Luc Besson

Luc Paul Maurice Besson (born 18 March 1959) is a French filmmaker.

In 1980, near the beginning of his career, he founded his own production company, Les Films du Loup, later renamed Les Films du Dauphin.

In the early 1980s, Besson met Éric Serra and asked him to compose the score for his first short film, L'Avant dernier.

He subsequently had Serra compose for other films.

Critics such as Raphaël Bassan and Guy Austin cite Besson as a pivotal figure in the Cinéma du look movement—a specific, highly visual style produced from the 1980s into the early 1990s.

French actor Jean Reno has appeared in several films by Besson, including Le dernier combat (1983), Subway (1985), The Big Blue (1988), La Femme Nikita (1990), and Léon: The Professional (1994).

He directed or produced the films Subway (1985), The Big Blue (1988), and La Femme Nikita (1990).

Subway (1985), The Big Blue (1988) and La Femme Nikita (1990) are all considered of this stylistic school.

"Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were rebelling against existing cultural values and used cinema as a means of expression simply because it was the most avant-garde medium at the time," said Besson in a 1985 interview in The New York Times.

The term was coined by critic Raphaël Bassan in a 1989 essay in La Revue du Cinema n° 449.

A partisan of the experimental cinema and friend of New Wave ("nouvelle vague") directors, Bassan grouped Besson with Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax as three directors who shared the style of "le look". These directors were later critically described as "favouring style over substance, and spectacle over narrative".

Besson, and most of the filmmakers so categorised, were uncomfortable with the label.

He contrasted their work with France's New Wave.

Associated with the Cinéma du look film movement, he has been nominated for a César Award for Best Director and Best Picture for his films Léon: The Professional (1994) and the English-language The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999).

He was nominated for Best Director and Best Picture César Awards for his films Léon: The Professional (1994) and The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999).

He won Best Director and Best French Director for his sci-fi action film The Fifth Element (1997).

Out of boredom, he started writing stories, including the background to what he later developed as The Fifth Element (1997), one of his most popular movies, inspired by the French comic books he read as a teenager.

He directed and co-wrote the screenplay of this science fiction thriller with American screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen.

At 18, Besson returned to his birthplace of Paris, where he took odd jobs in film to get a feel for the industry.

He worked as an assistant to directors including Claude Faraldo and Patrick Grandperret.

He directed three short films, a commissioned documentary, and several commercials.

He then moved to the United States for three years, but returned to Paris, where he formed his own production company.

He first named it Les Films du Loup, then changed it to Les Films du Dauphin.

Besson won the Lumières Award for Best Director and the César Award for Best Director, for his film The Fifth Element (1997).

Since the late 20th century, Besson has written and produced numerous action movies, including the Taxi series (1998–2007), the Transporter series (2002–2008; another collaboration with Robert Mark Kamen), and the Jet Li films Kiss of the Dragon and Unleashed.

His English-language films Taken, Taken 2, and Taken 3, all co-written with Kamen and starring Liam Neeson, have been major successes, with Taken 2 becoming the largest-grossing export French film.

It was superseded in 2000 when he co-founded EuropaCorp with longtime collaborator.

As writer, director, or producer, Besson has been involved in the creation of more than 50 films.

Besson was born in Paris, to parents who both worked as Club Med scuba-diving instructors.

Influenced by this milieu, as a child, he planned to become a marine biologist.

He spent much of his youth traveling with his parents to tourist resorts in Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece.

The family returned to France when he was 10.

His parents divorced, and both remarried; of this, he said:

"'Here there is two families, and I am the only bad souvenir of something that doesn't work,' he said in the International Herald Tribune. 'And if I disappear, then everything is perfect. The rage to exist comes from here. I have to do something! Otherwise I am going to die.'"

At age 17, Besson had a diving accident that left him unable to dive.

In a 2000 interview with The Guardian, he described how this influenced his choice of career:

"'I was 17 and I wondered what I was going to do. ... So I took a piece of paper and on the left I put everything I could do, or had skills for, and all the things I couldn't do. The first line was shorter and I could see that I loved writing, I loved images, I was taking a lot of pictures. So I thought maybe movies would be good. But I thought that to really know I should go to a set. And a friend of mine knew a guy whose brother was a third assistant on a short film. It's true. So, I said: 'OK, let's go on the set.' So I went on the set...The day after I went back to see my mum and told her that I was going to make films and stop school and 'bye. And I did it! Very soon after I made a short film and it was very, very bad. I wanted to prove that I could do something, so I made a short film. That was in fact my main concern, to be able to show that I could do one.'"

Besson reportedly worked on the first drafts of Le Grand Bleu while still in his teens.

Besson produced the promotional movie for the Paris 2012 Olympic bid.

He wrote and directed the 2014 sci-fi action film Lucy and the 2017 space opera film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.