Luc Besson

Actors and Actresses

Luc Besson has been criticized as the most Hollywood of French filmakers
Luc Besson has been criticized as the most Hollywood of French filmakers

has been criticized as the most Hollywood of French filmakers

Luc Besson ( born 18 March 1959) is a French film director, writer, and producer. He is the creator of EuropaCorp film company. He has been involved with over 50 , spanning 26 years, as writer, director, and/or producer.

Besson was born in Paris to who were both Club Med scuba diving instructors. This had a profound influence on his childhood as Besson planned on becoming 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 Besson was 10. His parents promptly divorced and were remarried to other people. “Here there is , 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.”

Out of boredom, he started to write stories, including the backdrop to what later became one of his most popular movies, The Fifth Element. Luc Besson directed and co-wrote the screenplay of this with the screenwriter, Robert Mark Kamen. The film is inspired by the French comic books Besson read as a teenager. He also reportedly worked on the first drafts of Le Grand Bleu while still in his teens.

At 18, Luc Besson returned to his birthplace of Paris. There 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. Besson also directed three , a commissioned documentary, and several commercials.

After this, he moved to the United States for three years, but returned to form his own production company which he called “Les Films du Loup”. The name was later changed to “Les Films du Dauphin”.

Critics cite Besson as being a pivotal figure in the Cinéma du look movement, a specific style of film being made in the 1980s into the early 1990s. Subway, The Big Blue and Nikita are all considered to be of this stylistic school. The term was coined in a 1989 essay, in La Revue du Cinema n° 449, by Raphaël Bassan, in which Besson was lumped with two other directors who shared “le look.” These directors were said to favor style over substance, spectacle over narrative.

Luc Besson was married to Anne Parillaud, who starred in Nikita, a film he wrote and directed. They have one daughter. He later dated model Maïwenn Le Besco. Their daughter, Shana Besson, was born in 1993. Besson married Milla Jovovich on December 14, 1997, but they divorced in 1999. On August 28 2004, Besson married Virginie Silla, a film producer.

Luc Besson's Filmography as Director

2017 Valerian
2014 Lucy
2011 The Lady
2010 Arthur 3: The War of the Two Worlds
2010 The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec
2009 Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard
2007 Arthur and the Invisibles: The Making of the Year's Greatest Adventure (TV documentary)
2006 Arthur et les Minimoys
2005 Angel-A
1999 Joan of Arc
1997 The Fifth Element
1994 Leon: The Professional
1994 De Serge Gainsbourg à Gainsbarre de 1958 – 1991 (video documentary)
1991 Atlantis (documentary)
1990 Nikita
1988 The Big Blue
1985 Subway
1983 Le dernier combat
1981 L'avant dernier

Share this article: Luc Besson

Facebook
LinkedIn
WhatsApp
Pinterest
Twitter
Email

MORE TOPICS

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2

In Sony Pictures Animation’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, Flint Lockwood and his pals discover that something big was leftover on the island of Swallow Falls. The action picks up just sixty seconds after the first film ends: Flint Lockwood has destroyed his greatest invention, the Flint Lockwood Diatomic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator.

In I'm Not Jesus Mommy, Dr. Kimberly Gabriel, one of the nation’s top fertility specialists, lives in irony as she is unable to have children of her own. Her chance comes when Dr. Roger Gibson recruits her on to his human cloning project.

I’m Not Jesus Mommy

I’m Not Jesus Mommy is a 2011 drama thriller film written by Vaughn Juares and Joseph Schneider and directed by Vaughn Juares. The movie stars Nora Montanez, Debbie DeLisi, Joseph Schneider, Bridget McGrath, Charles Hubbell. The film was done with a “Hitchcock-like” approach with off-camera violence

Locke

Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Steven Knight and driven by an unforgettable performance by Tom Hardy, Locke is a thrillingly unique cinematic experience of a man fighting to salvage all that is important to him.

The Divergent Series: Insurgent

The Divergent Series: Insurgent picks up three days after the end of Divergent, when Tris and Four narrowly hindered Jeanine’s plot to use mind-controlled Dauntless troops to exterminate the population of Abnegation.

Horrible Bosses

Horrible Bosses is a black comedy film directed by Seth Gordon and starring Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Jason Sudeikis, and Kevin Spacey, and funded by Filmförderungsanstalt (FFA), FFF Bayern, and Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC).

Bolden

Charles “Buddy” Bolden grew up in New Orleans at the end of 19th century to forge a new kind of music. Fusing blues, ragtime, and gospel with an improvisational urgency anchored by his cornet’s sensual sound, Bolden “invented” jazz, one of America’s few indigenous art forms and its earliest and most important cultural export.