Luc Besson

Luc Besson is a prolific French writer, director, producer. He spent his childhood with his parents, as a diving instructors at Club Med. But after an accident that prevented him from continuing the high level diving, he turned to another passion: cinema.

It then became known in the business by multiplying the positions of assistant director, before directing, in 1983, his first science fiction film: “Le Dernier Combat”. The success of this very low budget movie, allows him to sign a contract with Gaumont for whom he directed Subway and The Big Blue, which became a huge success and a social phenomenon in France. Then follow the movies, La Femme Nikita and Leon, who will also become very big success.

But his taste for science fiction pushes him with Gaumont, on an ambitious film project: The Fifth Element starring Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich. The film becomes, at the time, one of the biggest commercial success in the U.S. for a French film.

In 2000, he founded his own production and distribution company: EuropaCorp, with whom he produced the Taxi trilogy, The Transporter trilogy, Yamakasi, From Paris With Love... EuropaCorp became the largest film studio in Europe. Luc Besson returns to directing with Joan of Arc, and Angel-A, and Arthur and the Invisibles trilogy.

Luc Besson, also works on “la Cité du Cinéma", an ambitious building program that covers 6.5 hectares, which brings together all the movie production skills over 9 movie stages from 600 to 2000 m2, spread over 13,000 m2. A 140 million eurosproject open on September 2012.

But Luc Besson is a science-fiction lover and the director returned to this genre with the movie The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec (2010), Lucy (2014) and Valerian and the City of the Thousand Planets (2017).

Writer: PG