Special care was also taken in designing any shots involving the aliens. "Jean-Pierre rehearsed everything that involved them with a video camera masked to a 2.35:1 format all of the aliens' positions and movement," Khondji recalls. "Everything was planned beforehand to try to film them in a different way. Watching him work with the alien creatures long before principal photography even began made me think of a choreographer working with dancers."
"To save time on the set, I did all of the rehearsals with Pitof, the visual effects supervisor," Jeunet elaborates. "I then made a video print of every shot and had them in a notebook. It's very difficult to shoot a man in a suit and make it convincing. If you move a little bit too low or too high, it's a man in a suit it's not an alien. This strategy was also a great help because Pitof directed many of the alien scenes for the second unit with [A-camera operator/second-unit cinematographer] Connie Hall, Jr."
During of their preparation, Khondji and Jeunet thoroughly reviewed the previous Alien films to gather insights into how their predecessors approached their respective entries in the series. The duo also consulted many other science-fiction and horror film classics. "Jean-Pierre and I watched an incredible number of films," says Khondji. "I was actually very interested in B-movies, especially the science-fiction films of the Fifties. Although they're not always well-done, they can be almost haunting. That element was very important to me for Alien Resurrection, because I wanted the film to feel haunted. I wanted the sets and the ship to be haunted by the evilness of the characters within them.
"I also liked doing the gore effects in the film, but I don't like lighting them and making them too obvious. I love it when things are really horrible but back-lit, dark and silhouetted. Then the imagery is more a product of the audience's imagination rather than what is on the screen. I find that people can imagine much more than you can ever get on a negative, and you free people's imagination by not showing them certain things. That's a very important aspect of all of my work in general. I don't make the imagery dark just out of the pleasure of making it look good; in a way, [by keeping aspects of the imagery obscured], I give the audience something more to look at."
Alien Resurrection takes place entirely in outer space on two crafts: the Auriga, a massive and brooding space station aboard which Ripley and the aliens are experimented upon; and the Betty, a small, brightly colored renegade ship used by smugglers who board the station. Designed by Phelps, the often-cavernous sets depicting the interiors of these two vessels were realized on the Fox soundstages in Culver City.
In determining a lighting approach for the futuristic locales, which primarily consisted of seemingly endless corridors, Jeunet, Khondji and Phelps worked in tandem to integrate as much lighting as possible into the set design, often employing glowing panels behind built-in gratings and cosmetically enhanced Kino Flo fixtures built into walls and ceilings. Notes Khondji of this approach, "Nigel [Phelps] built the lighting into the structures so that it followed the contours of the sets, almost as if the lighting were etched or engraved into the design. The set's [integrated] lighting made it appear as if it were a living, breathing creature. On wide shots, it almost looked as if we were inside some cavernous animal or dinosaur. The sets became characters in themselves."
Adds gaffer Chris Strong, who helped Khondji illuminate Seven, "To be able to see and photograph the sets, the majority of the floors were made of metal grating backed with Lee 129 Heavy Frost diffusion and quarter CTB, with 2K nook lights hidden underneath. We had about 250 of them on the main set alone, all tied into a dimmer board. The ceiling was also grating backed with diffusion, behind which we had hundreds of bat strips strips of wood with porcelain sockets and 211 PH bulbs which were also tied to the dimmer. For high ceilings, we used chicken coops and 10-light cyc-strips for more punch. The set walls also had ribs periodic panels behind the grating that went around some of the hallways, which were lit from behind with 211s on bat strips. We also had clear 60-watt Lumaline bulbs [16" clear tubes visibly mounted on the walls] periodically built into the set walls down the big corridors. They were dimmed way down to just a glowing filament as a design element. Every light was individually dimmable, and we had about 550 different dimmer leads on the main hallway set alone.
"In some of the hallways, we had Kino Flo tubes running underneath the base edges of the grated floors. We didn't dim the Kino tubes on a dimmer channel, but we'd sometimes throw some neutral-density gel on them or use streaks and tips to knock them down a bit."
With the majority of the lighting provided by these built-in practicals, Khondji would then supplement light on the actors with more controlled, modeled sources, using individually set Kino Flo units. "The whole look of the film can be viewed as a blending of design and lighting," expounds the cameraman. "The production thought we were spending too much money building the lighting into the sets. Perhaps it was unusual to work that way, but it gave us a lot of freedom to move about and work very quickly between setups. In fact, we could make a set look like a completely different set just by a change in the built-in lighting scheme. Chris Strong would adjust a few channels on the dimmers, turning a high-key set into a low-key set. We'd then wet the set down, make it oily or gritty, and add smoke; it would become a completely different place, but with an almost subconscious suggestion of a place we've been before.
"We came up with a lot of different lighting schemes so that viewers wouldn't be able to tell that they'd been in the same hallway 15 times," Strong details. "We'd often take the diffusion paper out from under the floor at the edges, so we'd get hard shafts going up the walls and still have soft light underneath the actors. We had a video tap monitor in the dimmer room so that the dimmer operator could see exactly what was happening on the set. Then, for every slate number shot, he'd enter the exact lighting settings for each take into the board's memory. With the exception of any lights we had on stands on set, every light setting could be exactly recalled for any given shot. We did use some incandescent light on the sets, but not much. Darius preferred the Kino Flo look."
Khondji adds, "Topping all of that off was the use of the ENR process. It was like cooking you put in all of these different ingredients and make this sort of weird witch's brew that becomes the look of your film."
Executing such a high level of lighting/production design integration required the filmmakers to utilize a full-time rigging crew to install and wire the vast network of sources and cables before the main unit would walk onto a set. Explains key grip Alan Rawlins, "Even with the large stages we had at Fox, our main concern from the beginning was that we were very cramped and fighting for space for the rigging. With the bulk of our lighting coming from underneath, from above, or from the sides of the sets, it became quite a feat just to keep everything separated and find space for it while making it all work together. We also utilized a lot of little pieces of the sets that were actually working as rigging or built-in lighting apparati. Chris Strong and I as well as rigging gaffer Bill McKane and rigging key grip Bob Leitelt put a lot of thought into this to achieve the look and stay functional enough to be able to pull the project off. Bob and Bill were definitely our right and left hands in terms of keeping us prepped ahead of time. When we'd walk off one set and onto another, the rigging crew would have done a fantastic job and we'd only have to make a few minor changes to be off and running."
Taking full advantage of the versatility that the dimmer-controlled lighting offered the production, Jeunet and Khondji mapped out a visual flowchart that detailed how the lighting should transform to reflect the film's increasingly intense narrative. The cinematographer explains, "We established a scale from one to five; it began with almost no lighting effects or movement, and became complete lighting chaos. The lighting got a little stronger in levels two and three with some flashing and warning lights. Level four was a more frantic state of alarm, with strobe-lighting and gyrating sirens. By level five, everything was a complete frenzy of lighting and camera vibration going to an almost completely blurred image due to all of the shaking."
"The lighting was 'normal' up until the point when the aliens escape," expands Strong. "At first, we'd just have flashing red lights. Then we'd add panning Xenons and these strobe lights on the tops and bottoms of the hallways. The strobes were four-foot tubes with several small daylight-balanced lights inside and down the length of them. We then could strobe in sequence either at us or away from us. We also had steam, smoke, sparks, cracked oil, liquid nitrogen, and wind effects for added visual energy you name it, we had it."
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