FAQ

Being released as a Director's Cut nearly seven minutes of new footage were added to this movie. Most of these new scenes are story extensions but there are also two shots with added violence plus the rape scene was prolonged as well.

Big fans of Paul Verhoeven are to this day uncertain as to whether this is an actual director's cut or just a studio-ordered re-edit. Neither edit of the rape scene makes any sense from a storytelling perspective.

In the deleted scenes section of the DVD, Verhoeven described why scenes were cut. A common element in the cutting of scenes was finding that test audiences were ahead of the story, and information revealed in some scenes was redundant.

This film is inspired by the novella "The Invisible Man" by H.G. Wells. The stories are quite different though, taking place in a different time period and a different place with a completely different series of events. That being said, the basic premise of the movie is very similar to that of the book. A young, brilliant, but emotionally unstable scientist invent a way of becoming invisible. He tries it on an animal and then on himself, but can't become visible again (for different reasons though). Eventually this turns him crazy and evil, he suffers from delusion of grandeur and murderous rage. The protagonists have no choice but to kill him in self-defense. Certain small details are borrowed from the book, like using makeup and falling water to break invisibility (although in the book these methods are only discussed), and the fact that body becomes visible again after death.