while, it was really difficult to communicate with people I was close with at a certain point. It was really difficult to let people in too. I felt like I was hiding all of these secrets. What I tried to do is build up all of these secrets in myself. After a while, those become real enough to where you’re like ‘I can’t tell anyone anything anymore.’

Q: Did you get hurt at all?

Chris: Yeah. I got bumped up a bit. Margarita was in the gym every day. She was running like a madwoman. That girl has so much energy, it’s amazing and I was eating donuts off to the side. She definitely thrashed me around. We had a scene that they cut out where she had put a gun to my chest and they sort of cut around the gun because it was too violent but there was like a big huge mark on my chest for about three weeks because it was the butt of this gun constantly being jabbed in the same place. I had totally forgotten about it until I watched it. I forgot how painful that was.

Q: And it didn’t even make it to the final cut?

Chris: No, the scene with the gun in it didn’t unfortunately. It may be on the DVD.

Q: This is all very different from "Joan of Arcadia.” Would you ever go back and do another TV show?

Chris: I’d never say never but, as of now, no. I did this show called "Huff” afterwards, a few episodes of that which was a cool character and there’s always something nice when they come and offer something. So if there was ever a part that I felt I had something to offer to them and I got the opportunity to do it, then yeah, more than likely.

Q: The "Joan” fans wrote a lot of letters to keep it on the air.

Chris: They definitely did. To this day I still meet people and get to talk to people. That show did something I didn’t realize it could. It was really nice, yeah.

Q: What about "Fanboys”?

Chris: Fanboys will be out I think, as of now, it’s not set in stone but August 17^th we’re saying. They are going to start doing screenings soon. It’s cool. It’s a wacky comedy with a nice undertone of friendship. It’s like a road trip movie. It was me and they hired three other guys who are just insanely talented and funny so they just let us do sort of a free for all improv in a way.

Q: Why was it delayed so long?

Chris: I think it was just the timing and also they showed it to so many people involved in Star Wars that we’ve gone back several times with additional scenes. Like Kevin Smith had seen it and he came in and was like ‘Oh, man. I love it.’ So they let him write and direct one of his own scenes in it. They added that in and George Lucas saw it and loved it and gave us all of the sound effects from the original Star Wars movie so they went back in and re-put in all these sound effects and some cool special effects. It’s like everybody that’s seen it and loved it has attached themselves in a way to make the movie better so that’s what they’ve been constantly doing. It’s a great thing that’s been on hold.

Q: What is the pendant you are wearing?

Chris: Oh, it’s an old 18^th Century family crest, not my family, but there’s a little lion and an antelope and the lion’s for hope and courage and the antelope is for stability.

The Invisible opens in theaters on April 27^th.