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Beyond the Lens
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Luc Besson, Unplugged
After spending five years making Arthur and the Invisibles, the French filmmaker is happy to have cranked out a quickie in the city where his fame is always a handy plus.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
By Brett Buckalew
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Tass
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Besson, at the March 2007 Russian premiere of Arthur
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A specialist when it comes to action films that possess more off-the-wall humor and genuine heart than the norm, French director Luc Besson has amassed a fervent fan base, comprised chiefly of young male film geeks who plaster one-sheets of his León the Professional and The Fifth Element on their dorm or apartment walls.
But lately, Besson has left those devotees high and dry. It’s been eight years since the release of his last live-action feature, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. In that time, he has directed a poorly received animated film, Arthur and the Invisibles, and produced plenty of kinetic guilty pleasures, including the two Transporter films and the Parkour showcase District B13. What all those endeavors can’t disguise is that it’s been a lengthy wait for his latest visionary trifle, leaving his ardent followers chomping at the bit with impatience.
In an interview with FilmStew, Besson assures his fans that he hasn’t been wasting the near-decade since The Messenger on any idle pursuits. “I know it looks like that from the outside,” he concedes, “but [after] I finished Joan of Arc, I wrote for a couple months, like two or three, and then I started work on Arthur and the Invisibles. The making of Arthur was five years long. I was never on the beach, believe me!”
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Jun Sato/WireImage.com
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The very tall Rie Rasmussen
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Completed shortly after Arthur and released in France around Christmastime 2005, Angel-A marks Besson’s return to non-animated filmmaking, and it’ll be curious to see how stateside admirers of the director’s work take to it (over the Memorial Day weekend, it grossed just under $40,000 in seven theatres, and has made $7.7 million elsewhere). Though it continues Besson’s obsession with tough, no-nonsense heroines who also happen to be gorgeous, first evident with Anne Parillaud’s assassin in La Femme Nikita and manifest here in Rie Rasmussen’s fallen-to-earth angel, Angel-A is notably light on slam-bang action.
Even more challenging to the director’s more testosterone-seeking fans is that the film is a sweet-natured romance - some Neanderthals would even call it a “chick flick” - centered on the relationship that evolves between Rasmussen’s Angela and the troubled soul she’s been assigned to heal, unlucky, insecure thief Andre (Jamel Debbouze). “I’m pretty naked in this one,” Besson reveals, pointing to the story’s personal, change-of-pace nature. “I talk about this man who’s lying all his life and decides not to anymore.”
To ensure the production of Angel-A reflected this honesty, Besson, who occasionally sets his films in the U.S., decided to shoot the film in his native Paris. “Because I was so naked, I think it had to be in French and in Paris,” he explains. “It felt like closest to me. I would lie a little more if it was in English or in another city, so it would be another way of hiding myself more.”
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Tony Barson/WireImage.com
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The very French Jamel Debbouze, at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival
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Filming Angel-A on his native soil turned out to be advantageous for Besson in another, more practical way. Because he’s revered as something of a national hero in France, the filmmaker got to shoot scenes at landmarks like the Eiffel Tower without any police interference.
“That’s the good thing about being popular,” he observes. “If the cops arrive, I just smile, and say, ‘Hey, it’s me,’ and they go, ‘Oh, it’s Luc Besson! Can we take a picture?’ And they’re sweet in France, the cops, honestly.”
Another stroke of good fortune for Besson lay in the ideal, odd-couple casting of the diminutive Debbouze, last seen in Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee Days of Glory, and statuesque actress-director-painter Rasmussen in the two lead roles. Due to their vast differences in height and demeanor, the two earn laughs just standing next to each other.
“You can’t have one and not the other,” Besson notes when going into how he cast for the characters of André and Angela. “You have to choose them at the same time almost. I met [Rasmussen] as a director at first, because she likes to do her short films. So I never mentioned the film, I never talked about the film to her. And a month later, I met Jamel, and then it starts to work in my head, and I think, ‘Oh, him and her—that could be cool!’”
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Hee Chul Kim/WireImage.com
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Friend and DV trailblazer Jean-Jacques Annaud
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Wanting the diametrically opposed physical appearances of Debbouze and Rasmussen to be mirrored by the film’s visual style, Besson rendered Angel-A in crisp black-and-white tones after shooting it in color. “Black-and-white because yin and yang, because tall and small, introverted-extroverted, blonde-brown, the good-/the bad, the black-the white./.. Everything is in opposition in the film,” the director riffs. “And I need the film to have this little poetry. Is it real? Is it a dream? Is it a fairy tale? So I had the black-and-white, I had the frame, and I had the music to give a mood, because I need the people to believe [in it] at the end.”
“To make it believable,” he continues, “I need somehow to relax you, like almost a massage.”
So if Besson is experimental-minded enough to color outside the lines (or, in this case, not color at all), would he ever consider shooting on digital video in the future, considering American genre filmmakers like Robert Rodriguez and David Fincher have made the transition over from celluloid? “I think it’s a tool, so if it’s appropriate to the film, yeah, why not?” Besson reasons.
The director offers a recent family film by a fellow French filmmaker as an example of what he sees as an appropriate, even necessary, use of digital video. “When Jean-Jacques Annaud made Two Brothers, the film with the tigers, he shot in digital and he was right,” Besson remarks. “You have to shoot 15 hours of tigers before the tigers do what [you want]. Like, if [Annaud] wants [the tiger] to lick himself, he has to wait for two hours, so if you do that on 35mm, it will take forever.”
Hmm… Maybe a digitally shot film set in the animal kingdom would be an interesting project for Besson himself to tackle, provided it’s different enough from Two Brothers. It would certainly keep those fans on their toes.
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