吕克·贝松

In the Skies with Luc Besson and Rie Rasmussen
November 17, 2007 - 12:56am — GreenCineStaff
By John Esther

Considering the films he has written, directed and/or produced, it's not easy to see why Luc Besson and his film, Angela-A, were invited to this year's Sundance Film Festival. This is the festival, after all, that's supposed to be about finding great new voices outside of - and, ideally, who challenge - the mainstream entertainment apparatus.

Besson, the man behind such movies as Atlantis, La Femme Nikita, Léon, The Fifth Element, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, Wasabi, The Transporter, Unleashed, Arthur and the Invisibles, Bandidas and dozens of other soft-boiled titles, is about as independent-minded as the music of Oasis, the films of Quentin Tarantino, or a documentary on global warming featuring an ex-politician who allowed George Bush to steal the presidency from him. The fundamental difference between these artists and their crass commercial counterparts is the extra effort they put into stylizing their product.

Besson trekked up to the mountains of Utah to promote the out-of-competition entry, Angela-A. A neo-Howard Hawksian blend of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Besson produced, wrote and directed this film about a Parisian, Andre (Jamel Debbouze of the excellent Oscar-nominated Days of Glory), who is so down on his luck he decides take his life. Moments before Andre does his part to fight global warming - see the Inconvenient Truth segment on overpopulation - a beautiful, elongated blonde, Angel (Rie Rasmussen), appears to rescue him. Angel’s mission is to show Andre how he needs to learn to love himself so that he can love others. (The Nouvelle Vague is Dead!)

To give this film its primal Bessonion edge, Angel performs a few less-than-angelic tasks that might render her to here for eternity. Like any other Besson film I can remember, in Angela-A, the good outweighs the bad, villains are seriously injured and love conquers the hardened heart. In Park City, Utah, I spoke with Besson, along with Rasmussen, about their film, other films that have shocked the French director, and about how various audiences respond to decapitation.




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What do you have in common with Andre?

Luc Besson: [Laughs]. It’s easy. Andre is me. It’s the story of every man at the moment in which you have to accept you are not Brad Pitt. You look in the mirror and say, “Okay, I am not Brad Pitt. And you know what, I have to deal with it.” If anything, I think it is the same for women. It comes from the publicity, the image, we have now of the man and the woman. It’s so fake.

Rie Rasmussen: They’re not 16-years-old with Photoshop. It’s unfair. No woman looks like that. Sometimes there are people who are genetically compatible - my parents were, and I’m happy, but that’s it. But if you are 16, from Russia, and you have an eating disorder, and they put Photoshop on you, nobody is going to look like that. It’s fake.

When did you have that moment?

LB: It comes a little piece-by-piece. I come from a divorced family, and very young, you think you are undesired. You have to say, “I’m here.”

Is that the gist of Andre’s arc? That people can change on the inside but they cannot do anything about the outside?

LB: Yeah, and it’s also a fact that the lie is not the solution. The more you lie, the more you go down. It’s a spiral. It’s lie after lie after lie after lie. He lies to portray an image he thinks people will like, but it’s not him, and he knows it. So what about being loved with what you are? A little piece here and there, and you understand the message. I remember ten years ago, this young actress who had so much make-up on. Normally, I’m gentle and polite, and I was gentle, but I said, “Do you mind going to the restroom and just take everything out because I don’t know who you are?”

Why do you choose to direct some of your scripts and not others?

LB: It’s if I have the feeling that I’m the best director to do it. Sometimes I write a script I really like, but I’m thinking someone younger or with more energy who has not done this type of film will probably be better than me. I did Le Femme Nikita. So for me to do another action film like that is just boring. I’ve done it. Why do one more?

This film looks like a labor of love of yours.

LB: It may be evident on this one because there are fewer shots and they talk a lot. Maybe this one is obvious, but I hide my love more in the others. But it was always there.

RR: The message of this movie is love and acceptance. Love and accept yourself. Therefore you can love and accept others. This is Luc’s reaction to the world. We need to love ourselves. We need to accept ourselves. We need to stop lying to ourselves. Then we can see our neighbors for what they are and love them for what they are. And maybe we can find a solution without violence and a little more down the lines of love? It was a reaction to this society at the time.

LB: A long time ago, this old man told me, “You can’t love the other if you don’t love yourself.” And it’s true. It just took 20 years to understand it.

Why did you shoot the film in black and white?

LB: Because the film is about the yin and yang, man and woman, tall and small, blonde and brown, inside and outside, the dark side and the light side, the black and the white. It feeds the contrast.

Do you think things work in binary opposites rather than a continuum?

RR: You need to have the yin and the yang for the complete circle. You can’t have gray if you don’t have black and white.

How has your approach to making films changed over the years?

LB: You understand yourself better. You’re more precise with what you want to say. You know your tools better. You use your tools better. Slowly you progress, but you change at the same time. It’s funny.

RR: It goes sideways, not straight up.

LB: Your center of interests moves at the same time. Your audience also moves. There are basically three shocks when you’re a moviegoer. There is one between the ages 5 and 12, where, as a child, you’re stuck with a film or two. You have another one around adolescence where you’re basically building yourself; they are films that talk to you and you just die for them. Then as an adult you can have a time of shock.

What were the films of shock for you?

LB: When I was a kid, it was Jungle Book. I didn’t talk for a week after that. I hated my parents [laughs]. I wanted to be raised by a bear and a panther. I don’t care about the mom and the dad. And The Sword in the Stone, where he learns to be a man, he has to be a bird, then a fish. In order to be a man, he has to go high and fly deep. And he has to be a squirrel. As an adolescent, it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That was insane. Basically you’re 16 or 17-years-old and you are trying to understand the world, and then there’s this film that tells you: “The people who are crazy are not so crazy. The people who are not supposed to be crazy are crazy.” Then you are like, “Fuck.” Before that, you think you know that black is black and white is white. And Taxi Driver and Quest for Fire.

Quest for Fire?

LB: I was like, “Okay, we can make a film with no words and no known actors in a prehistoric time?” That was fresh to me. Then as an adult, the shocks are less strong, you know, too much. I really liked Little Miss Sunshine, for example. What I love is, at the end everybody loses, but you feel great. In a funny way, you’re happy for them. You say, “It doesn’t matter, they feel good together now.”

Are you as passionate about filmmaking today as you were when you first began?

LB: As a director, not so much, but as a writer, a producer and all this, yeah, I still am enjoying it. The funny thing is that sometimes I do things that I understand really clearly just a little afterward. It’s like I feel it. I don’t know how.

Lastly, what do you think about these interviews where you sit and talk about your work, do you think they serve the film or should the work speak for itself?

LB: The work speaks by itself, for sure. But we make films to share, so if the people want to talk and have an exchange, I’m happy. I need it, too. Otherwise you work, you never meet the people, they watch the film in the dark, and you never know what they think. Sometimes I sneak [into a theater]. For example, Joan of Arc: I went straight from the premiere to Los Angeles to Japan. Because I know the film by heart, sometimes when I know things are coming, I’m watching the people. I’m not watching the screen. In Joan of Arc, there is this moment in the middle of a battle where this guy’s head just blows off the guy. He is without a head. It’s a handheld shot. In the premiere, “Oh My God!” In the US, people were screaming, popcorn was flying. It was almost too much. In Japan, the theater has 1,500 people. Same moment, I turn and the head [comes off], and the crowd, “Oh.” That’s it. It’s because of the samurais. [Laughs]. “Mmm, well done.”