AUGUST 2006

Luc Besson speaks to Xan Brooks
Guardian newspaper

A few years ago, France's most successful living director announced his intention to quit while he was ahead. He would, he said, make 10 films and then get out of the game. At the time few people took him seriously. But with Angel-A (out this month) and Arthur and the Minimoys (set for release at Christmas), he has reached his limit. He says cinema is a young art form and he has now outgrown it. He takes his kids to the pictures and their schoolmates have only the foggiest idea who he is. He sips his tea with a world-weary air. At the age of 47, Besson manages a fair impression of a jaundiced old fogey with one foot on the golf course.

"Ten is a good number," he explains. "If you have 10 bullets you are much more careful about what you shoot. And I would rather stop too soon than too late. I've seen so many directors make a few too many films, and it's sad. So a few years ago I said, 'I wish I could make 10 films that I'm proud of.'" He shrugs. "If you make 10 films and you like them, it's not so bad, no?"

It is significant he uses the criteria of personal pride as opposed to worldwide acclaim. The director may bridle at being described as an auteur - seeing it as symptomatic of all that is wrong with French cinema - but that's precisely what he is. For all their populist leanings his films stand as flamboyant personal expressions, from the stylised action of Nikita and Leon to the exotic sci-fi fantasies of The Fifth Element. Even his most high-profile misfire, 1999's Joan of Arc, is an oddly endearing calamity: a lavish jumble of clashing accents and historical anachronism that led critics to re-christen it 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'. Like it or loathe it, it could have been made by no one else.

I fear that he may have similarly shot himself in the foot with Angel-A, an indulgent redemption song about a small-time hustler who is rescued from suicide by his guardian angel. One might describe it as Besson's remake of It's a Wonderful Life, except the angel is a peroxide vamp who offers to solve the hero's money worries by prostituting herself in the nightclubs of Paris.

As played by newcomer Rie Rasmussen, Angela proves a very Bessonian figure: leggy and lippy, a grungy euro-chick with a heart of gold. She could be the younger cousin of Ann Parillaud in Nikita, or Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element. Parillaud, incidentally, was Besson's first wife; Jovovich his second.

You definitely have a type of woman you like, I tell him. But the director is having none of it. "Mathilda [in Léon] is 11 and dark. In The Fifth Element she's red-haired. Angela is super-tall and blonde. Isabelle Adjani [in Subway] is very bourgeois and Chanel, and Rosanna Arquette in The Big Blue is very natural. So, no. I always love the characters I create for different reasons, but I never try to describe the women I would fall in love with." He gives me a baleful stare. "I don't know where you are going with that question."

He is more comfortable talking about the film itself. Angel-A is a micro-budget, black-and-white production that darts around the Paris streets in the manner of A Bout de Souffle. Besson explains that he conceived the movie as an antidote - not just to the grand canvases of The Fifth Element and Joan of Arc but also to his lengthy preparatory work on Arthur and the Minimoys, an epic children's fantasy that blends live action with computer animation.

"That got a little frustrating," he admits. "As a director, I'm used to putting my hands on the engine. Talking, screaming. Then all of a sudden I'm spending three years sitting at a computer with a nerd and a mouse. And the nerd doesn't even say hi to you." Besson shakes his head. "He doesn't know who you are. He doesn't care. He's 17."

With an effort, the director puts these indignities behind him. "So it's true it made me envy the other way of making films. One actor, one actress, one camera: Go! This film is obviously smaller, shot in black-and-white, with unknown actors, and I know it's not going to beat The Fifth Element in terms of money. But I don't care. The logic is not to go bigger and bigger. The logic is to follow every road."

Much has been made of Besson's own road to the summit. He was raised in the resorts of Greece and Yugoslavia, where his parents worked as diving instructors for Club Med. Besson's ambition was to become a marine biologist. He only turned to film as a fallback plan, following a near-fatal diving accident in his late teens.

"I was never polluted by the world of cinema," he says. "I didn't even have a TV until I was 16. My expression is a reflection of the world I have seen, and in that world everyone was barefoot in bathing suits, following the order of the sea, the natural order of sunrise and sunset. I never went to the cinémathèque. I didn't know much about the masters of world cinema. A film like The Fifth Element is a reflection of my life as a young boy who was into Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, comic-books and Kurosawa." Yet what Besson sees as his strength, others regard as a failing. He has, by his own admission, never been a favourite of the French critics, who dismiss him as a cultural philistine, a peddler of homogenised produce for the multiplex crowd. Inevitably, it was The Fifth Element that served as a lightning-rod for these attacks. Besson shot the film in English, with an American (Bruce Willis) and a Brit (Gary Oldman) in the leading roles. When it went on to become the most commercially successful French production in history, many were quick to claim that it wasn't, in fact, French at all.

Besson shakes his head in bemusement. "It is a stupid argument, no? Look at the Van Gogh painting, Irises. Where does it come from? Van Gogh is from Holland. The irises are in a field in France. And the painting is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. So the specialists say, 'Oh hold on? What nationality is it?' Who cares? Just look at the painting."

He pours himself more tea and says he has no big plans for his retirement. More than anything he wants some time to spend with his friends and family. Film-making is such a demanding mistress, he laments. There are so many things it prevents you from doing. "You pay hard," he sighs. "It makes me sad, in a way."

Besson's sincerity almost has me convinced. It's just that the longer he talks, the busier this life of leisure turns out to be. He will still write screenplays, he admits. And of course, he will still produce. His company, EuropaCorp, is developing plans for a studio complex near Paris so, yes, he is also heavily involved in that.

The tea is drunk and Besson cracks. Out of the blue, he explains that he envisages The Minimoys as a trilogy along the lines of The Lord of the Rings, which naturally means he has a further two instalments to shoot. "And you know what?" he exclaims brightly. "Maybe in two years I will do another movie after all." I leave with the impression that the man is destined for as many comebacks as Frank Sinatra. On balance the carriage clock will have to wait.

Fabian Bielinsky

The sudden death of Fabián Bielinsky, aged 47, apparently of a heart attack, has robbed Argentinian cinema of one of its newest talents only days after his second feature film, El Aura (2005), won a series of national cinema awards, including those for best director and best film. It followed his hugely capable and entertaining debut movie of 2000, Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens).

Follows an interview he gave Reel.com on his film - Nine Queens

Q: I'll start by asking what started your fascination with swindlers? There is a lot of affection for those characters in your film.

Fabián Bielinsky: [Laughs] You know, someone else asked me that. Of course, at that moment I didn't know exactly, but then I remembered seeing, when I was 13, Paper Moon by Peter Bogdanovich. It's about swindlers with Ryan O'Neal and Tatum O'Neal. I think that was the first time I saw that, I said, "Wow!" I was 13 and there was something magical about that and these guys. I think that was the beginning.

Q: I noticed in the press notes that you said that to prepare for Nine Queens, you talked to a lot of victims of swindles. Did you talk to any actual con artists as well?

FB: Well, I tried to, but they are kind of secret. [Laughs] I couldn't get the actual guys. I spoke to some marginal guys, people who knew these guys very well. I talked to one guy, he was a gambler. He was playing poker for the house, actually. He was the dealer. He told me a couple of amazing stories and he helped me get into the singular characteristics of these guys. He told me one … he used the phrase that I finally used in the film, something about the very special administration of the concept that everybody has a price. I used that in the film, because it was an extremely great way to illustrate that concept.

Q: There are echoes in the film of Hitchcock and David Mamet as well. Were those conscious influences? Were there any others?

FB: Well, I would say I spent a lot of time watching films all my life, and every single good director was a main influence on me. Of course, I love Hitchcock's work and, yes, of course, I really like David Mamet's work. And I saw House of Games with this kind of interest … of course, I saw House of Games. [Laughs] I loved it!

I don't feel … I have not the feeling that I have been influenced by one or two specific guys. I feel that all this time in front of the screen, all this time watching films, enjoying them, and even trying to understand why they [touch] me in some special way, all these things really have a great influence on me. So I feel the influence, but not in a specific way.

One director I admired over any other was Billy Wilder. I was so sorry to hear that he died, because he was amazingly good. The man was a genius; the perfect storyteller, the perfect screenwriter, so clever….He could understand exactly the main points of his own story. He knew where to get deeper and where just to make things happen. He had this intuition, this feeling about the material he was working with.

Q: When you were writing your film — a lot of your setups are very elaborate — did you keep going back over the script to make sure that you wouldn't lose the audience?

FB: Kind of. Let me tell you, I wrote it … it was quite a fast experience to write the script itself. But to think about it, I have the feeling I was thinking about this movie for years. But then when I finally got the main ideas in my head, I sat down and the process was really fast. One scene recalled the other and the other and the other, so it was a fast process. But, yeah, every once in a while, I went back to see that every connection was there, because it's kind of a work of … so, yeah, I tried to do that. Then when I finished, I gave the script to some people in order to squeeze it, to look at every single possible flaw in this logical cloth, in this logical net. Because I knew that was very important and I wanted to double-check, triple-check. Even then a couple of things, were not exactly … little things, but I won't tell you. [Laughs]

Q: You've worked extensively as an assistant director and you've worked as a screenwriter, but this was your first directing job. How did your prior experience help you in preparing for this job?

FB: It helped me a lot actually. On one side, no matter that you are there for 20 years just a couple of feet away from the director, looking at everything, trying to learn everything, no matter that. When you jump this little gap, it's a giant step for humanity! [Laughs] No, it's a giant step, actually. It's a big difference. Then you realize that perhaps you judged this guy a little tough when you were the assistant director, because it is a real difficult thing and you have to think of so many different things from when you were an AD. It's a real learning process. I feel this first directorial experience was an extensive learning process, the beginning of the learning process.

But then, on the other side, the experience of being on the set for so many years was so helpful. I worked a lot with first-time directors as an assistant director. I saw the guys suffering a lot, going through pain, really, because added to the fact that they were making a film for the first time, they didn't know exactly what was going on around them. They were in the center of a big mess, with about 100 people asking them questions. They didn't exactly know what to do, what's going on around me, who are these people doing …? Because they were directing for the first time, but they were also getting onto a set, a shooting set for the first time, which was a real bad experience, because they didn't have even the possibility of sitting down and relaxing and thinking about what they were doing. I had that possibility. I was there on a shooting set and I was so relaxed. It was my home, the place where I spent the last 20 years. I knew everybody there. I knew what everybody was doing. I knew the mechanics. I could think of things in advance; I really anticipated a lot of problems, because my work was anticipation. So everything was really cool. When my AD came to me with some line about what was going on, I knew the line. I knew exactly what was going on, because I told the director that same line all my life. [Laughs] So that was very good. Because the director's mood is the shooting mood, immediately. That's amazing. I felt that in my previous experience all the time: a nervous director, nervous shooting; a relaxed director, relaxed shooting; a good mood, a good mood shooting, and so on. So I was great on that shooting and everything went great. People were so happy to be there, you know? I remember the producer of the film coming in the third day or the fourth day and asking me, "So, how are things going?" And I said, "Now I have a problem. I want to do this for the rest of my life." [Laughs] I was happy. I remember the feeling. He came just at a good moment, and I was so happy to be there. So, you know, you can't lose with that feeling, at least during the shooting. You're going to have a good time, everyone's going to have a good time, and that's what happened.

Q: You chose suspense for your first film, which is one of the more difficult genres, because it is so dependent on precise timing and creating a mood.

FB: I never thought much about that, but it's quite true. You're right. You have to follow some rules, which in some other genres or whatever, you don't have so many rules to follow. And if it's a personal film, you know, something that's going out from you, you can just do whatever and that's it. You're right, but I don't feel that that was a problem, actually, because I wanted to do that. I wanted to that, because I wanted to feel the pleasure. I felt the pleasure as a spectator all my life, I would enjoy it. It's a childish feeling in a way. A teenage feeling, "Oh, two hours of movies! Wow!" [Laughs] To see the Metro lion and the 20th-Century Fox and the Warner Bros.' WB or whatever, I remember the feeling. I still have the feeling of looking at that and this good feeling of, "Well … two hours of movies!" It's like somebody telling you that you're going to have a good time. I remember that pleasure. I'm here because of that pleasure; I did the film because of that pleasure and this particular kind of genre is especially into that, into that joyful feeling of being in a game. It's kind of playful. For some reason, it connects myself with that special pleasure. And I wanted to retrieve that pleasure, in this case as a director.

I wanted people to feel this way. The most amazing thing and I'm so grateful for that, looking at the audiences as they are coming out of the theater and they are excited and they had a real good time. And they are talking about the film. And they are happy. I like that, because that was my first idea, that was the main fuel that was underneath everything. I did it out of my own pleasure and everything was great. It's not the only way. There are millions of ways. And I'm quite sure I'm going to do things that aren't going to come from there, but in this particular case, I wanted to do that. So I never thought that it could be difficult or that the genre was difficult, because it was like going to play, going to have fun.

Q: You wrote this script a few years ago and tried to get it produced without success. Then you enter a screenwriting contest and you win. You get to make the film and it comes out to great notices. It's very popular. How does that make you feel?

FB: Like a dream. Like a dream. You know? Sometimes it happens. I was thinking of the last couple of years, "Sometimes it happens and it happened to you." Like a dream. You know, a perfect situation where everything goes perfectly, and, yeah, like a movie. I mean, going to all these places, trying to sell the script, get it produced, "No, no, I'm not interested, no, no." And, finally, the contest and they call me at home, to my work and say, "Okay, now, you're going to do your film."

And from that moment to now, here, everything was perfect. It's like a child's dream or something like that. The shooting was a pleasure. And then the film came out in Argentina and was huge. And then it came out in some other countries and it went great. And then they called me from Hollywood and everything, and they're trying to contact me to see if perhaps I want to work here, send me some scripts or whatever. And then the festivals and awards and everything, and then they're going to put out the film here in the United States and in Europe. What can I say? [Laughs] Everything was like kind of a dream. It happens sometimes.

Gyorgy Illes

Few countries can boast as many great cinematographers as Hungary, and many of them were students of the legendary Gyorgy Illes, who taught at the Budapest Academy of Drama and Film for more than 50 years and has died aged 91.

"The curriculum I developed featured only still photography in the first two terms," he said. "Those candidates who got into the second round were given the task of going out to locations chosen by us, where they had to create a photographic étude consisting of 10 to 12 pictures. Most of my students were excellent photographers, and over the years we saw masses of brilliant photos."