Luc Besson

Luc Paul Maurice Besson (French: [lyk bɛsɔ̃]; born 18 March 1959) is a French filmmaker. He directed and produced the films Subway (1985), The Big Blue (1988), and La Femme Nikita (1990). Associated with the Cinéma du look film movement, he has been nominated for a César Award for Best Director and Best Picture for his films Léon: The Professional (1994) and The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999). He won Best Director and Best French Director for his sci-fi action film The Fifth Element (1997). He wrote and directed the sci-fi action film Lucy (2014), the space opera film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), and the fantasy romantic movie Dracula: A Love Tale (2025).

In 1980, near the beginning of his career, he founded his own production company, Les Films du Loup, later renamed Les Films du Dauphin. It was superseded in 2000 when he co-founded EuropaCorp with longtime collaborator Pierre-Ange Le Pogam [fr]. As writer, director, or producer, Besson has been involved in the creation of more than 50 films.

Besson was born in Paris, to parents who both worked as Club Med scuba-diving instructors. Influenced by this, he planned to become 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 he was 10. His parents divorced, and both remarried; of this, he said:

"Here there is two families, 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."

At age 17, Besson had a diving accident that left him unable to dive. In a 2000 interview with The Guardian, he described how this influenced his choice of career:

"I was 17 and I wondered what I was going to do. ... So I took a piece of paper and on the left I put everything I could do, or had skills for, and all the things I couldn't do. The first line was shorter and I could see that I loved writing, I loved images, I was taking a lot of pictures. So I thought maybe movies would be good. But I thought that to really know I should go to a set. And a friend of mine knew a guy whose brother was a third assistant on a short film. It's true. So, I said: 'OK, let's go on the set.' So I went on the set. The day after I went back to see my mum and told her that I was going to make films and stop school and 'bye. And I did it! Very soon after I made a short film and it was very, very bad. I wanted to prove that I could do something, so I made a short film. That was in fact my main concern, to be able to show that I could do one."

Besson reportedly worked on the first drafts of Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue) while still in his teens. Out of boredom, he started writing stories, including the background to what he later developed as The Fifth Element (1997), one of his most popular movies, inspired by the French comic books he read as a teenager.

At 18, Besson returned to his birthplace of Paris, where 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. He directed three short films, a commissioned documentary, and several commercials. He then moved to the United States for three years, but returned to Paris, where he formed his own production company. He first named it Les Films du Loup, then changed it to Les Films du Dauphin.