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At the Core of the ‘Hollow Man’

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

“It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have to look at yourself in the mirror anymore.”

--Sebastian in “Hollow Man.”

You know a film is sailing in uncharted waters when the director slides back in his chair, brushes his hair back with both hands, and says without a trace of contradiction that the underpinning of his latest bloody and violent sci-fi horror picture is rooted in the words of the Greek philosopher Plato.

Bear in mind that in his film a mouse gets picked up and chomped to bits; a dog is slammed to its death against the side of a cage; a woman struggles with a rapist inside her Washington, D.C., apartment; a man smoking a pipe is hurled into his backyard swimming pool by an assailant and drowned; and a research laboratory goes up in flames as the body count of technicians climbs almost by the minute.

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Yet, here is Dutch-born director Paul Verhoeven comparing the fiendish acts depicted in “Hollow Man,” his new R-rated film starring Kevin Bacon and Elisabeth Shue, to words written nearly 2,500 years ago by that great thinker who wrote “The Republic.” Yet somehow, listening to what the director of such films as “RoboCop,” “Total Recall” and “Basic Instinct” is trying to get across in his new film, the use of Plato’s ideas as a context for thinking about “Hollow Man’s” main character begins to make sense.

Imagine for a moment, the director says, that a man suddenly becomes invisible, enabling him to venture out into society and get away with anything he wants without fear of ever being caught? What possible evil could this man be capable of?

In the Columbia Pictures film, which opens Friday, Bacon plays a highly gifted scientist named Sebastian Caine, who, while working on a top-secret U.S. government research project, develops a serum that induces invisibility. Recklessly disobeying Pentagon orders, he experiments on himself. Writhing in pain on an operating room table, we watch hypnotically as his skin, then his veins, then his muscles and tendons, then his internal organs and, finally, his very bones, vanish like vapor before our eyes.

Now invisible to the human eye, the tricks Sebastian can now perform are both humorous and a little scary:

* He can stare in a mirror without seeing his reflection--unless he splashes himself with water.

* He can approach a slumbering colleague and rearrange the hairs on her head by blowing gently through his lips.

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* He can enter a restroom undetected while another female colleague is seated on the toilet.

Not surprisingly, Sebastian becomes intoxicated by his newfound power.

He spies an attractive brunet underdressing for the evening in an apartment window across the way and, while his voyeuristic instincts were always held in check when she did this before, he is now emboldened to visit her. “Who’s gonna know?” he asks himself.

He changes the password that allows other researchers to escape the underground lab where they all work. When Linda (Shue) asks where he is, Sebastian comes on the intercom and says, “You don’t know what it’s like, the power of it, the freedom.

It eventually falls to Linda and her lover and co-worker, Matthew Kensington (Josh Brolin), to try to stop Sebastian’s downward spiral.

“In the beginning, it’s a scientific experiment, a secret military operation supported by the Pentagon--how this process of invisibility has been cracked,” Verhoeven said of the plot. “But ultimately, the story is based on this premise of Plato’s, who said that if somebody becomes invisible, he will grab or steal whatever he can find, he will enter everybody’s house and rape whoever he wants, and he will kill whoever he likes and he will become like a god.”

This theme runs through “Hollow Man,” which is based on a screenplay by Andrew W. Marlowe from a story by Gary Scott Thompson and Marlowe; the film is produced by Alan Marshall and Douglas Wick.

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Sony is a studio that could use some more hits. While the Mel Gibson Revolutionary War saga, “The Patriot,” is hovering around $100 million at the box office, the studio’s next biggest hit this year was Sandra Bullock’s “28 Days,” which grossed $36.9 million.

With a budget some industry sources peg at around $100 million, “Hollow Man” relies on its special effects rather than a major box-office star to pull in moviegoers. Verhoeven, however, dismisses the $100-million production estimate, saying, “We were not allowed to get there.”

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Normally, an actor of Bacon’s stature and ability might look at a script, note that it calls for the male lead to be invisible 70% of the time and kindly take a pass. But Bacon said he was intrigued from the outset by Sebastian, a multilayered (physically and emotionally) character if there ever was one.

“If you took out the invisibility, it would still be an interesting part,” Bacon remarked recently by phone from New York.

Sebastian, he noted, is both brilliant and childlike, a megalomaniac with a twisted, voyeuristic sexuality who is given a project where millions of dollars are at stake and the outcome is uncertain.

“It’s not unlike a movie director!” Bacon joked.

Bacon said he wanted to avoid the usual stereotypes that Hollywood often employs to depict scientists.

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“I tried to play the guy, not with the idea we have of scientists as bespectacled nerds,” he explained. “I tried to make him a rock star. He is very, very self-involved. He is a very sexually driven man. He has had a relationship with [Shue’s character] that didn’t last, probably because he was unable to make any real commitment that she wanted. Yet, he still misses this power he had over her because of his sexual relationship.”

Bacon said it wasn’t only Sebastian that drew him to the part, but the opportunity to work with Verhoeven.

“I’m a great admirer of people who push the envelope, who take it to the edge and are not afraid to takes risks and make mistakes,” Bacon said. He added with a touch of humor: “I think he is a brilliant man and, in some ways, he is not unlike the character I play.”

But it wasn’t only the part or the director that interested Bacon. “Hollow Man” also provides the actor with a starring role in a big effects-laden film that has the potential to become a summer blockbuster.

The Box Office and

Actor Kevin Bacon

Bacon has long been known as a top-flight actor. He has delivered many richly detailed supporting performances over his career, from the brilliant, self-destructive Fenwick in “Diner” and the dancing rebel in “Footloose,” to memorable roles in “JFK,” “A Few Good Men,” “Apollo 13” and a cop researching the rape of a wealthy, teenage sexpot in “Wild Things.” He was nominated for a Golden Globe in 1994 for his role as a chilling psycho in “The River Wild,” which starred Meryl Streep.

Even the paranormal isn’t new to him on film. In last year’s supernatural thriller “Stir of Echoes,” Bacon starred as a man who has frightening visions that urge him to excavate his basement, where he unearths the skeleton of the woman who is haunting him.

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The film opened on Sept. 10 and, despite generally good reviews, grossed only $21.1 million. Some believe that it was severely hurt by the unexpected success of Bruce Willis’ supernatural thriller, “The Sixth Sense,” which opened weeks before on Aug. 6 and went on to make a staggering $293.5 million.

“I can’t tell you the people who told me that ‘Stir of Echoes’ was great and said, ‘People are going to love this,’ ” Bacon recalled. “You know, afterwards, what do I do? What can I do? I can pick up the pieces and try to keep working.”

“I do my best,” he said. “I’ve gone out there many times and hung my ass out there and it hasn’t worked out. . . . The only thing box-office success means to me is the parts get better and the directors start to get better.”

The work he is proudest of, he says, are probably things people have seen the least. “That’s my life in a nutshell,” he says. They include the PBS “American Playhouse” production of “Lemon Sky” (1987), where he met his wife, actress Kyra Sedgwick, and his directorial debut, “Losing Chase,” which premiered on Showtime before receiving a theatrical release. Sedgwick starred opposite Helen Mirren and also executive-produced the film.

He is also an accomplished musician. The Bacon Brothers, a band he formed in 1994 with his older brother, Michael, has cut albums and played a concert this year at New York’s venerable Town Hall.

“Music is going well,” he said. “We’ve cut two records, done a lot of tours and got a chance to get out there and play. We’ve probably had 50 or 60 dates.”

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Bacon is also something of a cultural phenomenon. His prolific acting career inspired the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” parlor game, which was based on the premise that anyone in Hollywood in the past 15 years could be linked to Bacon in six strokes or less. When asked what he thought of the game, Bacon would only say, “It made me chuckle. I find it amusing.”

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Ironically, Bacon noted, he has never seen some of the classic Invisible Man movies of years past so he cannot compare his performance as Sebastian to, for example, Claude Rains in the 1933 horror classic, “The Invisible Man.”

With modern computer graphics, however, “Hollow Man” is able to do things visually that earlier filmmakers only dreamed of doing.

In all, Verhoeven said, there were 560 effects in the film, making it far more complicated than originally anticipated.

One of the more demanding technical scenes is Sebastian’s transformation to invisibility on the operating room table. To make the figure appear as realistic as possible, artists, technicians and designers from Sony Pictures Imageworks visited medical facilities and schools to examine real bodies, pored over anatomical books and even went to Florence, Italy, which has a museum that houses anatomical wax sculptures.

Throughout the film, Sebastian often becomes partially visible, either when submerged in water or enveloped in wisps of smoke, gushing steam or a blowtorch of flames. These demanding effects were done by Tippett Studio, which is headed by Phil Tippett.

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Verhoeven said the visual effects attempted in “Hollow Man” were much more demanding than those in his 1997 sci-fi film, “Starship Troopers.” In “Starship Troopers,” he explained, he first filmed the soldiers in a canyon, then digitally added giant spiders to the shot.

With “Hollow Man,” however, the reverse process applied.

The director explained that whenever Sebastian physically interacts with other people, the actors--including Bacon--had to be filmed before Bacon is matted out. That was accomplished by Bacon spending much of the shoot covered in green, blue or black paint with matching contact lenses, wig, teeth covering and skintight leotard.

When Sebastian is standing underwater, for instance, Bacon is wearing a blue suit. That figure is then removed, leaving a black hole that must be filled in digitally.

“Kevin was completely scanned into the computer--his measurements, the eyebrows, everything,” Verhoeven said. “So, we had a three-dimensional model of Kevin that is identical to [the real] Kevin.”

Bacon said he had “constant hours” of cyber-scans, including a 360-degree scan of his head. “All my expressions--anguish, joy--I did all the consonants and vowels. Basically, they could make me [in a computer].”

Bacon donned an odd-looking mask that, when the digital effects were keyed in, make him appear as though he has no eyes or mouth. “You can see right back through to the back of my head,” he said.

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When asked why the film ends so violently, Verhoeven said it simply flows from the story.

“The story was, of course, that Sebastian becomes a killer,” the director said. “He is not a criminal in the beginning or evil. Invisibility makes him go that way.”

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