directors turn down the project. Eventually someone suggested John Carpenter, and Chase approved the idea. Carpenter was then in a legal dispute with They Live production company Alive Films regarding his contract. He had several projects fall through: a film with Cher called Pincushion, Exorcist III, and a version of Dracula. He was reluctant to make Memoirs at first. "When you have lots of money and lots of time, it's really grueling. I enjoy being an independent, and it's not possible to be one in this situation. But then I thought. 'Why not?' I hadn't done a movie for a long time." The actor had to convince Warner Bros. that Carpenter, who they still saw as a horror director, could work well for the picture. Writing Carpenter spent eighteen months working along with Olsen and Collector to make the script akin to "North by Northwest meets Starman", developing the love story to give the protagonist Nick a stronger motivation in escaping the villains. During the period, Chase lost 20 pounds knowing production and effects work would be physically straining. ""What we tried to do with Memoirs is show his character going through changes," said Carpenter. "Chevy didn’t want to just play somebody like Clark Griswold from the Vacation movies, who never changes." "It’s not about the kind of situation where Claude Rains became invisible and went nuts, nor is it about a wacky guy who’s invisible and looks up girls' skirts throughout the movie," said Chase. "It’s mostly about the peril of being invisible — not the fun or joy of it." Filming Filming rolled for 84 days between April and June 1991. Parts of the film were shot in Snowbird, Utah. Carpenter said due to the effects work by Industrial Light & Magic "we essentially had to shoot the same movie twice", as after normal takes the effects team would set up their bulky VistaVision motion control cameras to film the same elements again while gathering digital data for the computer-generated imagery. According to visual effects supervisor Bruce Nicholson, "Success in this movie was showing invisibility in detail". During nine months of preparation, Nicholson studied four previous films on the subject, The Invisible Man - which receives a tribute in the scene where Nick is shown to have his head wrapped in bandages and is wearing large dark goggles - and its sequel The Invisible Man Returns, Bedknobs and