 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
Essential Director: Luc Besson |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Beefy 51-year-old French director Luc Besson’s formative years read much like the script of a Wes Anderson film. Both his parents worked as diving instructors for Club Med – so Besson grew up a nomad moving between European resorts, developing a solitary interest in diving and the ocean.
When he was ten, his family returned to France and his parents divorced precipitously. They then remarried separately, which had a profoundly Andersonesque effect on the young Besson.
In 2007, the New York Times quoted him as saying that: “Here there is two families, and I am the only bad souvenir of something that doesn’t work. 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.”
That rage to exist found itself a purpose in film when Besson turned seventeen, after an accident eliminated the possibility that he could continue diving and pursue his planned career as a marine biologist.
The director says that at this critical juncture he sat down and wrote two lists on a piece of paper – on the left was a list of the things that he was good at, on the right a list of things that he could not do.
Observing that the list of the left was short, he decided that his propensity to write short stories (that he’d until this time never shared with anyone but himself), combined with his love for imagery and taking pictures, meant that he was built for a career in film.
He told his parents as much, and immediately set off for the nearest film set. The following day he quit school for cinema – his sails full of purpose.
Since that time, Besson has been prolific by anyone’s measure. As a teen he’d already written stories that would become the basis for his successful films The Fifth Element and The Big Blue. But even these efforts had barely scratched the surface of a career that has so far spanned more than 102 productions since his debut on film Deux Lions au Soleil, as a Trainee Assistant Director in 1980.
Today Besson is a mainstream cinema drawcard. But while he’s become well known in North America and other non-European countries as France’s most ‘Hollywood’ director (his often energetic yet soulful films like Leon: The Professional and The Transporter series have resonated deeply with global audiences), he’s openly viewed with disdain by many of the French cinema elite, for dragging their national flag through the streets of Hollywood and onto multiplex cinema screens.
They’ve attacked him in critical essays such as “Besson Murdered My Cinema” and labelled him ‘vulgar’. He’s been criticised at various times for ‘trying to buy the status of an auteur’.
Yet the director routinely responds to such vitriol with quotes like the one he delivered in the aforementioned New York Times article: “In France we have this problem,” he said. “We cannot admit that movies are also an industry, that a movie is also fun.”
Besson has further fuelled this critical bonfire in France by being quick to point out that: “Cinema never saved anyone’s life. It’s not a medicine that will save anyone’s life, it’s only an aspirin”.
Besson’s 1997 marriage to supermodel and actress Milla Jovovich, who starred in The Fifth Element, would certainly not have helped his cause either. Jovovich famously declared that she’d “Worked like hell (on the film): no band practice, no clubs, no pot, nothing”.
But Besson’s position as an outsider in the very serious pantheon of French cinema is perhaps best illustrated in this anecdote from his application to the French National Film School, La Fémis, in 1977.
During his interview, Besson was asked to name the directors with whom he most identified. He’d barely managed to get the names Spielberg, Scorsese and Milos Forman out of his mouth, before the interviewer called a halt to proceedings by saying: “That’s enough. I don’t think you belong here.”
While much of France might even agree with this assessment, Besson continues to be held in high regard – his Taxi film and Arthur and the Invisibles series (which he wrote the novel and screenplay, directed and produced) have been particularly well received by critics).
Curiously though, while France continues to perceive Besson as too American, American audiences in particular still view his films as ‘foreign’ or European affairs.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
