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Mind-blowing
Special effects to make man
A lot of hard work
and sweat, besides deep medical study went into making
Kevin Bacon and a gorilla disappear in the Hollow Man,
which tops the US b.o.
Making people invisible in Hollywood is pretty easy
is what we, in India, and the others around the world
believe. Because Hollywood has churned out enough films
in which you have characters who you see now, and now
you don’t. But the makers of Hollow Man, which
topped the US b.o. when it was released a couple of
weeks back, say they had no idea how difficult, expensive
and time-consuming it would be to make a gorilla invisible,
and then make actor Kevin Bacon vanish digitally layer
by layer — first the skin, then the muscles and
finally his skeleton. “It’s the hardest movie
I have worked on,” Bacon said in an interview,
“But it’s fun to be the ‘effect’
in the movie.”
In Hollow Man, Bacon plays Sebastian Caine, an arrogant
but brilliant scientist, who tests an invisibility drug
on himself with disastrous effects. The leader of an
elite team of scientists, Caine discovers the serum
that triggers invisibility, decides he likes his new
power, and becomes a threat to the existence of fellow
scientists Linda McKay (Elizabeth Shue) and Matthew
Kensington (Josh Brolin), who are trying to reverse
the effect.
Director Paul Verhoeven, who also direc ted
the sci-fi dramas RoboCop and Total Recall, said he
was partly inspired by Plato, who claimed that invisibility
would make people immoral, because no one would be around
to put the brakes on what they do. “He said an
invisible person would become intoxicated with the power
and abuse it simply because he could get away with it.
He would steal, and he would enter homes and rape and
kill at will. Who am I to argue with Plato?” questioned
the director.
While
Bacon and his co-stars are respected Hollywood figures,
the real stars of the movie are the special-effects
team headed by Scott Anderson, who won an Oscar for
visual effects in the 1995 for the film Babe. He and
his cohorts worked for more than a year after the movie
was shot, to make Bacon disappear and re-appear throughout
the film in spell-binding ways.
The
film has 560 special effects and was rumoured to cost
upwards of $100 million — a vast sum compared to
what invisible man movies cost in the 1930s and 1940s,
when the idea of a special effect was to have a cigarette
dangle in mid-air, held up by an unseen string.
Effects
man Anderson said that the scene in Hollow Man, in which
a gorilla disappears when injected with the serum, took
10 months to finish. Another scene that is brilliantly
executed is Caine’s brief eerie re-appearance when
he splashes water on his face.
Producer
Allan Marshall said the most challenging aspect was
the re-creation of the human body and the layering of
its ingredients. “I heard Scott say they had to
consider 10,000 moving parts of the body,” he said.
Informed Anderson, “The human skeleton was the
most accurate thing we created. We hired physiologists
and worked with medical consultants.” To get an
accurate picture of the constitution of the human body,
Anderson and his team attended dissections and examined
films of cadavers.
Bacon
too had his share to play in the special effects by
wearing a skin-tight leotard, painted in garish colors
and covered in gooey substances. The people behind the
movie said Bacon put in one-and-half hours to get ready
for a scene and almost the same time to remove all the
grime.
Elizabeth
Shue said she took up this movie because it gave her
a chance to do a physical role, a far cry from the emotional
prostitute she played in her most memorable and much
acclaimed film Leaving Las Vegas. Shue said she liked
the dark sexuality of the story and its seductive descent
into evil.
As
for her co-star, she said he brought a sense of joy
to his character. “He is invisible in half the
movie, but his presence is always there,” she smiled.
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