Late at night after a full 15-hour day shooting, Leigh Whannell is sitting in a plastic folding chair in the car park of Sydney’s Fox Studios looking contemplatively at sound stage two.
Nearly 20 years ago he was a struggling actor and aspiring filmmaker who had just received the phone call he thought was going to change his life.
He had been cast as Axel in The Matrix Reloaded, the second film in the Wachowski siblings’ Matrix trilogy, which had become a pop cultural phenomenon when it hit cinemas in 1999.
“I literally jumped into the air,” he says. “I was probably the most excited I’ve ever been in my life when my agent called me.
“I didn’t care that it was five lines in a movie. I was just blown away that I was going to be in The Matrix. I basically shot a sci-fi WorkCover commercial: I was injured and then fell off a catwalk. You could have easily thrown in a voiceover: ‘When you’re at work, watch yourself.’ ”
Whannell is on the set of his new film, The Invisible Man, a reimagining of the 1897 HG Wells novel of the same name starring Elisabeth Moss. The director is now something of an aspirational figure in the Australian film industry, having made it big in Hollywood while staying true to his creative vision. Back in the 90s though he was known to Australian audiences as the impassioned film critic on the ABC’s seminal Saturday morning youth music program Recovery, with Dylan Lewis.
It was a little horror film called Saw, made with frequent collaborator James Wan, that saw him break big. The Australian industry at the time was genre-averse, and the pair were unable to find support for it at home. But then the film sold internationally, becoming a billion-dollar franchise with nine films and counting (Saw uber-fan Chris Rock has written and stars in the next instalment, Spiral, which comes out this year with Samuel L Jackson).
Wan directed the first film, which he co-wrote with Whannell, who also starred as one of the ill-fated main characters. Whannell would continue to be a guiding hand in the franchise for the first three movies as a writer and recurring character while serving as executive producer on the rest.
The Matrix Reloaded turned out not to be his breakthrough after all but nearly two decades later he’s back filming his own movie on the same stage, on the same lot.
“Granted, the set I’m using is a lot smaller than the one they had for The Matrix, but I sat in that room, in that studio, when I wanted to be the Wachowskis, when I wanted to be making that film,” he says.
“It was pretty transformative in that sense. It was the first time something clicked in my mind that maybe I could do this … Maybe my dreams weren’t as unachievable as I thought.”
In The Invisible Man, Moss plays a woman convinced her supposed-to-be-dead former husband is haunting her. Whannell’s riff on the classic story is tense and atmospheric, doing for empty spaces what Jaws did for the ocean. And the title is somewhat of a Trojan Horse: while previous versions focused on the protagonist (or antagonist, depending on the teller), the 2020 iteration is all about the very real, very human woman at the centre of it all.
And as far as lead actors go, there are few bigger than Moss right now, testament to Whannell’s reputation. He made his directorial debut with Insidious: Chapter 3 in 2015 – another hugely successful horror franchise he and Wan kickstarted – but it was his second stint at direction that made people stand up and take notice.
A slick and gory ode to the pitfalls of technology, Upgrade in 2018 drew comparisons to the work of horror master John Carpenter, thanks in large part to Whannell’s precision of vision and ability to stretch a small budget. (Fittingly, Whannell has just been tapped for the upcoming remake of Carpenter’s Escape From New York.)
While Wan has been making blockbusters such as Aquaman and Fast & Furious 7, and creating the Conjuring Universe, Whannell has carved a niche as a genre artisan. So when it came time for the latest attempt to resurrect the Dark Universe – which many consider the original cinematic universe – there was only one person super-producer Jason Blum considered for the job.
Whannell wasn’t sure about diving into Universal’s world of monster movie classics – which includes The Wolf Man (1941), Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), and James Whale’s definitive film version of The Invisible Man (1933). Since then the character has had diminishing returns on screen, including Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man from 2000 with Kevin Bacon, with several television attempts.
“I saw an opportunity to change people’s perceptions of what The Invisible Man was,” Whannell says. “He’s very well known, but I think as time has gone by that character has become almost comical: you know, the floating sunglasses and bandages.
“The more I thought about it, the more I realised The Invisible Man movie I would love to see has never been made.”
• The Invisible Man releases globally on 27 February
