"When Adrian and I first sat down, we said, 'Let's do something completely different,'" says Anderson. "Since we were going into outer space, I felt we had to have a really strong design concept; otherwise Event Horizon would have ended up looking like [a bunch of] other movies cobbled together. We spent a lot of time coming up with a design concept, which we called 'techno-medieval.' When the lights are on, everything looks very technological and very spaceship-like. But when the lights go off and the haunting begins, you start looking at the shapes, and the architecture is actually very medieval. We extended that techno-medieval design idea into as many aspects of the picture's look as possible, without rubbing the audience's nose in it."
Beyond this hybrid production design, Biddle and Anderson struck upon the idea of using colored gels, a tactic not typically employed in films with such bilious subject matter. In moments of maniacal hysteria, for example, the spaceship's interior seems to come to life as a bloodlike substance courses from the walls. Notes Biddle, "I used some sepia brown coming up from the floor to make viewers uncomfortable on the ship, as well as flashes of red. I also used a lot of green. Cinematographers generally shy away from green, because it's not very pleasant, but on Event Horizon I used gels to produce that nasty, horrible green you get from fluorescents when they're not corrected [for color temperature]. If you're in an underground car park, the fluorescents make you feel uncomfortable. I was going for that kind of an effect, to convey the idea that something not very good is lurking in the ship."
When Anderson first met with Biddle, the director showed him several improperly balanced photographs of a rock 'n' roll band standing in a corridor lit by fluorescent lights. The images had all gone a ghastly green. "It was like mistake-green," says Anderson with a laugh, "and I said to Adrian, 'That's exactly the color we want.' On Mortal Kombat, [director of photography] John Leonetti and I really raided the lighting truck for gels that nobody else ever used deep purples, shades like that. Adrian and I tried to do the same thing on this movie. We wanted unpleasant colors that would really unsettle people and make them feel a little ill and queasy. Adrian had just come off of 101 Dalmatians, and our attitude was, 'Enough of the cute little puppies let's string a few of them up!'"
Biddle framed Event Horizon in widescreen anamorphic with Panavision equipment, just as he had done on 1492 and Willow. In an unusual move, the cinematographer photographed the entire film on Eastman Kodak's 500 ASA 5279 Vision stock, which he began using last summer, midway through production of director Neil Jordan's upcoming film The Butcher Boy. "The 79 was perfect for Event Horizon, because I get better blacks with it than I do with 5245 or 96," he says. "The 79 can be very forgiving in the dark. And in anamorphic, I'd rather go for a bit more f-stop to bring the quality up and get finer grain."
The interiors of the Event Horizon spacecraft filled most of seven soundstages at England's Pinewood Studios, including its vast 007 Stage. These massive sets would appear to offer unlimited directorial possibilities, but Anderson's insistence upon bizarre interior designs created a fair share of cinematographic constraints. In defending that tack, Anderson notes, "Whenever people build sets, they always tend to look like square boxes. It would have been easier to build sets with flat floors and flat walls to give ourselves lots of room for the camera, monitors and sound equipment, but it wouldn't necessarily have looked the most interesting. I wanted to get away from that 'big room' feel by building sets that were very different, using visually striking, interesting shapes. By doing that, of course, we actually made things more difficult for ourselves. We tried to get Adrian involved as soon as possible [in the design of the sets], since I knew they would be difficult to shoot in."
One of the larger sets was a vast, elliptical-shaped corridor with a ceiling formed from massive ribs that resembled those of a whale. Anderson wanted to view the entire span of the 140'-long tunnel as the astronauts moved through it. To achieve the shot, Biddle shone light into the set by placing fixtures along the outside of its frame. His on-set light sources were the astronaut's flashlights and the fixtures built into the helmets of their spacesuits. "We gelled the set itself and set up our units outside," Biddle explains. "I used lime green lighting through the windows, between each of the ribs. It was sort of a green-blue, which was supposed to be light coming from Neptune. In some of the other windows, we had a bit of red lightning flashing from a swirling storm over the planet. We had to use quite a lot of smoke in the green corridor, and we had hundreds of lamps behind the set. Once the fixtures were on scaffolds and throwing light all around, all of them had to go back to dimmers. We also used Lightning Strikes units to create both lightning and strobe-lighting effects; sometimes they were gelled and sometimes they were white. We had about 50 on that set, which took weeks to rig."
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