You won’t find many “invisible man” tropes in The Unseen, the feature directorial debut from Vancouver filmmaker Geoff Redknap.
“’Invisible man’ movies tend to be about gags, about hats floating around on people that you can’t see, and cutlery moving around, and we wanted to come up with a way that it would be fresh,” says Redknap, whose new film screens Oct. 7 as part of the 35th Vancouver International Film Festival.
Redknap and producing partner Katie Weekley also had a more practical motivation for rejecting those age-old cinema tropes: they didn’t want to “search for the perfect actor, cast the perfect actor, pay the perfect actor, and then not show him, which is a problem you have with invisible characters,” says Redknap.
That led the duo to rethink the whole concept of invisibility. “It evolved to a progressive condition, rather than an instantaneous lab experiment gone wrong – or right, however you look at the movie,” says Redknap.
So while you won’t see any floating spoons or levitating hats in The Unseen, you will bear witness as a man (portrayed by Rectify’s Aden Young) slowly disappears.
And this man – named Bob – isn't a mad scientist holed up in a spooky laboratory. He works in a sawmill, and he’s got an estranged teenage daughter (played by Julia Sarah Stone), a distraught ex (Camille Sullivan), and an unhappy drug dealer (Ben Cotton) all driving his actions and emotions.
For Redknap – a longtime director of short films with an even longer career as a special effects makeup artist on big budget projects like Star Trek Beyond and Deadpool – the experience of making the The Unseen was both satisfying and challenging.
“Making indie films is pretty much non-stop challenges, and I think if you’re not being challenged, you’re not trying hard enough,” chuckles Redknap. “If it’s too easy, you should be trying harder, because you’re not pushing yourself.”
One of the elements that made The Unseen especially challenging – and especially sumptuous – was location, location, location.
Redknap and co. shot The Unseen over 23 days at multiple locations in Vancouver, Langley, Britannia Beach, Vernon, and Kelowna – including at a sawmill.
“One of our goals to give the film a higher production value was to be very aggressive about the number of locations we used,” says Redknap. “We’re BC filmmakers, and I come from small town BC originally and I worked in sawmills, so that area was familiar to me, and I have a good friend who still works in the forestry industry and I hear his stories all of the time, so it was fuel for my writing.”
For his disappearing lead, Redknap sought out Young after enjoying the actor’s work on SundanceTV’s Rectify.
Once it was public knowledge that Young was confirmed for the role, “everybody in town starting calling us – actors that were our first choices for roles that we hadn’t even approached yet, their managers were calling us – because he’s just that good an actor,” says Redknap. “Actors know good actors, and they wanted to work with Aden.”
“Pretty much every filmmaker says, ‘our cast is amazing,’ but our cast really was amazing,” adds Redknap.
See The Unseen for yourself Oct. 7 at Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas. Tickets at https://www.viff.org/Online/article/f21532-the-unseen
