The colossal 007 Stage the biggest silent stage in Europe housed the Event Horizon's core, comprising three "Containments" that harnessed the black hole's energy. The sets consisted of the First Containment (a rotating corridor) connected directly with the Second Containment (a large, bowl-shaped room) which itself housed the Third Containment (a gyrosphere of spinning lights encompassing the black hole itself).
Each Containment presented unique cinematographic challenges. "The First Containment was a 50'-long tube that actually rotated, so the only bit that wasn't moving was this really thin walkway that ran down the middle of it," Anderson says. "The whole thing was like one of those turbines in a carnival's 'House of Fun,' where you walk through and fall over because you lose all sense of balance. The only place to put the camera was on the walkway, so we built dolly track into it in a discreet way, which allowed us to track down the length of that tube."
This Containment's dark, revolving corridor was studded with a swirling vortex of lights which served as a hypnotic beacon for the crew of the Lewis & Clark. Biddle even bolted the camera to the floor to create a sense of vertigo as the set swiveled upside-down around the actors. Biddle recalls, "We shot several sequences that involved the tunnel. That set was one piece, and the whole thing revolved 360 degrees, so it was a big challenge to light. There was no way to place individual lights inside the set, so we had a big rig all the way around it with lights on it that shined through the holes in the rotating walls. We had about 80 large 10Ks all along the outside pouring light in."
The First Containment, however, is merely the entrance-way "to the room of evil," as Anderson dubs the Second Containment. The director explains, "It's a large circular room with huge spikes coming out of its walls. But because it was a different shape than traditional sets, with curved rather than flat walls, we didn't actually leave ourselves a huge amount of room to work in. The Second Containment was partially flooded as well, so if we weren't trying to stand on a curved wall, we were up to our ankles in water or we were standing in front of the rotating Third Containment in the center, which could knock you over."
To lend the Second Containment's circular chamber a threatening ambiance, Biddle once again opted to backlight through the walls' metallic grillwork. "I couldn't really create claustrophobia in this huge set, which was like a big fishbowl, so I had to unnerve people with lighting," the cinematographer admits. "All of the characters ended up inside that particular set at one point or another. When they first come in, it's very dark, and when the power comes back up on the ship, the lighting changes. We used lasers, and did some practical pyro work in there as well. We had some lights coming from behind the walls and from the top as well. My gaffer, Kevin Day, who's worked with me on most of my pictures, put all of that in not just small units, but major-kilowatt units. We'd go right up to 20K or so in the set. Every lamp we had on the whole movie was on a dimmer or had some sort of gel on it, so they all had to go back to a computer board, and Kevin did all of that. He's my right-hand man."
Biddle and his crew were constantly fighting the clock in the Containment sets, which had to be struck by a certain date. Despite the time crunch, Biddle did achieve some spectacular camera moves within the Second Containment's 360-degree "fishbowl" setup, with several rigs built either into or outside of the set. "We did some great shots in there," the cameraman enthuses. "Every shot in this movie was moving, except maybe a couple of effects shots. We dollied around the base of the sphere, and since the set didn't have a ceiling, we also reached down with a crane mounted outside the set and did boom moves up and down."
Anderson elaborates, "We did some very fluid, sweeping, lovely camera moves in this oddly-shaped set. Those moves, combined with the revolving gyroscope, created a great sense of movement. We also built a pivot point at the top of the set, right above the center of this huge room, so the camera could peer straight down at the Third Containment, and rotate as well."
The Third Containment consists of a large, spinning gyroscope layered with lethal spikes that encloses the black hole powering the Event Horizon. "It's the evil heart of the ship," Anderson explains. "We wanted it to look so mean that you wouldn't want to be in the same room with it. I also wanted it moving all the time to give it an intelligence, and so that it would feel like a pulsating brain."
To create this effect, Biddle and Day put lights on tracks covering the sphere's surface, then set them in motion for each take. "We covered the Third Containment with 500-watt bulbs on strip rigs," Biddle explains. "The lights covering the sphere revolved like a huge 'executive toy.' It's almost like an atom or a model of the universe; all of those things were involved in the design. There were an awful lot of lights revolving on tracks around this sphere."
[ continued on page 4 ]