Luc Paul Maurice Besson (born 18 March 1959) is a French filmmaker. He has been involved in the creation of more than 50 films as a writer, director, or producer. Associated with the Cinéma du look film movement, he founded the production company Les Films du Loup (later renamed Les Films du Dauphin) and co-founded EuropaCorp with .
Besson's films include Subway (1985), The Big Blue (1988), La Femme Nikita (1990), Léon: The Professional (1994), The Fifth Element (1997), The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), Lucy (2014), Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), Dogman (2023), and Dracula (2025).
Besson has won three Lumière Awards: Best Director and Best Film for Joan of Arc, and Best Director for The Fifth Element. He also won the César Award for Best Director for The Fifth Element.
Early life Luc Paul Maurice Besson was born in Paris, France, to parents who worked as Club Med scuba-diving instructors. Influenced by their work, he planned to become a marine biologist. He spent much of his youth travelling with his parents to tourist resorts in Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia."Luc Besson", Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2008. The family returned to France when he was 10. His parents divorced and both remarried. At age 17, Besson had a diving accident that left him unable to dive. Pondering his career options, he realized that he loved writing and images. After visiting a film set, he decided he would become a filmmaker.
Career Besson reportedly worked on the first drafts of The Big Blue (1988) during 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 films, 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.Elley, Derek. "Pop pic auteur", Variety, 23 June 1997, v. 367 n. 8, pp. 44–45. 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.
Cinéma du look Film critics such as Raphaël Bassan and Guy Austin cite Besson as a pivotal figure in the Cinéma du look movement—a specific, highly visual style produced from the 1980s into the early 1990s. His early films Subway (1985), The Big Blue (1988) and La Femme Nikita (1990) are all considered of this stylistic school.
The term was coined by critic Raphaël Bassan in a 1989 essay in La Revue du Cinema n° 449.Translated into English: "The French neo-baroques directors: Beineix, Besson, Carax from Diva to le Grand Bleu" (pp. 11–23), in The Films of Luc Besson: Master of Spectacle (Under the direction of Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie), Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. A partisan of the experimental cinema and friend of New Wave ("nouvelle vague") directors, Bassan grouped Besson with Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax as three directors who shared the style of "le look". These directors were later critically described as "favouring style over substance, and spectacle over narrative".Austin, Guy (1999) Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction, Manchester University Press, pp. 119–120, 126–128.
Besson, and most of the filmmakers so categorised, were uncomfortable with the label. In a 1985 interview with The New York Times, Besson contrasted the "Cinema du Look" with France's New Wave: "Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were rebelling against existing cultural values and used cinema as a means of expression simply because it was the most avant-garde medium at the time" he added "Today, the revolution is occurring entirely within the industry and is led by people who want to change the look of movies by making them better, more convincing and pleasurable to watch." Also addressing the accusations of style over substance he remarked "Because it's becoming increasingly difficult to break into this field, we have developed a psychological armor and are ready to do anything in order to work," finally adding "I think our ardor alone is going to shake the pillars of the moviemaking establishment."
Popular success Many of Besson's films have achieved popular, if not always critical, success. Reviews were mixed for The Big Blue. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the movie was "too long and initially awkward but is clearly the work of a visionary." Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue) has become a cult film in France over time. "When the film had its premiere on opening night at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, it was mercilessly drubbed, but no matter; it was a smash," observed the International Herald Tribune in a 2007 profile of Besson. "Embraced by young people who kept returning to see it again, the movie sold 10 million tickets and quickly became what the French call a 'film générationnel,' a defining moment in the culture."
Besson's La Femme Nikita (1990) is one of his earliest action films. Besson went on to write and produce numerous films in this genre, including the Taxi series (1998–2007), the Transporter series (2002–2008), and the Jet Li films Kiss of the Dragon and Unleashed. He also worked on Lockout (2012).Sobel, Ian (9 June 2011) "‘Looper’, ‘Anonymous’, And ‘Lockout’ Do The Release Date Shuffle'", Screenjunkies.com.
After Besson's documentary film Atlantis (1991), he directed two critical and commercial successes: Léon: The Professional (1994) and The Fifth Element (1997) which would later become cult films. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) was the last film Besson directed that was produced by the oldest production company in the world, Gaumont, which had been producing his films since Subway (1985). After The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc he created his own studio, EuropaCorp.
From 2002 to 2005 Besson created the hugely successful Arthur series of children's fantasy novels, which comprises Arthur and the Minimoys, Arthur and the Forbidden City, Arthur and the Vengeance of Maltazard, and Arthur and the War of the Two Worlds. He directed Arthur and the Invisibles (2006), a feature film adaptation of the first two books of the collection, starring Madonna and Robert DeNiro. Combining live action and animation, it was released in the UK and the US, as well as in France.
His English language films Taken, Taken 2, and Taken 3 have been major successes; Taken 2 became the largest-grossing export French film.
Besson also produced the promotional movie for the Paris 2012 Olympic bid.
Studio ambitions and difficulties
In 2000, Besson superseded his production company by co-founding EuropaCorp with Pierre-Ange Le Pogam, with whom he had frequently worked since 1985. Le Pogam had then been Distribution Director with Gaumont.
With EuropaCorp, Besson wanted to compete with the American major studios, but to maintain a stable of French directors and technicians producing in France, even if their films are most often in English with a foreign international star in the lead role. EuropaCorp went public in 2006 to finance, with the help of the State, its own studios at the Cité du Cinéma. It also sought financing and distribution partnerships in Japan and China.
By 2011, when he directed a biopic of Aung San Suu Kyi called The Lady (original title Dans la Lumiere), Besson was spending most of his time at EuropaCorp as a writer and producer, rather than a director: he had 44 writing credits and 103 producer credits, but only 17 directing credits. The film was a departure from Besson's favoured directorial genres, and from his preference to write the films he directs; the screenwriter was Rebecca Frayn. Western critics singled out Besson's direction for negative comments; Roger Ebert said: "Perhaps, given his strengths in genre films, he should have chosen not to direct this one…"
After several failures, Besson returned to creative form and to international success with Lucy (2014), which became the world's most successful French feature film, earning $469 million worldwide, superseding the previous record holder The Intouchables ($426 million).
The blockbuster Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) had a budget of around $180 million, making it both the most expensive European and the most expensive independent film ever made, The project is very ambitious, with merchandise and even a board game planned ahead of its release. But by the summer of 2017, Chinese critics were snubbing it and the investment seemed impossible to make profitable.
Besson's failure was repeated with his next film, Anna (2019), placing his company in near bankruptcy and forcing him to sell it to a creditor and then close the free, no-degree-required school for screenwriters and directors that he had founded in 2012.
Recent work
Besson's film June & John (2025) was shot guerrilla-style in Los Angeles in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on a shelved pre-pandemic project Besson had been developing for a Chinese smartphone brand, the film was shot using only smartphones and a 12-person crew, and stars then-unknown actors Matilda Price and Luke Stanton Eddy.
He told Deadline: "It was very joyous. It was really two actors and a director because of the lockdown … It felt good to be uniquely creative without the pressure of money."
In 2022, Besson experimented with another kind of filmmaking when he shot Dogman (2023) in a virtual production facility in France, as well as on location in New Jersey.
Dogman was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 80th Venice International Film Festival, where it had its world premiere on 31 August 2023. It was released in French cinemas on 27 September 2023 by Apollo Films Distribution and EuropaCorp Distribution, and had mixed reviews: at Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 59% based on 71 reviews, but on the other hand received very positive audience feedback with 84% positive reviews. while Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 45 out of 100 from 23 critics, audience feedback on Metacritic is also more positive than press reviews, with an average score of 67 out of 100.
In summer 2024, Besson directed Dracula, an adaptation of Dracula starring Caleb Landry Jones and featuring Christoph Waltz. Dracula is the 2025 French film that achieved the highest global box office, with nearly 30 million dollars. It was released in cinemas in the United States in February 6, 2026. As with Dogman, Dracula had mixed press reviews, but was popular with the public, with an average of 53% from the press and 81% from viewers on Rotten Tomatoes. Dracula has met with notable success at the American box office, making $9 million in 10 days, a record for a French film since 2017.
In 2025 Luc Besson was announced as the director of The Last Man, a post-apocalyptic science fiction film starring rapper Snoop Dogg. He also wrote and produced the film Father Joe, starring Al Pacino, which premiered in September of 2026 at the Venice International Film Festival.
Regular collaborators
In the early 1980s, Besson met Éric Serra and asked him to compose the score for his first short film, L'Avant dernier. He subsequently had Serra compose for other films.
French actor Jean Reno has appeared in several films by Besson, including (1983), Subway (1985), The Big Blue (1988), La Femme Nikita (1990), and Léon: The Professional (1994).
Besson directed and co-wrote the screenplay of his science fiction thriller The Fifth Element (1997) with American screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen."Luc Besson", International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 2: Directors, 4th ed. St. James Press, 2000.