Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and cinematographer Darius Khondji, AFC revisit infamous extraterrestrial enemies in Alien Resurrection.
In the summer of 1979, an ominous decree ("In space, no one can hear you scream") was issued to legions of unsuspecting moviegoers. Skillfully directed by Ridley Scott and photographed by Derek Vanlint, Alien became an instant genre classic whose novel look influenced a score of imitators. The film's menacing, claustrophobic atmosphere, nightmarish bio-mechanical alien creatures (designed by Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger), and haunting visuals tapped directly into the terror-regions of the human psyche. Writer/director James Cameron and cameraman Adrian Biddle, BSC then conspired on Aliens, a high-energy 1986 sequel which redefined the original film's shock-appeal with swarms of the insect-like xenomorphs. Six years later, director David Fincher and cinematographer Alex Thomson, BSC crafted the stylishly nihilistic Alien3, in which the series' much-beleaguered heroine, Lt. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), was finally bested by her devilish tormentors: implanted with an alien embryo, she made a suicidal leap into a vat of molten lead in the film's self-sacrificial climax.
In killing off this popular protagonist, 20th Century Fox left itself with something of a predicament for further sequels. However, Alien Resurrection screenwriter Joss Whedon provided a viable narrative solution: reincarnate Ripley and her demons by cloning surviving samples of her alien-tainted DNA. This unholy genetic intermixture produces a reborn Ripley and an exotic array of fiendish extraterrestrials bonded by their shared bloodline. From there, all hell breaks loose.
Helming Alien Resurrection is French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who created the dark, acclaimed fantasies Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children with filmmaking partner Marc Caro. "There are several aspects of this picture that are similar to my other movies," remarks Jeunet. "In fact, in filming some shots for Alien Resurrection, I realized that I had composed similar ones in both Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. However, this film represents the first time I've directed a film that I haven't written, and it is a sequel, so I wanted to respect the spirit of the previous pictures. That was very important to me."
Jeunet took an interest in cinema at an early age. After leaving school at 17 and going to work at a telephone company, he bought a Super 8 camera and began making short animated films. After four years of creative experimentation tempered by professional monotony, he relocated to Paris and later met cartoonist Marc Caro. The duo began their collaboration with the animated short The Escape; their second short, The Merry-Go-Round, earned a 1981 César Award, the Gallic equivalent of an Academy Award. They quickly followed up with the 28-minute, black-and-white short The Last Burst Bunker, which took a year to make as Jeunet served as co-writer and co-director (with Caro), cinematographer, producer, editor, sound cutter and negative cutter. Bunker would go on to play for five years at a Parisian theater on a Saturday midnight double-bill with David Lynch's Eraserhead. These shorts launched Jeunet's entry into the realm of commercials and music videos culminating in his feature debut, Delicatessen.
On Alien Resurrection, his first U.S. studio feature, Jeunet could think of no other cinematographer with whom he'd rather work than Darius Khondji, AFC, who had photographed both of the director's previous films. "At the beginning," reveals the director, "I thought this film would be too difficult for me. It was my goal just to survive Hollywood and make the film, because for a French director, making a film in Hollywood is a dream and a nightmare at the same time! So it was very reassuring for me to work with Darius. After I started work on Alien, though, I discovered that [making a major American studio picture] involved pretty much the same procedures that I had used in France."
"I was lucky on this picture to be hired very early on in preproduction," Khondji says. "I started preparation 12 weeks before principal photography, which is very unique. Some of the design drawings were already done, but I saw most of the drawings coming out in the preproduction. Jean-Pierre and I worked very closely with production designer Nigel Phelps (Judge Dredd), and I think he's really the genius of this movie. His designs gave the film an incredible and very special look."
Khondji and Phelps soon began a series of photographic tests to devise the film's look and color palette. As in all of his prior work, the cinematographer knew that he would be incorporating some form of contrast-enhancement process in the lab to craft the emulsion's latitude to his liking, based on his response to the film's story and characters. The tests would determine which type of process would be used, and to what extent. "I don't think I've ever done so many tests for a film before," relates Khondji. "I experiment a lot during the testing, so I try to get the lab's participation very early on in the production. I also like to have the lab people read the script. I always view my work as a group effort, and I feel it's important to think of my position as perhaps the director of an orchestra. Within that philosophy, I think of the lab as almost an art director of the processing chemistry, and my color timer, Yvan Lucas, as another art director working with the printing.
"In my tests, I try to damage the negative as much as I possibly can underexposing and overexposing it. The people in the lab call me the 'Dracula' of the negative because I like to destroy it. From the ashes comes something new, and I sometimes find very strange imagery that I never would have been aware of if I hadn't gone through the tests. For example, by overexposing by three stops, you may be actually exposing something at key that would normally be very underexposed."
Through his tests, Khondji determined that he would be incorporating Technicolor's ENR process which he had recently utilized to great effect on Evita (see AC Jan. '97) and Eastman Kodak EXR 5293 and Vision 500T 5279 stocks. He gradually used more and more of the 79 as shooting continued, until he was exclusively using the high-speed emulsion. Knowing the ENR process would dramatically deepen his blacks, Khondji utilized a Panaflasher during certain low-light sequences to add detail in the shadows, often simultaneously adding color with warm gels inserted in the device's filter holder.
The cameraman employed Panavision Platinum cameras (as well as an Aaton 35-III with a Panavision mount for handheld work) with Primo standard and close-focusing primes. He and Jeunet opted to shoot the film in the 2.35:1 Super 35 format, as he had done previously on Seven (AC Oct. '95). "I chose Super 35 not due to lighting issues [spherical lenses are faster], but because I wanted to be able to get dynamic movement and certain camera angles," Khondji submits. "Jean-Pierre wanted the freedom to come in very close to an actor's face with the camera, as he had on his previous two films. With anamorphic lenses, you can't get that close in the same shot, because they tend to deform the actor's face. This was not an issue with spherical lenses. Jean-Pierre likes to place the actors in the frame in a way that creates tension, and often makes them enter at certain cross-angles so that they appear suddenly. He's a very big fan of Sergio Leone and of the way he framed his 'scope films; Leone's work has been a primary inspiration for all of Jean-Pierre's films."
"For me," reveals Jeunet, "Once Upon A Time in the West was a revelation. I was 15 when I first saw it, and I could not even talk for three days afterward. My parents kept asking, 'What's the matter, are you sick?' But I could only raise my hand as if to say, 'Don't talk, don't talk!' The second film that affected me that way was A Clockwork Orange, which I saw in the theater 40 times. My background is in animation, and Marc Caro was a comics designer. In a way, we were somewhat like Terry Gilliam in our visual sensibilities on the two French films we did together. We like pictures and compositions. I can't imagine doing a film without paying attention to composition. It's by instinct, I don't think about it. If I think a shot is ugly, I throw it in the garbage in the editing room. Even though I did Alien Resurrection without Marc, I think this film is very close to our movies in terms of its [visual] aesthetics."
With the myriad considerations involved in mounting a huge special effects-laden, sci-fi/action film not to mention the struggle of communicating with a mostly American crew in his modest English Jeunet decided to storyboard the entire picture to give everyone a visual basis from which to work. As Khondji explains, "Working with Jean-Pierre, you really do use the storyboards, although he doesn't want them treated like a literal bible. He wants the crew to imagine beyond the storyboards. There are elements regarding the sets, props and costumes that are not exactly described or even mentioned in the storyboards. But we'd use them for the framing of shots, because he has very definite ideas about how he wants the shot to be framed and which [aspects of the story] you need to tell with the frame."
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