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Midway through Element's stellar adventure, Dallas and Leeloo board the floating pleasure cruiser Fhloston Paradise to contact an extraterrestrial opera diva and find clues to the whereabouts of the five artifacts they seek. Before the pair can acquire any information, the strange siren must first take the stage and perform for an eclectic audience of admirers.
The scene was one of the film's few that was filmed on location, inside the towering London Covent Garden Royal Opera House. While on stage, the aquamarine diva is bathed in an intense but cold spotlight. Recalls Arbogast, "When we were planning this, I remembered the scene from A Clockwork Orange [shot by John Alcott, BSC] where the nude woman on the stage [during the demonstration of Alex's "cure" via the Ludovico technique] was lit by a blue follow-spot. In our film, the diva's outfit was blue and the set was a bit golden in tone, so I thought it would be best to play with the color temperatures a bit. I lit her to be slightly overexposed, which would help give the impression that some of the light was emanating from within her. We wanted her to give off a glow. I lit her with a 4K Xenon from the balcony seats above, but since the stability of the light on her wasn't perfect, I used a 6K Cinepar for the tighter shots.
"Most of the lights you see in the opera house were already there," he adds. "The difficulty was in lighting the people in the audience without illuminating the white facades of the balcony. Therefore, we used a lot of flags to focus our lighting precisely on the people."
Location work factored into the picture's prologue as well. The film's first sequence begins in early 20th-century Egypt, where a spaceship piloted by the benevolent Mondoshawan lands near a temple to retrieve four of the five elements needed to vanquish the evil forces threatening the universe. Ten days' worth of photography took place in Mauritania, a nation on the eastern peninsula of the African continent. With advisory assistance from Digital Domain effects cinematographer Bill Neil, Arbogast shot background plates for the ship's vertical landing and takeoff. The location-shot footage was later augmented with set work photographed at Pinewood Studios.
Arbogast details, "We wanted to give the desert a presence, and we used very bright light outside to give the temple the feeling of a black oven or corridor. Luc had the brilliant idea to have children use mirrors to reflect light into the temple [as a practical source]. I decided to deploy 18K HMIs for this general daylight effect, because I wanted to use a few very strong sources. We then used a Xenon light to get the reflection of the 'sun' from the mirrors. We didn't use any lens filtration, because the sets were already done in warm tones, but we did use warming gels on the lights."
Clad in copper-colored armor, the lumbering Mondo-shawan resemble nothing so much as a group of giant walking alarm clocks. They were lit much like an automobile might be in order to highlight their gleaming contours. As Arbogast recalls, "I tried to bounce my lighting, because their metal suits took reflections very well. We had also hung a large softbox overhead for overall ambience. The motivation was that there might be a hole in the temple ceiling with sunlight coming in."
Pinewood's mammoth "007 Stage" (famed for its use on various James Bond films) was dressed as a plush hotel ballroom during the final days of production to facilitate an extensive shootout sequence pitting Dallas against Mangalore mercenaries who have boarded the Fhloston Paradise. Outgunned, the cabbie retrieves a grenade lobbed by his alien foes and slings it back in their direction — resulting in the largest indoor explosion ever created. Notes Arbogast, "We used about 15 different cameras running at once for that shot. Luc doesn't like to use slow-motion for explosions, but we did have the cameras set at various frame rates ranging from 24 to 48 fps. Controlling the exposure during the explosion was tricky, because the set was really big and the higher frame rates necessitated a lot of light. The extra lighting helped us to control the exposure; we didn't want the flash to be too bright."
The extensive use of special effects in Fifth Element — 240 shots combining CGI, greenscreen work, models and miniatures — was a novel challenge for Arbogast, who had never before mapped out lighting effects that would be coupled with postpro-duction creations.
An impressive example of this photographic approach occurs in the film's first act, when Leeloo finds herself trapped on the ledge of a skyscraper as she is pursued by the NYPD's armor-plated, jack-booted officers. Manhattan looms all around her precarious perch, hundreds of stories above the invisible street far below. As Leeloo considers her fate, an external elevator rushes past along the side of the huge structure, narrowly missing the girl as its running lights flash across her frightened profile.
In reality, of course, actress Milla Jovovich merely performed on a slightly elevated set, situated above a massive greenscreen. But while the cityscape and elevator car were digital additions, Arbogast had to create as much interactive lighting as possible to help sell the shot. "We had to cheat the lighting on her face from the vertical elevator," he notes. "We built a special guillotine-like device that would cut the light as it moved across it. The whole thing was a bit like a film strip, with these bars that would interrupt the light. We also had a dimmer-controlled vertical light bar with different sources to create a kind of uneven lighting."
Leeloo chooses to leap rather than be captured, but as fate would have it, she safely lands in Korben's flying cab. What ensues is a spectacular flying car chase through the skies of the labyrinthine megalopolis as Korben outmaneuvers dozens of pursuing police cruisers. Arbogast offers, "The difficult part [of shooting the cab interiors] was in matching the studio lighting with the lighting of the special-effects city. I also had to create some interactive shadows and special lighting effects on the cars, because the light was always moving around them. We rigged certain lights on dimmers that would oscillate to create the sense of movement, and also physically moved some other fixtures around the cars themselves."
Having aced his entry into big-budget moviemaking, the cinematographer is currently in the former Yugoslavia completing work on a still-untitled film directed by Emir Kusturica (Time of the Gypsies, Arizona Dreaming). Arbogast says that he is hoping to collaborate again with Besson, who has no new projects on deck just yet. "He's the best director I could work with," says the cameraman. "Luc has a very specific style of filming that adds a lot to the cinematography. He's a bit like Kubrick or Spielberg in the way he handles the camerawork. He places the camera to meet the action; it's simple but very effective, and the action is always clear."
