The Fifth Element - Absolutely No Admittance”. Thus read the sign outside the vast, hangar-like sound stages at Pinewood Studios while, inside, Luc Besson and his team of actors, technicians and digital wizards were busy contriving the $90 million spectacle which opens the Cannes Film Festival tonight. Like the D-Day plans, production details were kept top secret. Even a recent teaser campaign didn't do much to elucidate matters: trailers warned cinemagoers that something big and very exotic was on its way, but neglected to say exactly what.
At last, it is time for The Fifth Element to be unveiled. As a Hollywood blockbuster made by a French auteur in a British studio, a film matching European artistry with American know-how, it makes a perfect overture to Cannes' 50th birthday celebrations.
Often with productions on this scale, the director's original vision is lost amid all the gadgetry and special effects, but given that Besson wrote the script, operated the camera and oversaw every technical decision - however minute - this is one studio epic with a distinctly personal touch. As Besson puts it, “This is the first time an individual artist has tried to build the entire machine himself.”
Nor was The Fifth Element thrown together on a whim. Besson has been working on it in one form or another for over 20 years. “I started on this story when I was 16,” he observes, “writing solely for the pleasure of it - just to escape the everyday.” His original screenplay was a hulking 400 pages long. “I just put down on paper everything that I love to see. I just like to go for it, and I consider the serious questions later,” he says.
After earth, wind, fire and water, the fifth element, Besson explains, is life itself. The film is set in the 23rd century. Humans have escaped their earthly bounds and colonised the stars. But a dark, inscrutable being from a parallel dimension is threatening to extinguish the light. With humanity on the brink of disaster, a New York cabbie (Bruce Willis) emerges as unlikely saviour.
To help design his film, Besson recruited Jean Giraud and Jean-Claude Mezieres (who collaborate on graphic novels as “Moebius”) and enlisted half a dozen artists to provide him with drawings. Besson and his team worked in tandem with the visual effects designers, Digital Domain, fashioning a menagerie of outlandish creatures. (Probably the most memorable is Besson's pet alien species, the Mondoshawan - large, rubbery, armadillo-like animals with tiny heads.) The small army of extras were clad in outlandish outfits designed by that supreme iconoclast of the fashion world, Jean-Paul Gaultier.
There's a touch of Barbarella-like kitsch about Besson's vision of the future, which encompasses everything from dainty little space hostesses to police officers with strange plastic cones on their heads. The sheer scale of the project also inevitably rekindles memories of the original dystopian sci-fi epic - Fritz Lang's Metropolis. This is cinema as spectacle, something about which Besson makes no apologies. He believes in “movies for people, movies for emotion”, not ponderous, talk-heavy films for the delectation of a handful of pompous intellectuals.
Not that Besson neglects his actors in favour of showy effects. “The movie is, above all else, a story. The effects are there to do their job in relation to the story, not the other way around,” he observes. His improvisatory approach extends to casting: doughty old British character actor Ian Holm, comedian Lee Evans, trip-hop meister Tricky and actress/model/singer Milla Jovovich appear alongside the two A-list stars, Bruce Willis and Gary Oldman (Besson also produced Oldman's Competition entry, Nil By Mouth).
In two days' time, The Fifth Element opens all across America. First, Besson hopes, it will put a bit of oomph into this year's Cannes celebrations. “This is meant purely for fun,” he says. “When I made my last film, I was feeling a little aggressive and dark. The Fifth Element comes from an entirely different mood - it's just for fun and big, big adventure.”
Geoffrey MacNab
Prod co: Gaumont
Prod: Patrice Ledoux
Dir: Luc Besson
Scr: Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen
Ph: Thierry Arbogast
Prod des: Dan Weil
Cos: Jean-Paul Gaultier
Mus: Eric Serra
Ed: Sylvia Landra
Cast: Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, Milla Jovovich
Running Time: 125 mins
Int'l sales: Gaumont
