![]() ![]() Standing at the precipice of 21st-century filmmaking, with its allure for huge action set pieces and galaxy-spanning misanthropy, The Fifth Element seems a natural property to fuck up with a modern interpretation – and yet, here we are, celebrating its 25th anniversary with nothing to cloud the crystallized image of its beauty, the rare big-budget hit with no ancillary properties to tarnish its long-earned reputation (we don’t need to talk about The Fifth Element video game, ok? It’s bad). The CGI revolution was just starting to take its hold on release schedules, with a collection of films that, 25 years later, feels like the infant form of the 21st century Intellectual Property Blockbuster dominating film today (a third of the year’s top 25 films have had sequels, which is more than it felt like back then).Ī little bit further down the list, at 25th on the domestic box office charts for 1997, is Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element– one of the few great works of modern science fiction without a sequel, prequel, reboot, or television series based on itself (to date). ![]() This news originated at Uproxx.To look at a list of the highest-grossing films of 1997 is to look upon the baby face of modern summer blockbuster cinema, led by Men in Black, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Air Force One, and Face/Off (fun fact: Titanic, which released on December 19th, is also in the top 10). Kamen and Besson were finally able to create a script they were satisfied with, and thus began the journey, which lasted for four more years, to create a movie that many consider a highlight of '90s sci-fi along with The Matrix. Soon, Kamen was on a plane to Paris, where a three-day brainstorming session with Besson turned into a three-week tour of the studio in which the work was being done to bring to life the alien world of The Fifth Element. But to his surprise, Besson called him a week later and asked for his help in writing the script. Kamen naturally concluded that was the last he would ever hear about The Fifth Element. And at the end of the meeting, Billy called me up, he said, "Dude, you just ruined that relationship." Because all I had done was I just kept saying what a huge piece of shit this script was." He's a French auteur, I'm just this fucking Hollywood screenwriter. And he sits there, and I could see that he was getting more and more pissed off. He doesn't get all of it because his English wasn't that great. "I said, "I'll come in and meet him." said, "Great." So I come in and meet the guy, and I tell him everything that's wrong with his script. Unfortunately, the meeting was far from a success. Kamen had trouble understanding the script, but he considered Besson a cinematic genius based on his previous work, and so agreed to meet the filmmaker. It tells the story of a taxicab driver, played by Willis, who takes it upon himself to protect the life of a strang, humanoid creature, played by Jovovich, whose existence is directly linked to the survival of the human race against a malevolent cosmic entity.Īccording to Kamen, he was working with Warner Brothers as a script doctor when the producer of Gran Torino, Bill Gerber, asked him to take a look at a strange new script written by a guy named Luc Besson, who had made La Femme Nikita. The story behind the making The Fifth Element is as much a clash of cultures as the movie itself, which boasted a strange, captivating European arthouse aesthetic filtered through the prism of raw commercial Hollywood. So we never did the sequel, and the sequel would have been taking the other 180-page thing had and working it into a script." It was huge in the rest of the world, and it's a classic, but it only did $75 million here or $80 million. We were going to do it as a sequel, but it made no sense, and The Fifth Element wasn't big enough here. " was actually 180 pages, and then added a second part to it, which made no sense either. In a conversation with the movie's co-writer, Robert Kamen, it was revealed that the original plan had been to make a sequel to The Fifth Element, that fell through because the first film underperformed at the box-office. The movie starred an eclectic cast that included Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich, Chris Tucker, and Gary Oldman. When it comes to sci-fi cinema, few movies are as bizarrely entertaining as The Fifth Element, the 1997 English-language French science-fiction action film directed and co-written by Luc Besson. ![]()
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