Luc Beson

Luc Besson was born in the French capital on March 18, 1959. His parents, diving instructors, worked for a long time in Yugoslavia and Greece, where Besson spent his childhood. Seduced by the deep sea, he was determined to become a marine biologist. But after a serious diving accident, at the age of 17, he regretted it and decided to dedicate himself to the cinema.

“I told my mother that I was going to make movies, that I was leaving school and that I was leaving. And I did it. Soon after, I made a short that was very, very bad. I was more concerned with proving that I could make one than with the quality of it,” says Besson. After working as an assistant director on a couple of titles, he founded his own company, Les Films du Loup –later Les Films du Dauphin–, and directed his first important short, L’avant Dernier , where he had Jean Reno , who he would become his fetish actor, and with the musician Eric Serra , who would be his usual composer. He reprized with both in his first feature film, Kamikaze 1999: The Last Fight, a mixture of intrigue and apocalyptic science fiction, where its hallmarks were already present: an elaborate aesthetic, and a fast-paced Hollywood-style montage.

Besson was hugely successful with Subway , a thriller about two characters hiding in the subway. After his first works, he is considered one of the greatest representatives of the so-called Cinéma du Look, which encompasses the French creators that emerged in the early 80s ( Jean-Jacques Beineix , Leos Carax ), influenced by comics and video clips, and fascinated by by the stylized and pictorial images, for them more important than the arguments.

Soon, Besson established himself internationally with the well-rounded film El gran azul , where he reflected his fascination for underwater life, and the knowledge acquired through his parents. He was following in the footsteps of Jacques Mayol, who had become a champion scuba diver without oxygen tubes, more interested in the sea, and in a dolphin, than in the girl he has theoretically fallen in love with. A few years later, Besson would return to the bottom with the documentary Atlantis , a phenomenon in France that went unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Luc Besson married the actress Anne Parillaud in 1986 , with whom he had a daughter. Parillaud herself was the protagonist of the American-style thriller Nikita (1990) , a dynamic revision of Pygmalion , with a delinquent turned sophisticated spy, who she swept the billboards with. Her success led to a deteriorated American version, The Assassin , with Bridget Fonda . And the role of “cleaner” played by Jean Reno ( Harvey Keitel in the US version) delighted Tarantino, who appropriated it for his Pulp Fiction .

One of his most recognized films is another thriller in the same vein, El profesional (León) , with an acting recital by Jean Reno, as a solitary hired assassin who protects a girl. The latter was played by a very young Natalie Portman , who at 11 years old made her feature film debut after being chosen from thousands of applicants.

Divorced from Parillaud, Besson joined the model Maïwenn Le Besco , with whom he had a second daughter, and later with the actress Milla Jovovich , present in the science fiction film The Fifth Element and in Joan of Arc (1999) , lackluster version of the life of the historical person. He also divorced Jovovich, to join Virginie Silla, a producer, who gave him three other girls.

With the arrival of the new millennium, Besson seems to have completely lost the will to shoot. He even announced his withdrawal as a director, despite the fact that he has never completely abandoned this task. “I’m tired. It’s pretty hard to reinvent myself with every movie. I am very afraid of repeating myself. But I’m getting older and I no longer have energy. The time has come to help others, but hand over the baton to them. I am proud of my films, but I no longer have the need to express myself anymore, let others do it ”, he came to comment to me in an interview.

Undoubtedly, the unusual success of Taxi Express has been decisive in this change of attitude , where he limited himself to acting as a screenwriter (with a very poor script) and producer, ceding the honor of directing and facing the day-to-day shooting to his protégé. Gerard Pires . Besson saw the sky open to the possibility of collecting astronomical box office figures with hardly a visit to the set, and he launched into a frantic career as a producer, which includes a hundred titles, almost all shot in the first decade of the 21st century. He has carried out films like Kiss of the Dragon , Wasabi , Transporter and its sequels, etc., and of course he exploded the saga that gave rise to this fever in Taxi 2and Taxi 3 . Although most of them leave a lot to be desired on an artistic level, they are very profitable products in which action, persecutions and ‘video clip’ montage predominate.

He has returned to work as a director with Arthur and the Minimoys and its two sequels, which adapt a saga of children’s novels. Most of the footage is made up of computer animations that do not require conventional filming. He also took Adèle and the Mystery of the Mummy to the movies , based on a comic by Jacques Tardi , of whom he declares himself a fervent follower. In any case, they are films far inferior to those of his early days.

Perhaps all is not lost. She could get her pulse back with The Lady , a recreation of the love story between a Burmese pro-democracy activist and a writer. It stars David Thewlis and Michelle Yeoh .