Hollow Man is a 2000 science fiction horror film directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Andrew W. Marlowe from a story he co-wrote with Gary Scott Thompson. The film stars Elisabeth Shue, Kevin Bacon, Josh Brolin, Kim Dickens, Greg Grunberg, Joey Slotnick, Mary Randle, and William Devane. It follows Sebastian Caine, a scientist who volunteers to test an experimental serum that renders him invisible. When the process cannot be reversed, he becomes increasingly unstable and violent.
Produced as a large-scale studio project with an emphasis on visual effects, the film was shot in 1999 on a budget of approximately $95 million, most of which was allocated to effects work by Sony Pictures Imageworks and Tippett Studio. Filming took place in California and the Washington, D.C. area, combining practical effects with digital compositing to depict invisibility, including motion-control photography and computer-generated imagery.
Released in the United States on August 4, 2000, Hollow Man debuted at number one at the box office and went on to gross about $190 million worldwide. The film received generally negative reviews from critics. However, its visual effects were well-received and earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects at the 73rd Academy Awards.
A direct-to-video sequel, Hollow Man 2, starring Christian Slater and Peter Facinelli, was released in 2006.
Plot Brilliant but narcissistic scientist Sebastian Caine develops a serum for the military that renders a subject invisible. His team includes ex-girlfriend Linda McKay, Matt Kensington, Sarah Kennedy, Janice Walton, Carter Abbey, and Frank Chase. Sebastian finally devises a means to reverse the process, which they successfully test on an invisible gorilla. Sebastian also continues to pursue Linda romantically, unaware that she is now involved with Matt.
Rather than report his success, Sebastian lies to an oversight committee, including his mentor Howard Kramer, claiming he needs more time. Intending to make history as the first invisible man, he persuades Linda and Matt to proceed with unauthorized human testing while keeping the others uninformed. The procedure succeeds, and Sebastian becomes completely invisible. He is initially overjoyed at the success and begins using his condition to spy on and prank his colleagues, but eventually progresses to sexually assaulting a sleeping Sarah. The team grows concerned about his behavior. When the reversal procedure fails and nearly kills him, Sebastian is quarantined in the lab, and the team creates a latex mask for him to wear.
Sebastian becomes frustrated both by his situation and the constant testing he must undergo, leaving the facility and returning to his apartment. There, he resumes spying on an attractive neighbor. Realizing that no one could prove he was there, Sebastian sneaks into his neighbor's apartment and rapes her, before returning to the lab. Linda warns that if he leaves again, she and Matt will report the truth to the committee. Ignoring this, Sebastian rigs a device to loop a recording of his heat signature in his quarters, allowing him to leave undetected. He spies on Linda and Matt and becomes enraged upon seeing their relationship. Growing increasingly unstable, Sebastian later kills a dog used in the lab. The team discovers the looped recording and realizes Sebastian has been leaving the facility. Linda and Matt confess the unauthorized experiment to Kramer. After they leave, Sebastian, who has followed them, drowns Kramer in his pool.
The next day, Linda learns of Kramer's death just before Sebastian traps the team inside the lab by disabling the phones and elevator codes. He murders Janice, forcing the others into hiding while Matt and Carter search for him using tranquilizer guns and thermal goggles. Linda attempts to rationalize with Sebastian, who refuses to surrender the freedom and power his invisibility gives him. The team deduces that Sebastian intends to kill them all to conceal the fact that he has been made invisible. He kills Carter, Sarah, and Frank, wounds Matt, and locks him and Linda in a freezer. Linda uses a defibrillator to create an electromagnet and force the freezer door open, then constructs a flamethrower. Meanwhile, Sebastian rigs an improvised bomb using lab equipment.
As Sebastian attempts to escape via the elevator, Linda attacks him with the flamethrower, severely burning him. He survives and continues the attack. During the ensuing struggle, Matt strikes Sebastian with a crowbar. Though he recovers, Sebastian is thrown into a circuit box and electrocuted, incapacitating and rendering him partially visible.
Linda and Matt locate the bomb but cannot stop it. They climb the elevator shaft to escape just before the bomb explodes. Sebastian returns and pulls Linda onto the elevator roof before attacking her. He asks for a final kiss; during it, Linda disconnects the elevator cables, sending Sebastian falling to his death in the flames rapidly rising in the shaft. Linda and Matt escape the burning facility and are taken away by emergency responders.
Cast
Production Development Following the multi-layered and controversial Starship Troopers (1997), Paul Verhoeven wanted to tone down the levels of sex and violence in his next film, aiming to make a more "conventionally commercial blockbuster". Approximately $50 million of the film's $95 million budget was reserved for visual effects work, which was primarily worked on by Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI)Verhoeven, Paul, Marlowe, Andrew and Bacon, Kevin. Audio commentary. Hollow Man DVD. Sony Pictures, 2001. and Tippett Studio. Of the 560 visual effects shots in the film, approximately two-thirds were worked on by SPI and the remaining third by Tippett Studio. Verhoeven also storyboarded most of the film, as he had done with all of his American films after experiencing trouble coordinating the action of Flesh+Blood (1985). He maintains that over 90% of the film is how he storyboarded it, as it was expensive (costing up to $300,000) if he decided to change a camera movement.
William Goldman says he was sent the script which he thought was "terrible... But I thought if the special effects worked, it could be a very, very exciting and different movie, and I’d never done special effects so I thought that could be interesting." He met with Verhoeven and realised the director liked the script but the studio wanted Goldman to rewrite it; the director said he would ignore anything Goldman did. "So, basically, I started rewriting for a director, knowing he wouldn’t like anything that I was rewriting," said Goldman in 2000. "I haven’t seen the movie, but I gather it sucks although the special effects are terrific. I’ll never know if it could have been saved."
Filming The film was shot in chronological order, partially due to the fact that the laboratory set would be physically blown up near the end of the story, a sequence that was captured by 14 cameras at various angles. Principal photography began on April 16, 1999. Six weeks into filming, Elisabeth Shue tore her Achilles tendon, which shut down production on June 25 for over seven weeks. At one point, producers considered replacing her; however, shooting resumed on August 18, 1999, and ran until February 4, 2000, following her recovery.
Hollow Man was one of very few films allowed to shoot directly in front of The Pentagon building, with Verhoeven expressing surprise that the script was approved, because of the themes of the United States Government commissioning scientific experiments into making living beings invisible. Many of the location scenes were shot in and around Washington, D.C., with a restaurant set also being constructed in a building overlooking the U.S. Capitol. The laboratory scenes were shot at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California; the elevator shaft used in the film's climax was built onto the side of the studio's parking garage.
A thermal imaging camera was employed for scenes showing "invisible" animals (most notably Isabelle the gorilla) or Sebastian following his transformation and the unsuccessful attempt to restore him to visibility; the same technique was used for characters when they look through thermal goggles. As Isabelle was played in part by a man in a gorilla suit, crew members had to stand by and warm the suit with hair dryers in order for the thermal camera to accurately emulate an actual gorilla's warmth.
Despite assumptions that Bacon would not be needed on set except when his character Sebastian is visible, Verhoeven and the crew realized after test footage was shot that he would need to be present to interact with the cast, as "the other actors were stranded in empty space, and the scenes looked stiff, inorganic and unconvincing" without him. Guy Pearce and Edward Norton were also considered for the role of Sebastian before Bacon was chosen, in part for his "ability to be both charming and diabolical". At the time of Hollow Mans release, Bacon recounted a "bad morning" on which, among other mishaps, he read a story in the press that suggested Robert Downey Jr. had been offered the film's title role.
Special effects To achieve the effects of Sebastian being invisible, Bacon was digitally removed from the footage and each scene was shot twice: once with the actors and once without, for the background to be able to be seen through Sebastian's body. The crew used a motion-control camera, to ensure the same movements were achieved and the shots were then composited in post-production. For scenes where Sebastian was outlined in smoke, water and blood, Bacon wore a latex body suit, face mask, contact lenses and a dental plate all of one color; green was used for blood, blue for smoke, and black for water. Visual effects supervisor Craig Hayes then replaced Bacon with a digital clone to form an outline of his performance. To make the clone appear more like Bacon, information about "every aspect" of his body was recorded and the entirety of his body, including his genitals, was scanned into a computer. Their work earned Hayes and the effects team a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, which they lost to Gladiator.
"In Hollow Man we really tried to link the special effect shots with the actors as much as possible. That's why we were constantly sliding, panning and moving the camera, so the audience would feel that the actor was in the special effect shot or that the special effect shot was tied to the actor. We wanted coherence between the special effects and the actors so people would accept the effects as part of the actor's scene rather than as a special effect." — Paul Verhoeven on the film's effects. Inspired after his daughter bought him books on the subject of écorchés at La Specola in Florence, Verhoeven enlisted special effects supervisor Scott Anderson to create a three-dimensional digital model of the inside of Bacon's body, to create the "transformation scene" where Sebastian becomes invisible. New volume-rendering software was required just to replicate the inside of Bacon's body. The scene depicts Sebastian disappearing in stages; first, his skin, followed by his muscles, organs (including his lungs and heart) and finally, his skeleton. Bacon detailed the complications of his role in a diary he kept while filming and believed the "sense of isolation, anger and suffering" that he felt while wearing the mask and body suit helped his performance.