The Anti-Blade Runner: How Luc Besson Built a Bright Future

Most science fiction hides its world in shadow and grime, but The Fifth Element did the opposite and turned the lights on. That single decision, made by director Luc Besson, shaped a bright, colorful, chaotic future that still holds up decades after release.

A close breakdown of that world comes from Sareesh Sudhakaran of wolfcrow, who traces how the film pulled its look straight from European comic books. Besson brought in two French comic artists, Jean Giraud, known as Moebius, and Jean-Claude Mézières, whose flying taxi concept turned Korben Dallas from a factory worker into a cab driver. Their influence gave the film towering vertical cities and flying vehicles lifted from graphic novel pages. Besson's instruction to cinematographer Thierry Arbogast was blunt: most of the film would happen in daylight or well-lit locations. That approach rejected the standard space-opera darkness and delivered a future that reads like a living comic book.

The consistency is what keeps everything from feeling stitched together. Production designer Dan Weil and his team spent a year mapping out vehicles, apartments, food, and everyday tools, then discovered they could transform ordinary materials by painting them in vivid pinks, yellows, and purples. Weil color-coded each environment so you always know where you are. Egypt runs on warm desert ochres, New York leans on bright primary yellows and oranges, Zorg's headquarters sits in cold bronze and dark glass, and Fhloston Paradise explodes into cyan and gold. The future feels strange because its rules are unfamiliar, yet believable because those rules never break.

Weil called the guiding idea functional futurism, and it's a principle you can apply well beyond movie sets. The design team kept familiar objects recognizable. A vacuum cleaner still looks like a vacuum cleaner. Korben's cramped, low-ceilinged apartment has drawers like anyone else's, built-in lights so the space reads as lived-in rather than staged. This is the same logic that separates believable world-building from empty spectacle across film, video games, and even product design: grounding the extraordinary in something ordinary enough to trust. The audience accepts the wild parts because the mundane parts hold steady. If you shoot sets, build environments, or design anything meant to feel real, that balance between the strange and the recognizable is the takeaway worth stealing.

The physical craft backs up the vision. For the vertical metropolis of future New York, the crew built an enormous miniature at 1:24 scale, with 25 skyscrapers, some reaching around 20 ft high. Roughly 80 people worked on these models for about five months, packing them with window blinds, furniture, and working light boxes so the structures felt inhabited. Action plays out in the foreground, middleground, and background at once, pulling your eye deep into the frame. Full-scale taxis were mounted on hydraulic gimbals inside Pinewood Studios, so when Bruce Willis dodges traffic, he's reacting to real motion under real lights, handing the compositing team genuine reflections to build around.

Costumes carried the same weight. Besson skipped a traditional costume designer and hired fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier, who treated each of more than a thousand costumes as part of the whole. Leeloo's look became instant pop culture. Ruby Rhod arrives as a walking explosion of personality. Even the creatures follow one design logic. The Mondoshawan silhouette echoes the Egyptian temple, the Mangalores go animalistic with oversized jaws and rough skin, and the Diva stretches into an almost aquatic shape with her impossibly long neck and blue skin. You understand what each being is before the film explains anything. On the technical side, the team filmed in Super 35 on Kodak stock rather than anamorphic widescreen, avoiding distortion at the edges and keeping the vivid colors clean and sharp. Besson operated the main camera himself in nearly every shot, favoring center-point compositions that turn streets into comic book panels with a strong vanishing point.

Watch the video above for the full story on Milla Jovovich's invented language and the technical choices that let the frame hold so much detail.