Amdall Gallery

Welcome to part two of this run of drawings from The Fifth Element. In the first one, I covered some basics from the film and shared a drawing of Leeloo Dallas and her treasured Multipass. In this second drawing, we’re going to talk about the main antagonist of the movie (aside from the evil planet), Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg.

One fascinating aspect of the film is that Luc Besson, who wrote and directed, was able to get so many high grade actors to do it. At the time, the only big movie he’d directed was Leon The Professional with Jean Reno and Gary Oldman. The fact that a relatively unknown director was able to get studio support for a story he made up as a kid, and sign on Bruce Willis, Chris Tucker, Oldman (again), Luke Perry, and Ian Holm, was pretty impressive. This was after Die Hard (Willis), Friday (Tucker), and 90210 (Perry cameo), so these guys were stars already. I read Besson originally intended for this to be a trilogy, so it’s a shame it didn’t perform as well as it probably needed to at the box office.

Anywho, on to Gary Oldman. For an actor who has had so many memorable roles, his performance as Zorg might be one of my favorites. In The Fifth Element, Zorg is the unscrupulous head of a huge corporation. He demonstrates his love of arms dealing, violence, betrayal, firing large amounts of people, and making alliances with evil planets. He’s such a completely greedy and horrible person, and is played in such a captivating way by Oldman. As I mentioned in the last post, Zorg actually never meets the heroes, which is such a unique twist. They almost run into each other at an elevator in one of the final scenes, but that’s about it.

Oldman steals the scene every time he shows up in the movie, but one of the best is when the priest visits his office. Zorg gives an excellently villianous speech about the importance of destruction, and ends up choking on a cherry. The priest saves his life, and Zorg let’s him go. It’s some entertaining dialogue, and I decided to capture Zorg/Oldman in this scene. Here’s the result:

I’m really happy with this result, with bonus points for not getting food on it like I did with the first. This looks like Gary Oldman, and it’s got his Zorg smirk in full effect. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to handle his weird transparent plastic half helmet thing, but I think I knocked it out decently. Another thing I thought would be problematic, the glass, turned out okay too. I completely forgot to include the cherry in it that he choked on, though! Sort of an important oversight.

I remember to make a progression .gif on this one too:

Part two complete! It looks like my area is in for a raining Memorial Day weekend, so I’m guessing something else will be in the pipeline soon. Possibly either a Korbin Dallas/Ruby Rhod drawing, or something else from the movie favorites list.

Credit to media.giphy.com/media/3ohzdI2qPIkiHBwJMY/giphy.gif for the movie .gif.