The Columbia deal came with conditions, however, not least the casting of a Hollywood star of a certain caliber to fill the lead role of taxi driver turned savior of mankind Korben Dallas. Ledoux also notes that Besson was no longer the young upstart filmmaker behind The Big Blue, but the director responsible for Leon, which had become a major critical and box office hit around the world. “We were pretty confident we could succeed.” While he says it was a “big risk,” it wasn’t his first risk with Besson. Although there were a few presales and other investments, Gaumont paid the - then European record-breaking - rest. “But $90 million minus $25 million still leaves a lot to make up,” he notes. and to Sony’s Columbia Pictures, which had scooped up both The Big Blue and Leon, and it agreed to hand over $25 million for the U.S. So the producer went with cap in hand to the U.S. “Which for a French company was absolutely insane,” he admits. He also squeezed in time to make the 1991 underwater documentary Atlantis.īut - eventually - The Fifth Element was whittled down to an acceptable size, with Ledoux agreeing on a budget of around $90 million. With Besson itching to get behind the camera and the development work for his magnum opus still rumbling on, he wrote and directed two more live-action features for Gaumont: 1990’s La Femme Nikita and 1994’s Leon: The Professional, which Ledoux produced. The ideal size was 120 pages, so there was a lot more work still to do. “At one point, we had two scripts of 300 pages,” says Ledoux, who acknowledges it was always going to be a “very, very ambitious project” (while he says that Besson would have likely gone for it, Gaumont was never going to agree to split the story into two features). But even once The Big Blue was completed (it screened out of competition in Cannes) and with numerous hands, including Besson’s, on board, the film was still proving to be something of a monster, impossible to contain in one manageable feature. “We had a lot of people working on the writing,” notes Ledoux. With Besson initially focused on making his second feature, which was shooting on the Greek island of Amorgos, Gaumont hired a team of creatives to begin putting together the script for The Fifth Element. The company had backed his previous, and debut, feature, the French box office smash Subway, a film - later Oscar-nominated - that marked the director as a fast-rising star (the “enfant terrible” badge was already being heavily overused) and a pivotal figure of the new, highly visual and pop-soaked Cinéma du look movement. The company even stumped up the lion’s share of the budget that, at the time, made it the most expensive European film in history.Īccording to then-Gaumont head, and The Fifth Element’s lead producer, Patrice Ledoux, he first optioned the rights to Besson’s wildly colorful sci-fi adventure - or at least the idea for it - back when the director was developing his 1988 free-diving aquatic drama The Big Blue, the film many consider his international breakout. French studio Gaumont took the project on when it was still in infant form and spent a full nine years developing it - during which time Besson made three other films - before a camera was ever picked up. But it wasn’t just a cinematic odyssey for the director, who was 38 when it hit cinemas. In the 25 years since its release, much has already been written about the making of The Fifth Element and how it began its epic journey, culminating on the Croisette, as an idea in the imaginative head of Besson when he was just 16 years old. Sarajevo Film Festival Cancels All Screenings for Bosnia and Herzegovina Day of Mourning Following Triple Murder-Suicide And all this glitz was a precursor to a global box office take in excess of $260 million, making it the ninth-highest-grossing film of the year. Luc Besson’s wild space opera brought lead star Bruce Willis and his then-wife Demi Moore - plus co-stars Gary Oldman, Chris Tucker and Milla Jovovich (wearing a loincloth-style skirt and little else) - up the Palais steps for the world premiere, followed by a grand post-screening shindig for 1,000 guests by the seafront in a specially built space of more 100,000 square feet. The party in question was for The Fifth Element, which opened the 50th Cannes Film Festival in 1997 in extravagant, star-studded style and now firmly resides on the list of cinema’s cult classics. But an event costing a festival record $1 million and featuring a Jean-Paul Gaultier fashion show, a futuristic ballet and guests including the biggest A-list couple on the planet, not to mention dinner, fireworks and tickets in the form of a specially made Swatch watch, certainly sounds like it has the right sort of ludicrous credentials. It takes a lot to crack the top list of Cannes parties.
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