Director Paul Anderson and cinematographer Adrian Biddle, BSC enter the darkest depths of space in Event Horizon.
In astronomer's lingo, an "event horizon" is the point at which light and matter are ensnared by the immense gravitational field of a black hole, the remnants of a collapsed star. Scientists and science-fiction writers alike have postulated that black holes could possibly be portals to a distant galaxy, a parallel universe, or perhaps even Heaven or Hell. In British director Paul Anderson's sci-fi horror film Event Horizon, this astral phenomenon also provides the name of a prototype starship powered by the energy of a black hole. After a seven-year disappearance, the ship has mysteriously rematerialized over the planet Neptune. A rescue mission mounted from a salvage ship the Lewis & Clark reveals that the derelict vessel has been ravaged by a malevolent presence whose origins date back to the Earth's Middle Ages.
This quasi-mystical plot provides the perfect backdrop for grim episodes of Gothic space horror. Director Anderson offers, "Event Horizon has a lot more in common with The Haunting or The Amityville Horror than The Black Hole. This film is about spacemen in the future who come face to face with a very medieval kind of evil in the far-flung reaches of our solar system. If you replaced The Shining's Overlook Hotel with a labyrinthine spaceship orbiting Neptune, you'd have the basic premise. It's a great bonus that the story is set on a giant spaceship, but we're not making any bones about it we're out to scare and revolt people like they did in the good old days! We don't want any of this namby-pamby postmodern horror attitude, we just want people to jump off their seats. I wanted to make the kind of frightening horror movie that I loved as kid, like Alien."
Anderson's previous pictures the $3 million independent cult film Shopping (1993) and the $23 million effects extravaganza Mortal Kombat (1995) proved that he could milk maximum impact from frugal financing. Event Horizon's budget of $70 million offered considerably more breathing room, but still proved to be a daunting project. Anderson therefore entrusted its look to some of the business' top talent, including cinematographer Adrian Biddle, BSC and visual effects supervisor Richard Yuricich, ASC. "I think both Adrian and Richard are pretty sick individuals," Anderson opines with a chuckle, recalling a sequence in which one Lewis & Clark crew member gouges out his own eyes. "Richard was suggesting things like, 'He could sew his eyes back up again and we could do it in CG!' I'd reply, 'I'm a hardened horror fan, but even I don't want to see that!' Then Adrian would say, 'If I put a light here, we could get more light into the empty holes of his eye sockets.' They definitely got into the spirit of the film."
Adrian Biddle has spent much of his career realizing fantastic yet believable milieus. In his early days as a camera assistant, he donned a pair of skis to shoot the famed toboggan chase in the James Bond adventure On Her Majesty's Secret Service. He also did some striking underwater work on Captain Nemo and the Underwater City. Biddle then served as a focus puller on director Ridley Scott's first two features The Duellists (shot by Frank Tidy, BSC) and Alien (shot by Derek Vanlint).
Biddle's subsequent TV commercial work for Scott and other filmmakers netted him two Minerves prizes and a British Designers and Art Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Cinematography. He later served as director of photography on Scott's films Thelma & Louise (for which he earned an Academy Award nomination) and 1492 Conquest of Paradise (see AC Oct. 1992). He has also served as director of photography on Aliens, The Princess Bride, Willow and Judge Dredd.
Having photographed so many genre films, the cinematographer concedes that devising a unique approach can be difficult: "A lot of it is done in conjunction with the director and the production designer. On Event Horizon, I was fortunate to be working with a director like Paul Anderson and a production designer like Joseph Bennett [Jude, Backbeat, Dust Devil, Hardware]. They really have a feel for these things. We went for more of a Gothic approach inside the Event Horizon ship, which has all of these crosses and objects of that nature within it."
When it first appears onscreen, the Event Horizon craft itself resembles a giant crucifix hovering over the surface of Neptune. "The spaceship was built on a cruciform, like all cathedrals are," Anderson explains. "We began the design process by literally scanning the Notre Dame cathedral into the computer and then constructing the Event Horizon out of those Gothic elements. For example, the big thruster engines are an adaptation of the Notre Dame towers, repositioned on their sides. A lot of the iron and steel work of the superstructure is based on the cathedral's stained glass windows. The ship also has a lot of triptych windows and big recessed crosses.
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