Luc Besson

Luc Besson is a French film director, writer, and producer known for making films in the action and thriller genres. Besson has been nominated for and won numerous awards and honors from the foreign press, and he is often credited as one of the pioneers of the Cinema du look, or cinema of the look” movement in French film, along with Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax.

Besson was born in Paris and as a child traveled around Europe with his parents, who were ocean divers, which led him to cultivate an interest in their profession, but an accident eventually inclined him toward filmmaking. He was raised in resorts around Greece and Yugoslavia, where his parents worked as diving instructors for Club Med. Early in his life, Besson's wanted to pursue marine biology and only turned to film as a fallback plan after a near-fatal diving accident in his late teens dissuaded him from following in his parents' footsteps.

Besson on the set of The Fifth Element (1997)

Following a series of odd jobs in the Parisian film scene of the time, Besson began writing stories that would eventually evolve into some of his greatest achievements in film: The Fifth Element and The Big Blue (French title: Le Grand Bleu). In 1980, he founded his own production company, Les Films du Loup, renamed Les Films du Dauphin, and later EuropaCorp. Throughout his career, Besson worked on more than fifty films.

On a number of occasions, Besson suggested he might only direct ten films in his life, commenting that he "would rather stop too soon than too late." Since then, he has made more than ten films. He later clarified:

When I said it, I meant it. I said if I made 10 films in my life, I would be very lucky. That's how I meant it. My fear after my first one was whether they would let me make another one, so I had this goal in my head. After six, seven films, I started to get a little tired. Shooting takes a lot out of you. You finish a film and most of the time you're half-dead. I was happy to finish after 10.

Besson on the set of The Big Blue (1988)

Besson never went to film school and learned most of his craft working on film sets. According to Besson, his attempt to enter Femis, France's national film school, failed when he was asked to name his three favourite directors. He recalled the experience in a 2011 interview with The Guardian:

They asked me to name my three favourite directors and I basically gave the wrong answer. I said Scorsese, Spielberg and Milos Forman. So that's it. They said no. Twenty years later they asked me to give a lecture there. I said no. Because everything I'm going to say is the direct opposite of what they are teaching.

Reportedly, when reviewers accused Besson of committing artistic theft against the renowned Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky with his first film, The Last Battle, he rented a Tarkovsky video to find out what they meant. Besson has repeatedly insisted that he has been influenced more by his own life and pop culture than classical cinema. He told The Guardian in 2006:

Luc Besson operating the camera on the set of Leon (1993)

I was never polluted by the world of cinema. I didn't even have a TV until I was 16. My expression is a reflection of the world I have seen, and in that world everyone was barefoot in bathing suits, following the order of the sea, the natural order of sunrise and sunset. I never went to the cinematheque. I didn't know much about the masters of world cinema. A film like The Fifth Element is a reflection of my life as a young boy who was into Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, comic books, and Kurosawa.