Luc Besson retires from filmmaking

The long goodbye

France's most successful living director is retiring from film-making. It's a young man's game, Luc Besson, 47, explains to Xan Brooks

Xan Brooks
Friday July 21, 2006

Guardian

The Luc Besson leaving do is a quiet affair. Tea and water are the only drinks on offer, and the sole guest in attendance is me. It is a curious experience: a case of hello and goodbye, welcome back and sayonara. On the one hand, Besson is in town to plug the two films he will be unveiling in 2006. On the other, he is here to discuss his imminent retirement. I feel as though I should have brought along a carriage clock.

A few years ago, France's most successful living director announced his intention to quit while he was ahead. He would, he said, make 10 films and then get out of the game. At the time few people took him seriously. But with Angel-A (out this month) and Arthur and the Minimoys (set for release at Christmas), he has reached his limit. He says cinema is a young art form and he has now outgrown it. He takes his kids to the pictures and their schoolmates have only the foggiest idea who he is. He sips his tea with a world-weary air. At the age of 47, Besson manages a fair impression of a jaundiced old fogey with one foot on the golf course.

"Ten is a good number," he explains. "If you have 10 bullets you are much more careful about what you shoot. And I would rather stop too soon than too late. I've seen so many directors make a few too many films, and it's sad. So a few years ago I said, 'I wish I could make 10 films that I'm proud of.'" He shrugs. "If you make 10 films and you like them, it's not so bad, no?"

It is significant he uses the criteria of personal pride as opposed to worldwide acclaim. The director may bridle at being described as an auteur - seeing it as symptomatic of all that is wrong with French cinema - but that's precisely what he is. For all their populist leanings his films stand as flamboyant personal expressions, from the stylised action of Nikita and Leon to the exotic sci-fi fantasies of The Fifth Element. Even his most high-profile misfire, 1999's Joan of Arc, is an oddly endearing calamity: a lavish jumble of clashing accents and historical anachronism that led critics to re-christen it 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'. Like it or loathe it, it could have been made by no one else.

I fear that he may have similarly shot himself in the foot with Angel-A, an indulgent redemption song about a small-time hustler who is rescued from suicide by his guardian angel. One might describe it as Besson's remake of It's a Wonderful Life, except the angel is a peroxide vamp who offers to solve the hero's money worries by prostituting herself in the nightclubs of Paris.

As played by newcomer Rie Rasmussen, Angela proves a very Bessonian figure: leggy and lippy, a grungy euro-chick with a heart of gold. She could be the younger cousin of Ann Parillaud in Nikita, or Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element. Parillaud, incidentally, was Besson's first wife; Jovovich his second.

You definitely have a type of woman you like, I tell him. But the director is having none of it. "Mathilda [in Léon] is 11 and dark. In The Fifth Element she's red-haired. Angela is super-tall and blonde. Isabelle Adjani [in Subway] is very bourgeois and Chanel, and Rosanna Arquette in The Big Blue is very natural. So, no. I always love the characters I create for different reasons, but I never try to describe the women I would fall in love with." He gives me a baleful stare. "I don't know where you are going with that question."

He is more comfortable talking about the film itself. Angel-A is a micro-budget, black-and-white production that darts around the Paris streets in the manner of A Bout de Souffle. Besson explains that he conceived the movie as an antidote - not just to the grand canvases of The Fifth Element and Joan of Arc but also to his lengthy preparatory work on Arthur and the Minimoys, an epic children's fantasy that blends live action with computer animation.

"That got a little frustrating," he admits. "As a director, I'm used to putting my hands on the engine. Talking, screaming. Then all of a sudden I'm spending three years sitting at a computer with a nerd and a mouse. And the nerd doesn't even say hi to you." Besson shakes his head. "He doesn't know who you are. He doesn't care. He's 17."

With an effort, the director puts these indignities behind him. "So it's true it made me envy the other way of making films. One actor, one actress, one camera: Go! This film is obviously smaller, shot in black-and-white, with unknown actors, and I know it's not going to beat The Fifth Element in terms of money. But I don't care. The logic is not to go bigger and bigger. The logic is to follow every road."

Much has been made of Besson's own road to the summit. He was raised in the resorts of Greece and Yugoslavia, where his parents worked as diving instructors for Club Med. Besson's ambition was to become a marine biologist. He only turned to film as a fallback plan, following a near-fatal diving accident in his late teens.

"I was never polluted by the world of cinema," he says. "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 cinémathèque. 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." Yet what Besson sees as his strength, others regard as a failing. He has, by his own admission, never been a favourite of the French critics, who dismiss him as a cultural philistine, a peddler of homogenised produce for the multiplex crowd. Inevitably, it was The Fifth Element that served as a lightning-rod for these attacks. Besson shot the film in English, with an American (Bruce Willis) and a Brit (Gary Oldman) in the leading roles. When it went on to become the most commercially successful French production in history, many were quick to claim that it wasn't, in fact, French at all.

Besson shakes his head in bemusement. "It is a stupid argument, no? Look at the Van Gogh painting, Irises. Where does it come from? Van Gogh is from Holland. The irises are in a field in France. And the painting is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. So the specialists say, 'Oh hold on? What nationality is it?' Who cares? Just look at the painting."

He pours himself more tea and says he has no big plans for his retirement. More than anything he wants some time to spend with his friends and family. Film-making is such a demanding mistress, he laments. There are so many things it prevents you from doing. "You pay hard," he sighs. "It makes me sad, in a way."

Besson's sincerity almost has me convinced. It's just that the longer he talks, the busier this life of leisure turns out to be. He will still write screenplays, he admits. And of course, he will still produce. His company, EuropaCorp, is developing plans for a studio complex near Paris so, yes, he is also heavily involved in that.

The tea is drunk and Besson cracks. Out of the blue, he explains that he envisages The Minimoys as a trilogy along the lines of The Lord of the Rings, which naturally means he has a further two instalments to shoot. "And you know what?" he exclaims brightly. "Maybe in two years I will do another movie after all." I leave with the impression that the man is destined for as many comebacks as Frank Sinatra. On balance the carriage clock will have to wait.