Quotes of the Day

There are certain preconceptions about French cultural icons. They will take themselves and their work extremely seriously. Their suits will be as sharp as their razor-like minds, but they will feign a disinterest in the economics of artistic endeavor. They make few concessions to commerce, and expect their public to attempt to rise to their intellectual level. Luc Besson — at 46, one of France's most successful film directors — dashes all of these expectations.

Sitting in his office in the ritzy eighth arrondissement of Paris, Besson is kitted out in a faded black Nike T shirt and sports a week's growth of beard. He is making the heretical case for liberating France from its compulsion to wallow in art films. "We are finally getting rid of the 'I am an auteur, I have to create' notion," he says, "the idea that a filmmaker doesn't care if his film is seen by only two people."

Such populist views make Besson an anomaly — and, frankly, a bit of a mystery to his compatriots. That doesn't mean they ignore him. Far from it. He's tabloid fodder because of a series of high-profile romances and marriages with insanely attractive actresses like Milla Jovovich and Maïwenn Le Besco. Even if he weren't given to living it large, he would be considered France's most Hollywood-like filmmaker for an oeuvre that consists almost exclusively of action films. Some of them — Léon, The Fifth Element and Joan of Arc — are in English. Perhaps in recognition of his ability to reach audiences, Besson was the go-to guy for the Paris 2012 Olympic Bid Committee, who chose him to make the film that accompanied its final presentation in July in Singapore. Besson's more than $7 million film lasted more than half an hour (the other cities' films were all under 10 minutes) and featured a plethora of France's political and cultural élite promoting the city as an Olympic host. After London got the nod, critics jeered at the film for relying too much on the Paris éternel cliché.

But Besson's hardly licking his wounds. His six-year-old production company-cum-studio, EuropaCorp, will have produced or distributed 16 films this year, including director Guy Ritchie's disappointing Revolver and Tommy Lee Jones' up-coming theatrical film directorial debut, Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (arriving on some European screens this week), which won awards for best actor and screenplay at the Cannes film festival. Action sequel Transporter 2, which Besson co-wrote and produced, hit No. 1 at the U.S. box office when it was released in September and is opening in Britain this week, while the Besson-co-produced stolen-identity romp Colour Me Kubrick, starring John Malkovich, opens in France in January.

Besson's journey into moguldom has been remarkable. Unlike such American confreres as Steven Spielberg or George Lucas or the French auteurs of recent years, Besson didn't eat and breathe cinema from birth. His parents were both scuba instructors and brought him up in the former Yugoslavia and Greece, teaching him to dive, and sparking an interest in the sea that almost led to a career as a marine biologist. Only at 17 following a near-fatal diving accident did he turn to filmmaking. His first feature at age 23, 1983's The Last Combat, already had him thinking beyond borders: a Mad Max–like, postapocalyptic action film in which people aren't able to speak, it conveniently sidestepped language barriers. He followed it with the 1985 cult classic Subway, but it was 1988's The Big Blue that launched him internationally. Inspired by his love of the underwater world, it tells the story of rival free divers. Says Jean-Marc Barr, the film's star: "Luc is a guy who saw the beautiful cinematic potential in free diving. Nobody had ever seen that before. And he knows how to make that kind of image sell." In 1990, Nikita (which is in French) cemented his action-thriller bona fides, and four years later, Besson attacked American multiplexes with Léon, the story of a hit man's paternal relationship with a young girl who wants to enter his line of work.

For several years Besson has mostly sat back and let others direct. His first foray as director since 1999's poorly received biopic Joan of Arc was at the helm of the part-animation, part-live-action film Arthur and the Minimoys, an adaptation of his own series of children's novels about a boy searching for a lost tribe of miniature people, scheduled for a December 2006 release. He is also completing a black-and-white film called Angel-A, shot secretly in Paris this summer with actor-comedian Jamel Debbouze (the grocer's assistant in Amélie). Besson is confirming few details beyond a release next month.

When not looking through a lens, Besson has been focusing on others' work. He has executive produced over 60 films and has developed a niche: hip-hop action thrillers like Banlieue 13 and Yamakasi as well as the crowd-pleasing Taxi trilogy. Most of these are about characters from the poor suburbs of large French cities, often from ethnic minorities. His company also came up with the financing for Jones' project, directing Guillermo Arriaga's screenplay about a Texas border town, after Jones failed to raise the money in the U.S. Besson comments that American studios have made "so much money over the past few years on [Jones'] movies, and nobody could even offer him a few million for his own film. I'm glad to produce it, but I wouldn't be proud if I were an American studio."

If Besson sounds like he's itching for a fight between his Paris-based company and the Hollywood big guns, well, he is. EuropaCorp's $120 million studio soundstage complex is scheduled to open in 2007. Under construction in the rundown Saint-Denis suburb, Cinema City is a nine-soundstage campus, a megaventure that Besson says he's been shepherding out of necessity. He had to make his 1997 Bruce Willis sci-fi extravaganza The Fifth Element in Britain because France lacked a facility of this size. "From a cinematic point of view, France should have the same advantages as other countries," says Besson. "We are the biggest producer of films, and you have soundstages in Italy, England, Germany and Spain, but nothing in France."

Besson's own company looks like keeping the new complex busy. "We are going to start making films on a bigger scale," he explains. "And we started asking ourselves last year, Where are we going to shoot them?" He isn't giving much away about what these projects might be, but a stash of sci-fi scripts and animated film ideas is known to be piling up at EuropaCorp. What Besson will admit is that he balances conviction about the merits of each project with a cool assessment of its commercial viability. "We have only one rule at EuropaCorp," says Besson. "To produce what we love. If it's really bad for us financially we don't do it. To not make money is one thing, but to lose it is another. Because when that happens, there's one more film that won't be made." That's the sort of pragmatism to make art-house purists shudder. For Besson, it's an apostasy that drives his own success and may encourage more French filmmakers to please audiences as well as themselves.

• GRANT ROSENBERG
• Is Luc Besson the film mogul his country needs?