With production moving rapidly ahead, David Goyer was well aware that everything would now hinge on finding the right cast to give THE INVISIBLE that feeling of fear-inducing reality. First, he would set out on a search to find a young actor capable of taking on the movie’s challenging central character: Nick, a bright young man who seems to have it all— looks, brains, money, grades and girlfriends—yet is still feeling lost and is just about to give up on himself. Nick only begins to realize what his life is worth through the transformational experience of what it is to be dead.

Because the character spends so much of the film in the limbo between the living and the dead, and thus invisible to the rest of the characters, Goyer knew he would need to find an actor daring enough to try something different and charismatic enough to bring an emotional charge even to non-verbal scenes. After an extensive search, the filmmakers came upon Justin Chatwin, a Canadian native who had recently come to the attention of audiences by playing Tom Cruise’s son in “War of the Worlds.” After meeting with Chatwin, Goyer was convinced he had everything it would take, from his boyish charm to his strong work ethic, to do the role justice. “Justin has a look, a personality and an attitude that absolutely pops on the screen,” observes Goyer. “The camera just loves him. It’s a tough task to play a character who has to react to everything happening around him without playing off of the other actors or having them be able to react to him.”

Adds Mike Macari: “Justin has to carry this invisibility through most of the film, yet he still keeps you completely engaged. There’s very few actors his age who I think could accomplish what he’s done in such a compelling way.”

For his part, Chatwin was instantly drawn to the role’s depth and complexity, which gave him a lot to chew on as he prepared for his performance. “What I loved about the script is that it’s about all these polar opposites—life and death, love and hate—and also about the idea that when you think something is black or white, you might suddenly find that there’s gray to it. It also is very realistic about youth and adults and the lines that separate the two,” he says.

As for playing a character who is literally invisible, Chatwin could at first relate on the most basic level. “I think a lot of kids growing up feel invisible to the world around them,” he says. But as he got deeper into it, he found the experience of operating in the world as a ghost even more profound. “It put me in a realm where I was constantly asking myself questions like ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What am I?’ so I got to explore those questions the same as my character does,” he explains. “It was definitely hard and sometimes frustrating to play a part where no one is talking to you or even looking at you—but it was a really interesting challenge.”

Chatwin was already a fan of Goyer’s “Blade” and “Batman Begins,” so that became another draw for the young star. “One of the things I was really looking forward to was working with David Goyer, because I already knew he had such great visual talent. Anyone who could bring a fantasy idea like Batman to life I knew would be able to take this story and really make audiences believe in it,” he comments.

As Nick learns to navigate as an undetectable ghost, he finds himself trying to reach out to one of the living—and perhaps the most unlikely person of all: Annie, Nick’s seemingly tough- as-nails schoolmate who is implicated in his disappearance. As with Nick, the role of Annie would require an unusual set of skills for a young actress. Whoever they cast would have to be able to pull off Annie’s seething, villainous exterior while also revealing her inner vulnerability and potential for redemption. She would have to be able to flip the audience’s feelings from hatred to sympathy.

The plum role was sought after by many, yet after auditioning dozens upon dozens of Hollywood’s leading young actresses, the filmmakers had yet to see the qualities they were seeking. Then, newcomer Margarita Levieva came in and blew them away. Recalls Mike Macari, “The minute Margarita came in the room, you believed she was dangerous and that she could actually hurt you, yet when she did a tender scene, you were completely with her emotionally. She was a godsend. Annie is such a tough role, yet you instantly buy into Margarita and believe in her.”

David Goyer continues: “I was getting depressed because I just didn’t think we were ever going to find Annie, and I remember my casting director saying, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll just walk in the door’ and literally the next person who walked in was Margarita, this virtual unknown. By the end of her audition, I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s her.’ And from that moment onward, we didn’t even really consider anyone else. I was so convinced that she was the one that I cancelled the other screen tests.”

Goyer continues: “Margarita has to make an incredible transition from this feral girl who seems completely irredeemable and vicious to someone who you feel conflicted about, someone who has been hurt by life and isn’t at all black and white. It’s an extremely complex role with many layers. Annie does this horrible act, but then you start to see her home life, which is awful, and how she’s caring for her younger brother, and all these things. You want to hate this person, but you can’t. And then progressively, as the story unfolds, she ends up actually redeeming herself. Margarita handled it all so beautifully. She’s going to be a huge star.”

Also key was that Justin Chatwin immediately found an intense chemistry with Margarita, volatile though it may be. “From day one, she was very hungry and ready to go,” Justin says. “We bounced off each other a lot on the set and I really felt connected to her. David found somebody who truly has that kind of fierce wild child in her. I enjoyed just watching Margarita because she was so on the edge.”

Levieva, a former gymnast who moved to New York from her native Russia when she was 11, was thrilled at the opportunity to make her screen debut in such a strong and unique role. I feel so lucky and grateful to have had this chance to play a character that is so deep, so diverse and complex,” Levieva says. Last year, she was seen in the ensemble television drama “Vanished.”

Despite Annie’s sheer brutality early in the film, Levieva found she could relate to the character’s inner struggle. “Like Nick, Annie just wants to be visible to the world,” she says. “To be just 18 and so broken and so hurt and so lost in so many ways, I think she feels like nobody really understands who she is.”

She continues: “What’s really interesting is that Annie seems like she’s the dark, evil force you need to stay away from and Nick seems like he’s the perfectly lovable, good, innocent guy, but in a way, they’re both coming from the same place. They’ve both been hurt, they both feel like outcasts, and they both have a different way of seeing the world—and because of that, they are able to ultimately see each other.”

If Nick’s opinion of Annie undergoes a dramatic shift after he gets the chance to observe her from his undetectable vantage point, so, too, does his view of his best friend, Pete, who finds himself torn between his own overwhelming fears and doing the right thing to help save Nick’s life.

To play Pete, David Goyer chose Chris Marquette, a rising young star who has won legions of young fans in his role on television’s “Joan of Arcadia” and is now coming to the fore in feature films. Establishing the loyal but unequal relationship between Nick and Pete was key to the intricacies of the story.

“Nick is the one who always gets the girl, always the good grades and Pete has been kind of a hanger-on in the shadow of this golden boy,” explains Goyer. “But it is Pete’s cowardice that sets in motion all the events that lead to Nick’s potential death. I thought Chris was amazing in the role. He reminds me a lot of Sal Mineo in the James Dean film ‘Rebel Without a Cause.’ He plays this sad, wounded soul so beautifully.”

Justin Chatwin so enjoyed working with Marquette that the two developed a friendship that added further layers of realism to their on-screen relationship. “Chris was great,” says Chatwin. He really digs deeply into the characters he plays, and right from day one, we clicked. Chris and I had mutual friends in common, and I had always wanted to do a movie with him. We just had fun in every scene that we worked together in.”

Marquette was immediately attracted to the screenplay’s nuanced depiction of teen lives inside a harrowing tale of suspense. “I thought the story was really unique, and I also felt there were a lot of truths in the characters,” Chris says. “To take a concept that’s so out of this world, where you have this otherworldly character wandering around, and then to find a lot of reality and truth in it was really interesting to me.”

Still, Marquette admits it was difficult to play out Pete’s tragedy. “Pete is a weak person,” he explains. “Nick tells Pete that he has to learn to stand up for himself, to hold his ground, but Pete doesn’t quite know how to do it because he’s so scared all the time. He’s constantly letting himself be pushed around and told what to do, and all of the sudden, it erupts into this terrible situation he never thought he could be in.”

Helping to create that terrifying situation is the character of Marcus, Annie’s criminal boyfriend, who is played with resonating menace by Alex O’Loughlin, an up-and-coming Australian actor who came to global notice as one of the four finalists for the role of James Bond. He recently made his feature-film debut in the sci-fi thriller “Man Thing,” based on the Marvel comic book, and will join the cast of “The Shield” in 2007.

O’Loughlin was intrigued by Marcus’ intense relationship with Annie. “He’s obsessed with her, even though she’s no good for him,” he observes. “I mean Marcus is no angel. He’s well on his way to becoming a career criminal—but there’s a million reasons why he should walk away from Annie, and he can’t because he’s bewitched by her.”

In playing Marcus, O’Loughlin especially enjoyed working so closely with Margarita Levieva. “She’s an incredibly instinctual actress,” he says. “The minute the cameras are rolling, she’s there, living in the moment.”

In another casting coup, the filmmakers were thrilled to bring Marcia Gay Harden on board as Nick’s mother, Diane—adding an Academy Award®-winning actress to THE INVISIBLE’s roster of young stars. Working with Harden was especially exciting for David Goyer. “She’s the most talented actor I’ve worked with,” he states. “She can turn from one emotion to the next like a switch going on and off. In any other hands, Diane might have come across as the clichéd mother who doesn’t understand her son, but the whole point of the film is that all these characters are invisible to each other, and Nick sees that when her mask is down, that she really does love him—and Marcia makes that so real.”

Justin Chatwin was also pleased to have the chance to work so closely with one of today’s most-acclaimed screen actresses. “One of the things that Nick comes to see in his invisibility is that his mother is not the heartless person he thinks she is—she has real feelings,” he observes. “I loved working with Marcia because she’s so experienced, and I’m always interested in how other actors get to that place and their approach. Marcia is such a fine-tuned actress—she can be subtle and funny and moving at the same time.”

Marcia Gay Harden was equally impressed with Chatwin. “He has a kind of classic film face that you can project a lot onto, and I think you identify with him,” she says. “He is a young actor who is willing to try anything. He just wanted to dive into the character. And in the process, you can get a lot of really wonderful and unusual choices.”

She was also drawn to the screenplay. “It’s a psychological drama to a degree, and it’s certainly also a ticking-clock story, where a crime has to be solved before time runs out, which makes for a really exciting movie,” she says. “But what also interested me is that there is a real undercurrent in terms of what the characters come to understand about themselves—what this mother comes to understand, and what this boy and girl each come to understand about who they are and about what they have been missing in their lives.”

Most of all Harden was especially pleased with the ways in which David Goyer translated both the thrills and depth of the story to the screen. “David and his visual team brought a beautiful starkness to the movie,” she says. “The shots they chose turned out to be so much more interesting than the ones I imagined in my head.”

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THE LOOK OF THE INVISIBLE:
ABOUT THE FILM’S DESIGN
On the set of THE INVISIBLE, David Goyer continued to be driven by character. He knew that each location, each shot, the look of each particular set would help to build the film’s dramatic tension—and unravel the mystery facing Nick Powell.