Moviefone Editorial

Tag: the-fifth-element

  • Bruce Willis to Retire from Acting Following Aphasia Diagnosis

    Bruce Willis with a tie
    Bruce Willis in ‘A Day to Die.’

    In some sad news for the movie world, Bruce Willis’ family has made an emotional announcement that the veteran actor is to retire from his career.

    The post, which was placed across various members’ social media channels, explained that the ‘Die Hard’ and ‘Sixth Sense’ star had been diagnosed with aphasia, a medical condition which leads to the loss of ability to understand or express speech.

    “To Bruce’s amazing supporters, as a family we wanted to share that our beloved Bruce has been experiencing some health issues and has recently been diagnosed with aphasia, which is impacting his cognitive abilities,” the statement reads. “As a result of this and with much consideration Bruce is stepping away from the career that has meant so much to him.”

    “This is a really challenging time for our family and we are so appreciative of your continued love, compassion and support,” the statement continues. “We are moving through this as a strong family unit, and wanted to bring his fans in because we know how much he means to you, as you do to him. As Bruce always says, ‘Live it up’ and together we plan to do just that.”

    While the condition can be managed with treatment, it often results in the patient’s inability to stay in their chosen career and for an actor, language skills are a critical part of their job.

    The 67-year-old actor rose to early prominence on TV series ‘Moonlighting,’ before the role as NYPD cop John McClane in 1988’s ‘Die Hard’ rocketed him to true movie star status. He’s since gone on to appear in a wide variety of movies including ‘The Last Boy Scout,’ ‘The Fifth Element’, ‘Armageddon’, ‘The Sixth Sense’, ‘Death Becomes Her’, ‘Pulp Fiction’, and ’Twelve Monkeys’.

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    “Bruce and I have worked on over 20 films together. He is a terrific actor and legendary action star, an incredible father, and a close friend,” producer Randall Emmett told The Hollywood Reporter. “I fully support Bruce and his family during this challenging time and admire him for his courage in battling this incredibly difficult medical condition. Bruce will always be part of our family.” The pair collaborated on such films as ‘Midnight in the Switchgrass’, ‘Survive the Night’, ‘Hard Kill,’ ‘Extraction’, ‘Fortress’ and ‘Out of Death’.

    If Willis’ more recent career – with exceptions for the likes of his reunion with ‘Sixth Sense’ and ‘Unbreakable’ director M. Night Shyamalan for ‘Glass’ – may not have reached the heights of his earlier days, he remains a genuine star who combined an ability to be wise-cracking, tough and charming in one package.

    Peers and fellow filmmakers paid tribute to his career, including Gale Anne Hurd, who posted to Twitter and, perhaps more controversially, director Kevin Smith, who famously fell out with the actor while making ‘Cop Out’ and now expresses regret for his comments.

    Willis still has plenty of life to enjoy, and you must respect him for doing that out of the spotlight.

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  • Luc Besson Can’t Find All the ‘Fifth Element’ Easter Eggs in ‘Valerian’

    Even if you’ve seen all of French auteur Luc Besson’s films, which include such visionary masterworks as “Le Femme Nikita,” “The Professional,” “The Fifth Element,” and “Lucy,” you won’t be prepared for the visual splendor of “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.”

    Based on a groundbreaking French comic book series, the film follows a pair of intergalactic law enforcers (played by Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne) as they uncover a mysterious conspiracy at the heart of a bustling space station and flirt with each other a lot in the process. At one point, and we mention it because it’s brought up in the interview, the duo does a mission in Big Market, a kind of interplanetary flea market that exists in another dimension, so anyone entering it has to wear special goggles and gloves to be able to interact with the merchandise.

    It’s wild.

    You can tell that this is something that Besson has been wanting to do; indeed he’s been a fan of the property since he was a child and used some of the comic book artists in “The Fifth Element.” The movie has the feeling of an artistic statement decades in the making. And it’s so much fun to watch, especially if you watch it in IMAX 3D (seek out the IMAX screens that aren’t been monopolized by “Dunkirk,” it’s worth it).

    We got to sit down with Besson in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, and talked about choosing the right story to adapt, the technological changes that happened between “The Fifth Element” and “Valerian,” why he doesn’t think it’s foolish to already be prepping the sequels, and how he can’t find the hidden “Fifth Element” Easter eggs in the movie.

    Moviefone: You’ve been a fan of this comic since you were 10. How did you decide what story to adapt for the first movie?

    Luc Besson: When I was 10, I didn’t think about making the film. In fact, I never thought about making the film until “The Fifth Element.” Before, it was just a part of my childhood and I never thought I’d make a film of it. It was also impossible, because technically I didn’t know how you’d do it 20 years ago. I never had an issue because the Ambassador of Shadows, that’s the volume I chose, it struck me as the most evident. If you want to introduce the world of Valerian and Laureline, this is the one to do it. Because there’s Alpha, there’s the Pearls, there are the three stooges, there is the giant fish, the pirate. It was obvious. But you can read the comic in 25 minutes. I have to make a two-hour movie. So you have to get out of the drawings.

    Have you earmarked what the next one will be?

    Well, I already finished the script for the second one. I’m working on the third. And it’s funny because some of my friends have said, “This is insane. You don’t know if the first one will work. Maybe you’ll never get to do the second one.” And I said, “Yeah but I don’t care.” I just love to write.

    You write a lot.

    Yeah, I do write a lot. This last year, I was working three hours a day on the special effects. But that’s it. So I’m kind of like [raps fingers on the table].

    What story did you adapt?

    It’s not one in particular. The third one, yes, is an adaptation.Can you talk a little bit about the opening of the movie with the space station? It wonderfully relates it to our world.

    Exactly. I was struck by this footage of 1975 of the American and the Russian shaking hands and I watched the news an hour before and you see all this conflict between America and Russia and how we’re back to the Cold War. Suddenly, I watched this wonderful footage of these two guys with big smiles and they hug each other and I said, “Why’d we lose this energy?” I thought it was a good start. To start in 1975 and from 1975 to basically 2400, to see how this space station grows little by little. I used the shaking hands to have everybody shaking hands. It’s a metaphor to show we can still shake hands. It’s fine.

    Was part of the appeal of the movie making a hopeful science-fiction story?

    As a moviegoer, I’m a little fed up. Sci-fi is so dark. It’s always raining. It’s always night. The hero is always wondering what he should do and if it’s right to save the world. It’s like, “Wow. That’s the future? Are we sure it’s that?” The present is dark. If we cannot imagine that our future is bright, then it’s all suicide today. We will right our future. It’s up to us to shake hands and make it bright. And by the way, if you look at the state of humanity in the 10th century, we were fighting a lot. Today we share. We take the same planes. We are in the same company. We share the kitchen. We share sushi. We share a cheeseburger. It’s better. So why aren’t we sure it’ll be positive 10 centuries from now?

    Can you talk about the division of labor between your two big effects houses, Industrial Light & Magic and Weta?

    At the beginning, we bid. Weta wanted to do everything and ILM wanted to do everything. And I honestly love both of them. So we had this conversation and I said, “Let’s be honest. Do you really think you can handle 2,734 shots by yourself on time?” They were kind enough and honest to say, “Maybe it’s going to be hard.” So I said, “How about you share? You do a piece and you do a piece?” It’s the first time they shared. I was so happy. They almost choose by themselves. ILM was comfortable with Big Market, to take the entire thing, because it’s 600 shots. So they did all of Big Market. Boom. Then Weta took most of the rest. And there’s a third company called Rodeo and Rodeo that took all of the mechanical stuff — the space station, the space ships, nothing organic but mechanical. That was the third. The Pearls, all of the aliens are from Weta. And Big Market is ILM.

    Is Big Market from the comic?

    No, I came up with it.

    It’s insane.

    I know.Was it hard for everybody to keep track of?

    Come on. My first meeting I had 80 people from special effects and 100 people from the crew. I spent an hour explaining the scene and, at the end of the hour, they look at me like … I can tell no one understands. No one. I scratched my head and thought, How am I going to do this? It’s going to be a nightmare.

    I took all of the students from my school, I have a film school and there’s 120 students. I rented a sound studio for five weeks and we shot the scene. It was all handheld but they were playing the parts, they were doing the accessories, the sound, everything. So we put the 600 storyboards on a wall and did every shot one by one. I edited the entire scene, put some temp music in, and then I colored the entire scene. We had three colors — one for desert vision (yellow), blue vision I put on my helmet and see the other world, but I see the desert at the same time and the third vision, the red one, is the merchant who sees us. So now you have the entire thing edited with three different colors. Now we understand which version we’re seeing and where we are.

    I have this scene and it’s 18 minutes. So we have it on stage so the technicians can always refer to it and the actors are really happy because they can understand. Six weeks shooting for the entire Big Market sequence.

    At a recent special effects convention, it was teased that there are some connections to “The Fifth Element.”

    That’s not the story. The story is that some artist at ILM told me they put some tricks in it and I have to find them. He said there’s seven of them. I found five. There are two that I haven’t seen.

    There’s supposedly a flying taxi right?

    Yeah, that’s what they said. I haven’t seen it yet.In your mind, are these two films of a whole?

    I think there is a common energy and a common meaning in a way, but “The Fifth Element” was way weirder than “Valerian” for me. I think “Valerian” is easier to embrace. Because it’s the story of the guy and the girl and the guy tries to get the girl, this tiny little human story, which I love. They look like a couple from today fighting and having a job. This aspect makes it very real for an audience. Someone who doesn’t even like sci-fi can relate, because of that.

    “The Fifth Element” is out of this world. The girl doesn’t even speak English. And I think the audience, you have to remember, at the time, even though “The Fifth Element” is now a classic from what I heard, the movie wasn’t popular when it opened here. You had a blue alien singing classical music in space and having a stone in her stomach? It was nuts. But, 20 years later, because of Internet and people are traveling now with no cost, kids are flying everywhere, they are much more open. They’re closer to this type of universe than they were before.

    Do you miss the puppets you worked with on “Fifth Element”?

    No. It was a nightmare.

    Why did Alexandre Desplat do “Valerian” instead of your usual composer and collaborator, Eric Serra?

    You know, the reason is very simple: Eric is my friend of more than 30 years. We know each other so well. It’s very hard to reinvent ourselves when we’re together. It’s like an old couple. For the past couple of years, I’ve decided to do a movie with Eric once every two films. So he did “Lucy,” he did “The Lady.” So he will do the next movie I will do. I’ll do a movie in between the next “Valerian.” It’s a way of refreshing ourselves and meet again. Now he’s frustrated because he didn’t do the film and now he wants to impress me. I remember five, six years ago we were looking so much like an old couple it wasn’t creative. It wasn’t creative enough.

    Can you talk about your decision to go with a big orchestral score instead of something more electronic and futuristic?

    I think, after a while, when you see sci-fi what makes them old is the music. When you go to classical, it’s not dated. That’s why, for me, I wanted it to be more classical.

    There’s a story in the press notes about Natalie Portman visiting your set dressed as Jackie O.

    I’m shooting “Valerian,” and we’re in sound stages in Paris. And I have my little lounge. And Natalie is shooting “Jackie” in the same sound stages and her lounge is next to mine. So sometimes I come in the morning to my little apartment and see Jackie Kennedy aka Matilda aka Natalie, who I’ve known since she was 11 years old, dressed as Jackie. And she really did look like Jackie, with the pink thing and the wig. It was like switching in space every time I see her. I didn’t know who I was looking at — Jackie or Natalie or Matilda? And then you see Jackie Kennedy say, “Hi Luc!” It was so bizarre. When I met her as Natalie I’m used to it. It’s fine. It’s the fact that she was Jackie, it was too much for me.How was working with Rihanna?

    My goal is to think, Okay who do you think is the best to play the plot? Then you figure out everything else. First, it’s all about who you’d love to have. If you don’t try, then you never know. And I thought, Well Rihanna. Everybody collapsed. They said, “Are you kidding? She’s the biggest star in the world?” But I figured we should ask. The first thing I asked her manager was, “Is she interested in playing the part?” They said, “She’s definitely interested in playing the part and definitely interested in meeting you because she knows you and your reputation with women.” I said, “Well that’s a good sign.”

    I think between the role and the director I am, it was a safe place for her to go. It’s a real part but not too long, it won’t take six months out of a world tour. She trusts me, she has faith. So it was perfect for her too. The minute she came to Paris, she was dedicated totally. She let the entire entourage outside of the set, she came by herself and she really offered herself as an actress. She let me model her.

    Before I leave, I wanted to ask you about the ending, not to get into spoilers but it’s very human-versus-human. Was there ever a version where more of the crazy creatures we meet along the way show up again?

    No. It was already complicated enough. The only moment was, at a certain point, I wanted to put in the Doghan Daguis [three whimsical, gargoyle-y creatures that serve as comic relief earlier in the film]. I tried it a few times. I’d found a way, but it makes the climax more funny but too funny. I wanted the people to fear. There’s a ticking clock. If you have them cracking jokes in the middle of that you’re not going to take it seriously.

    “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” is in theaters across the galaxy starting Friday.

  • 12 Reasons Why 1997 Was the Best Summer for Movies Ever

    If you look back at the movies that were released May through September of 1997, your initial reaction will probably be, “whoa, those all came out in the same year?!” And what a year it was.

    From “Men in Black” to “The Fifth Element,” that year gave us was one heck of a blockbuster season. The (fictional) President of the United States went full “Die Hard” when his plane was hijacked, and Nic Cage went full action hero — twice. Oh, what a time to be alive.

    Here are 12 reasons why we’ll always be grateful for the films of summer ’97.

  • 22 Things You Never Knew About ‘The Fifth Element’

    Twenty years after the release of “The Fifth Element” (on May 9, 1997), we still have one question: What in the world was that?

    Luc Besson‘s flamboyant, over-the-top sci-fi epic, starring a blond Bruce Willis, an androgynous Chris Tucker, a tragically-coiffed Gary Oldman, and Milla Jovovich left viewers stunned. Some loved it, some hated it, but it was a box office hit around the world (for many years, the biggest French cinema export ever), and it remains a cult favorite today.

    Still, as many times as you’ve marveled (or snickered, or just gawked) at “The Fifth Element” on cable, there’s a lot you may not know about the movie — its long gestation (22 years!), the hilarious story of how Tucker landed his role, and the production’s scandalous off-screen love triangle. Here are the elements that made the film.
    1. Besson (above) said he started writing the screenplay when he was 16, creating the vivid fantasy universes to combat the boredom he experienced living in rural France. But it didn’t reach the screen until he was 38 years old; by that time, he felt he was old enough to actually have something to say about life.

    2. The filmmaker had approached Willis to star as heroic cabbie Korben Dallas back in the early 1990s, before he had financing in place. He also sought Mel Gibson, who turned the part down.
    3. Ultimately, Besson thought he’d have to settle for a cheaper leading man, but in a chance conversation with Willis, the actor said that if he liked the script, he’d figure out a way to make the money work. “Sometimes I just do it because they’re just fun,” he said of his movie role choices in 1997, “and this was a real fun movie to make.” He’d end up signing on for a reduced salary up front and a percentage of the profits.
    4. Oldman, who’d played the villain in “The Professional,” took the bad guy role of Zorg as a favor to Besson, who’d helped finance Oldman’s directing debut, “Nil by Mouth.” “It was me singing for my supper,” Oldman recalled in 2011. “I owed him one.” He did his duty, but he didn’t think much of his performance. “I can’t bear it,” he said in 2014.

    5. The filmmakers auditioned 8,000 actresses to play mysterious, scantily clad heroine Leeloo. Besson said he saw 200 or 300 of those actresses read. One of them was Jovovich, who had taken a break from acting after “Dazed and Confused” three years earlier, in order to focus on her singing career. “Milla has this physical thing, she can be from the past or the future,” Besson said in 1997. “She can be an Egyptian or a Roman. She can be Nefertiti and she can be from outer space.”
    6. “Fifth Element” would relaunch the future “Resident Evil” mainstay as an action star, a career for which she began training over several months of rehearsals for Leeloo, studying acting and karate for eight hours a day.
    7. Even so, the martial arts novice couldn’t manage some of the high kicks required of her character. They were accomplished via artful editing and an artificial leg operated from just outside the frame.

    8. French fashionista Jean-Paul Gaultier designed the film’s elaborate, gender-bending costumes. He had to outfit at least 900 actors and extras. One costume included a jacket that was said to have cost $5,000.
    9. Chris Tucker (still best known at the time for his scene-stealing “Friday” role) won the role of colorful media personality Ruby Rhod because the part had been turned down by Besson’s first choice: Prince.

    10. So why did Prince turn down the role? As Gaultier explained it in 2013, the “Purple Rain” star found the proposed costumes the designer had shown him in illustrations to be “a bit too effeminate.” (Let that sink in for a minute.) 11. Gaultier had also unwittingly offended Prince with his description of one proposed outfit, a mesh suit with a padded, fringe-bedecked rear. Gaultier kept referring to this part of the suit as a “faux cul” (“fake ass”), but because of his thick accent, he said Prince misheard him as saying, “F— you!”

    12. Tucker has said he took inspiration from both Prince and Michael Jackson in crafting his performance as Ruby Rhod. Quipped Gaultier, “Maybe he’s less Michael Jackson and more Janet.”
    13. Besson enlisted influential French comic book artists Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius) and Jean-Claude Mézières to design his futuristic universe. Willis’ flying taxi was inspired by the images of a similar vehicle in Mézières’ title “The Circles of Power.”

    14. The New York scenes were created using a combination of CGI (for the flying cars), live action (the people), and scale models (the buildings). A crew of 80 on the production design team spent five months building dozens of city blocks at 1/24th scale.

    15. The language Leeloo speaks had a vocabulary of 400 words invented by Besson and Jovovich. They practiced it by writing letters to each other in the made-up tongue.
    16. Besson cast his wife, Maïwenn Le Besco, as the alien Diva Plavalaguna (above) after the actress he’d originally chosen dropped out. But during the shoot, he left Maïwenn and took up with Jovovich.

    17. Besson and Jovovich married at the end of 1997 and divorced two years later, after he’d directed her in the lead role of his 1999 movie “The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc.”
    18. The astonishment on everyone’s faces when Plavalaguna appears was real. Besson had isolated his wife from the cast so that no one would know what the Diva was supposed to look like until they saw her in character as the blue-skinned alien.

    19. Surprisingly, hero Willis and villain Oldman share no screen time.
    20. “The Fifth Element” cost a reported $90 million to produce, the costliest film made up to that point by a non-American production company (in this case, the French studio Gaumont). It earned back $264 million worldwide, $200 million of which came from moviegoers outside North America. It held the record as the most globally successful French-produced movie until “The Intouchables” in 2011.

    21. The movie earned one Oscar nomination, for Best Sound Editing.
    22. As sophisticated as the visual effects seemed at the time, Besson found them frustratingly primitive. Today’s digital effects would have made shooting “Fifth Element” much easier, he said recently. He’s currently finishing for July release the sci-fi epic “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” based on the Mézières stories he loved as a boy. Besson says it features 2,734 effects shots, compared to a mere 188 for “Fifth Element.”

  • Everything We Know About the ‘Fifth Element’ Sequel That Never Was

    This year marks the 20th anniversary of “The Fifth Element,” French visionary Luc Besson‘s whirligig sci-fi epic about a cab driver (Bruce Willis) who befriends and falls in love with a space deity (Milla Jovovich) and ends up saving the galaxy and defeating a truly over-the-top baddie (Gary Oldman, naturally). It was a movie that seemingly came out of nowhere but was instantly embraced, if not widely than by a certain type of filmgoer that responded to its unusual and enchanting blend of comic book aesthetics, broad humor, thrilling action set pieces, and colorful characters. Two decades in, it’s hard not to think of it as a lovably goofy, ahead-of-its-time masterpiece.

    But the question remains: Why hasn’t there ever been a proper sequel to the film?

    The legend goes that Luc Besson started working on what would end up being “The Fifth Element” back when he was 15. By the time he had finished making “Atlantis,” his gorgeous and elliptical documentary about oceans, his script had ballooned to 400 pages. While Besson developed the visual look of the film, production halted in 1992. Besson went on to make “Leon: The Professional” in the interim and following the release of that film, he worked to streamline the ungainly sci-fi project to something more manageable (and attractive for big movie stars). Obviously, he pared down the script and even scored Willis, who Besson had courted during the first iteration of the movie, to star. But what became of all that additional material?When Besson made the press rounds for “The Fifth Element,” he casually mentioned a sequel or follow-up. The movie that the filmmaker had just completed was the first half of that massive script; the sequel would be the second half. Somewhere along the way it even got a name: “Mr. Shadow” (named after the malevolent force that threatened all mankind in “The Fifth Element”).

    In 1998, during the nascent days of the Internet rumor mill, it was reported that Bruce Willis had signed on for the follow-up and Mira Sorvino was also interested in a role. (Sorvino wound up in his 2001 martial arts thriller “Kiss of the Dragon,” which Besson co-wrote and produced.) For his part, Besson was hard at work on his follow up (with “Fifth Element” co-star and then-wife Milla Jovovich). In a 2011 interview with Moviefone, Besson said he had no interest in doing a sequel and in a Reddit AMA in 2013 he said that any talk of a sequel was just a “rumor.”

    I talked to him that same year about a potential “Fifth Element” follow-up and he told me: “‘The Fifth Element’ … I was a little bit frustrated because I made the film right before all the new effects arrived. So when I did the film it was all blue screen, six hours, dots on the wall, takes forever to do one shot. Now, basically, you put the camera on your shoulder and then you run and then you add a couple of dinosaurs and spaceships. And I was so frustrated because it was not so easy at the time. So I always think to myself that I would avenge one day and use all the new tools to do a sci-fi film for sure.”

    When I pressed him as to whether this sci-fi film would have any direct connection to “The Fifth Element,” he demurred: “I don’t know if it would be directly connected but it would be the same area and the same genre. So for me it would be connected even if the stories had nothing to do with each other.” (Also worth noting: Besson and the movie’s star, Milla Jovovich, divorced in 1999.)

    Which brings us to Besson’s approach to sequels, which can be a little tricky to understand. The only true sequels the filmmaker has directed himself involved a trilogy of animated features he made in France that were nominally distributed stateside. Otherwise, he has only written sequels (to mid-sized hits, like “Taken” and “The Transporter“). For years, he worked on a proper follow-up to “Leon: The Professional” and he said that none of the scripts were good enough. But when “Columbiana” (an assassin thriller he made with Zoe Saldana) was coming out, Besson spoke openly about it being a slightly modified version of the “Leon” sequel he had been working on, which at one point was titled “Mathilda.” So it might seem like we never got the sequel to “Leon: The Professional,” we did … kind of … you just have to look through the lens of Luc.M-4VDF-16373afrpsd Final (Left to right.) Dane DeHaan, and Cara Delevingne star in EuropaCorp's Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.Photo credit: Vikram Gounassegarin� 2016 VALERIAN SAS � TF1 FILMS PRODUCTIONWhich brings us to “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” Besson’s next grandiose sci-fi extravaganza, scheduled to open later this summer. If you watch the trailer for the film, you’ll notice key touchstones, like the exaggerated color palette, wacky alien species, and off-kilter comedic elements. The fact that there isn’t a flying taxi in the trailer is a miracle. (Also, there probably is one, you just have to look hard enough.)

    Unlike “The Fifth Element,” which was merely inspired by French comic books, “Valerian” is actually based off of one. This is that follow-up that Besson was hinting about in those Reddit AMAs and the film he was talking about with me. What I mean to say is that maybe the “Fifth Element” sequel is actually happening right now and being released as “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.” Even if it doesn’t have a direct connection, it’s sort of that spiritual successor Besson mentioned. There’s certain strands of the same DNA there.

    So, even if we never really-for-real got “Mr. Shadow” (or whatever it might have been called), at least we get this. And, judging by the trailers, it’s going to be awesome.