Development In 1986, Harry F. Saint's
Memoirs of an Invisible Man was still unfinished when Hollywood agent
William Morris gave it to
Chevy Chase to read. The actor instantly got interested, which led to a bidding war among studios.
Warner Bros. Pictures paid $1.35 million for the film rights. William Goldman was assigned to write the screenplay in the mid-1980s, by which time
Ivan Reitman was attached to direct. It was Goldman's first screenplay after what he called his "leper" period when he was in no demand to write scripts; he attributes his comeback to being represented by CAA. The project was largely a vanity project shepherded by Chase through the studio. (The film is billed as "A Cornelius Production": Cornelius is Chevy Chase's real first name.) He wanted to make a film about the loneliness of invisibility, intending the film to be a bridge into less comedic roles. Goldman did three drafts of the script and Warners was prepared to greenlight the film. However Chase was unhappy with the script. Reitman wanted to proceed with the script, but the studio backed Chase, and Reitman left the project. Chase found Goldman's script too comedic—"
Clark Griswold becoming invisible"—and sought screenwriters to rework it, reportedly to do something "more serious, with more adventure", eventually approaching
Dana Olsen and Robert Collector.
Richard Donner was attached to direct for eight months due to his experience with visual effects, something that made various potential directors turn down the project. Eventually someone suggested John Carpenter, and Chase approved the idea. Carpenter was then embroiled in a legal dispute with
They Live production company Alive Films regarding his contract. He had several projects fall through: a film with Cher called
Pincushion,
Exorcist III, and a version of
Dracula. He was reluctant to make
Memoirs at first. "When you have lots of money and lots of time, it's really grueling. I enjoy being an
independent, and it's not possible to be one in this situation. But then I thought. 'Why not?' I hadn't done a movie for a long time." The actor had to convince Warner Bros. that Carpenter, whom they still saw as a
horror director, could work well for the picture.
Writing Carpenter spent eighteen months working along with Olsen and Collector to make the script akin to "
North by Northwest meets
Starman", developing the love story to give the protagonist Nick a stronger motivation in escaping the villains. During the period, Chase lost 20 pounds, knowing that production and effects work would be physically demanding.
Filming Filming lasted 84 days between April and June 1991. Carpenter said that due to the effects work by
Industrial Light & Magic, "we essentially had to shoot the same movie twice", as after normal takes the effects team would set up their bulky
VistaVision motion control cameras to film the same elements again while gathering digital data for the
computer-generated imagery. According to visual effects supervisor
Bruce Nicholson, "Success in this movie was showing invisibility in detail". During nine months of preparation, Nicholson studied four previous films on the subject:
The Invisible Man (1933), which receives an homage in the scene where Nick is shown to have his head wrapped in bandages and is wearing large dark goggles; its sequel
The Invisible Man Returns (1940);
Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971); and
Ghost (1990). Chase wore a blue bodysuit below his clothing, so that computer artists could erase his body through
chroma key and match the clothes with computer-generated replicas so that even the inside of the clothing could be seen, along with other touches such as erasing the shadow made by Chase's body. A particularly elaborate effect had Nick's invisible face being covered in flesh-colored make-up. The make-up was applied to Chase as his head was covered in viscous blue cosmetic, tongue and teeth coated with blue food coloring, and the cornea of each eye covered with blue contact lenses, an uncomfortable makeover made worse by the June heat and heavy studio lighting. An
alternate ending was filmed showing Alice giving birth to an invisible child. Carpenter later stated that this ending was cut because "Warner Brothers was worried that the audience would react to the invisible baby as if it were a freak, an unfortunate and innocent diabolical child. Warner Brothers is in the business of making audience-friendly, non-challenging movies. I was aware of this when I signed on [to the film], so I guess I shouldn't complain. Still, we could have released a somewhat stronger version of the picture. But it was a big studio film and it suffered from what a lot of studio movies suffer from: the audience preview process, when you cut every highpoint and lowpoint, and make it very bland." Carpenter would go on to say that the production of the film was very troubling and vigorous. While also battling studio executives, Carpenter claimed Chase and Hannah were "the stuff of nightmares" and "impossible to direct". In particular, Chase would often refuse to wear his special effects makeup and would remove it prematurely, ruining a day's worth of filming.
Music This is one of the few John Carpenter films not scored by the director, with
Shirley Walker composing the music instead. Unlike prior collaborators
Ennio Morricone on
The Thing and
Jack Nitzsche on
Starman, Walker would team back up with Carpenter, the two co-scoring the subsequent
Escape from L.A.. She was suggested to work on the movie when Jack Nitzsche refused to do it – a landmark decision, not just because Carpenter often composed his own scores, but because it was one of the first times a female composer had a solo credit on a major studio picture. It would become Walker's first official solo film score. Walker has the distinction of being the first woman to have composed an entire symphonic score, which she also orchestrated and conducted alone. After this she got recognition and went to do movies like
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm,
Turbulence,
Willard and the first three
Final Destination movies. ==Reception==