Luc Besson, the Fifth Element director who lost his studio but not his appetite

Luc Besson

Photo: Harald Krichel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 18, 1959 Paris, France
Occupation	Film director
Known for	The Big Blue, Taxi 2, Subway
Awards	César · Lumière · Lumière Awards · Sitges Film Festival · Special Grand Prix of the Americas, Montreal World Film Festival · César (honorary)

Luc Besson has spent four decades trying to prove that a French director could play Hollywood’s game at Hollywood’s scale, and he has paid for it more than once. He made a hitman’s apprentice of a very young Natalie Portman in Léon: The Professional, wrapped Milla Jovovich in Jean Paul Gaultier bandages for The Fifth Element and built a studio, EuropaCorp, that was meant to stand beside the American majors. The studio slipped out of his hands after one enormously expensive space opera. The appetite never did. At the Venice Film Festival, where a thriller he wrote for Kiefer Sutherland and Al Pacino was screening, he promised that his next science-fiction story would be so unhinged that audiences might “need a ticket and an aspirin at the same time.”

Cinema was his second choice. His parents worked as scuba-diving instructors for Club Med, and he spent much of his childhood moving between Mediterranean resorts, planning a life as a marine biologist until a diving accident in his late teens kept him out of the water for good. Bored, he started writing. Among those adolescent pages was the first outline of what would become The Fifth Element, which waited two decades for a budget big enough to hold it.

Back in Paris, the city where he had been born on 18 March 1959, he took odd jobs on film sets at eighteen, assisted the directors Claude Faraldo and Patrick Grandperret and spent three years in the United States before returning to set up his own company, Les Films du Loup, later renamed Les Films du Dauphin. His first feature, Le Dernier Combat, released in 1983, was a black-and-white, almost wordless tale of survivors in a ruined world, with Jean Reno in the cast and a score by Éric Serra. It won him the best director prize at Sitges.

What followed was the run that critics, not always kindly, filed under the “cinéma du look”. The critic Raphaël Bassan coined the label in 1989, grouping Besson with Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax, and the charge attached to it was style over substance. Subway, in 1985, sent Christopher Lambert and Isabelle Adjani into the Paris metro. The Big Blue opened the 1988 Cannes Film Festival to a beating from the press and then sold around ten million tickets in France, becoming a generational film for French teenagers. La Femme Nikita, in 1990, gave Anne Parillaud a government assassin to play and set the template for the action cinema Besson would later produce by the dozen.

The international peak came in quick succession. Léon: The Professional, in 1994, paired Reno’s solitary killer with Portman’s orphaned girl and Gary Oldman‘s corrupt drug-squad cop. The Fifth Element, in 1997, finally put the teenage science-fiction notebooks on screen, with Bruce Willis at the wheel of the flying cab, and earned Besson the César for best director. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc followed in 1999 with Jovovich in armour, and won him the Lumière awards for best director and best film.

Then he stopped being mainly a director. With Pierre-Ange Le Pogam he founded EuropaCorp in 2000, took it public in 2006 and built studios north of Paris at the Cité du Cinéma. As a writer and producer he turned out the Taxi and Transporter series and, with Robert Mark Kamen, Taken, whose sequel became France’s biggest-earning film export of its day. He wrote the Arthur children’s novels and filmed them as Arthur and the Invisibles. In 2014 Lucy, with Scarlett Johansson, earned more than $460 million worldwide and became the most successful French film ever at the global box office.

The fall was just as large. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, released in 2017 on a budget of around $180 million, was the most expensive European film ever made, and it never came close to recouping. Anna, in 2019, flopped. EuropaCorp entered court-supervised restructuring that year, and in 2020 its creditor Vine Alternative Investments converted debt into a controlling stake, keeping Besson on as artistic director. The free film school he had opened at the Cité du Cinéma closed. Critics who called him the most Hollywood of French filmmakers now had a balance sheet to point to.

His private life has drawn harder questions. Besson began a relationship with Maïwenn Le Besco when she was fifteen and he was thirty-one; they married in 1992, had a daughter, Shanna, and divorced in 1997. Maïwenn has said that Léon, with its bond between a hitman and a girl, drew partly on that relationship, and she has defended it publicly against criticism that has never gone away. In 2018 the actress Sand Van Roy, who appeared in Valerian, filed a rape complaint against him, which he denied through his lawyer. Prosecutors dropped the case in 2019, a judge dismissed it in 2021 after a second investigation, and in 2023 France’s Court of Cassation refused her final appeal. In June 2026 a Paris appeals chamber rejected her request to reopen the inquiry on the basis of new DNA analyses; her lawyer announced a fresh appeal to the Court of Cassation.

The recent films have been smaller. June & John, shot on smartphones in Los Angeles during the 2020 lockdown with a twelve-person crew and two unknown leads, was released in 2025; Besson told Deadline it felt good “to be uniquely creative without the pressure of money.” DogMan, which competed at Venice in 2023, began his partnership with Caleb Landry Jones, a talent he has said he had not seen since Gary Oldman. Jones returned as the count in Dracula: A Love Tale, opposite Christoph Waltz, which opened in France in July 2025 and in the United States in February 2026. Reviews were split and audiences warmer; when it arrived on Paramount+ in October 2026, it became one of the most-watched films on the service.

Besson has been married four times. After Parillaud and Maïwenn came Jovovich, from 1997 to 1999, and since 2004 he has been married to the producer Virginie Besson-Silla, with whom he has three children, among them the actress Thalia Besson.

The next chapters are already written, at least on paper. Father Joe, which he scripted and produced for the director Barthélémy Grossmann, premiered out of competition at Venice in September 2026, with Sutherland as a priest waging war on Al Pacino’s gangster in 1990s Little Italy. He is attached to direct The Last Man, a post-apocalyptic film starring and co-produced by Snoop Dogg, and he says he is writing another science-fiction script, a return to the genre of his first feature. At sixty-seven, the director who lost a studio chasing spectacle is still planning the biggest thing he can imagine.