Production History (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Robert H. Solo brought the remake to Kaufman and Richter in parallel

Producer Robert H. Solo developed the project at United Artists and approached Philip Kaufman (in Body Snatchers, as director) to direct at the same time he was courting W. D. Richter to adapt Jack Finney's 1955 novel The Body Snatchers. The two men knew each other but were initially unaware they were both being pursued for the same picture. (wikipedia, starburst)

Kaufman had been a fan of Don Siegel's (in Body Snatchers, as director) 1956 film since childhood and took the job on the condition that it not be a beat-for-beat remake:

"Well this doesn't have to be a remake as such. It can be a new envisioning that was a variation on a theme." — Philip Kaufman, It Came From Blog (2019)

The first two departures from the original were obvious to Kaufman from the start: color instead of black and white, and a city instead of Santa Mira.

Kaufman moved the pods to San Francisco at the last possible moment

The original novel and the 1956 film are set in a small California town. Kaufman relocated the story to San Francisco — the city he lived in and the city he associated with the exhausted utopianism of late-1970s human-potential culture.

"Could it happen in the city I love the most? The city with the most advanced, progressive therapies, politics and so forth?" — Philip Kaufman, It Came From Blog (2019)

The move was decided late enough that Richter was rewriting pages during production, often only days ahead of what Michael Chapman (in Body Snatchers, as cinematographer) was shooting. See San Francisco as Setting. (starburst)

The shoot ran roughly 49 days on a $3.5 million budget

Principal photography took place in San Francisco with a budget of approximately $3.5 million — a modest sum even by 1978 standards for a studio science-fiction picture. United Artists distributed. (wikipedia, imdb)

Kaufman kept the ending secret from the entire crew except Richter and Solo. Donald Sutherland (in Body Snatchers, as actor) only learned what his final scene would be the night before it was shot.

"The night before we shot I talked to Donald Sutherland about it." — Philip Kaufman, It Came From Blog (2019)

See The Ending (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and The Pod Scream.

Kaufman ran a loose set and trusted the actors to fill silence

Kaufman's direction emphasized behavior over plot beats. He wanted the pre-pod versions of his characters to register as full of small, unreplicable mannerisms so the pod versions would feel wrong by contrast.

"Often people on the set or at the studio are so worried about just getting content, and content is not necessarily going to make the scene full of humanity." — Philip Kaufman, It Came From Blog (2019)

The example he singled out was Brooke Adams (in Body Snatchers, as actor) rolling her eyes in opposite directions across the dinner table — a micro-gesture no pod would reproduce. See Brooke Adams.

Tom Burman and Dell Rheaume built the pods

The pod-growth effects were designed by makeup and creature-effects artists Tom Burman and Dell Rheaume. The pods gestate human doubles visible through translucent membranes — bodies covered in fibrous tendrils and clear jelly, lit from beneath. Kaufman improvised some of the photographic effects himself:

"I found some viscous material in an art store, I think we paid $12 for a big vat of it, and then [we dropped it] into solutions and reversed the film." — Philip Kaufman, It Came From Blog (2019)

Daniel Robichaud, reviewing the film at Considering Stories, noted how effectively the production stretched its modest resources:

"The film works as well as it does without relying on either of the two go-tos for horror flicks: nudity and gruesome effects." — Daniel Robichaud, Considering Stories (2020)

The dog-with-a-human-face is a practical effect built around a real dog

One of the film's most unsettling images — a homeless banjo player whose body has merged with his dog, producing a small animal with a human face — was achieved with a prosthetic mask fitted to a trained dog. A hole in the mask allowed the dog to lick itself through the human face, which gave the creature its uncanny motion on screen. Jerry Garcia can be heard on the soundtrack playing the banjo for the homeless musician's scenes. (wikipedia; TV Tropes)

"Amazing Grace" plays from a cargo ship as the pods ship out

Near the end of the film, speakers on a docked cargo ship play "Amazing Grace" performed on bagpipes by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards while pods are loaded for distribution beyond San Francisco. The hymn cuts to static and a pod dispatcher's flat voice — the film's sharpest collision of human feeling and the system replacing it. See Denny Zeitlin for how the source cue sits against the original score. (WhatSong soundtrack listing)

Ben Burtt built the pod scream from pig squeals and ultrasound

Sound designer Ben Burtt, fresh off Star Wars, created the film's signature sound — the high-pitched shriek the pod people emit to identify unconverted humans. Kaufman recalled Ben Burtt's encyclopedic command of sound history as the key to the collaboration:

"I remember with Ben Burtt somebody would play a door slam and he would identify when that slam was made and what it was: 'Warner Brothers, 1937.' So when we created the pod shriek, he just became so inventive. Out of his respect for sound and knowing the whole encyclopedia of sound effects, how could he do something that was original and bone-chilling?" — Philip Kaufman, Screen Rant

See The Pod Scream for the scream's construction and Denny Zeitlin for how Zeitlin's score morphs into Burtt's sound effects and back.

Kaufman noir-staged the exteriors with Chapman

Kaufman and cinematographer Michael Chapman watched film-noir reference prints before shooting and planned the San Francisco exteriors as silhouettes and shadow-drops:

"When they're running along the Embarcadero and the huge shadows appear first, those are sort of classic film noir images." — Philip Kaufman, It Came From Blog (2019)

Jonestown arrived three weeks before the film opened

The Jonestown mass suicide occurred on November 18, 1978. Invasion of the Body Snatchers opened December 22. The coincidence shaped how audiences read the film — a story about a San Francisco movement whose members surrender their individuality to a group, released weeks after 900 followers of a San Francisco movement surrendered their lives.

"Part of the pod thing is becoming single-minded, and becoming part of a group of people who are single-minded and bent on survival of that group. Just before the film was released, Jonestown took place, and that was a case of a lot of people from San Francisco were looking for a better world and suddenly found themselves in pod-dom, and it was fatal." — Philip Kaufman, It Came From Blog (2019)

See Post-Watergate Paranoia and Themes and Analysis (Invasion of the Body Snatchers).