Luc Besson started writing the story that became Leon: The Professional when he was sixteen years old. Not a screenplay — a story, in a school notebook, about a lonely hitman and a twelve-year-old girl. He carried it for fifteen years before filming it. The notebook went everywhere. He revised it constantly. When he finally made the film in 1994, Jean Reno played Leon with the tenderness and violence that Besson had been refining since adolescence.
That’s the pattern. The obsession comes first. The film comes when the obsession has been refined long enough to survive contact with a camera.
The Fixation
Talk to Besson and he’d describe cinema the way an addict describes a substance. He saw his first film at age ten — his parents were diving instructors in Greece, and he spent a childhood underwater, which explains the liquid visual quality of everything he’s ever shot. He moved to Paris at seventeen with no connections, no money, and a notebook full of stories. He was making commercials by nineteen. He directed his first feature, Le Dernier Combat, at twenty-four — a post-apocalyptic film shot entirely without dialogue because he couldn’t afford sound equipment.
He’d tell you about The Fifth Element with the same notebook energy. He wrote the story at sixteen, alongside Leon, in the same school notebook. He spent twenty years refining it. When he finally filmed it in 1997, the production was the most expensive French film ever made, and every frame looked like a page torn from an adolescent’s imagination and given a $90 million budget.
The obsession isn’t with quality in the traditional sense — his later films have been critically uneven. The obsession is with images. Specific images that lodge in his mind and won’t leave until he puts them on screen. The underwater Paris of The Fifth Element. The hallway silhouette of Leon carrying his plant. The slow-motion gunfight in La Femme Nikita. Each one carried for years before it reached a lens.
What It Looks Like from Inside
He writes quickly when he writes — scripts in weeks, sometimes days. But the thinking happens over years. The notebook never closes. He’s described his process as collecting images the way other people collect stamps: compulsively, without a clear purpose, trusting that the collection will organize itself into a film eventually.
He founded EuropaCorp, a production company designed to let him make the films the Hollywood system wouldn’t greenlight. It produced dozens of movies. Some were great. Many were forgettable. All of them looked like Luc Besson films — visually extravagant, emotionally sincere, and built on images that had been living in his head longer than most of the actors had been alive.
He’s directed over twenty films. He’s produced over a hundred. The critical consensus is that his best work — Leon, The Fifth Element, La Femme Nikita — was made when he was young and hungry, and that the later output suffers from the absence of the constraints that forced the early work into shape. He’d disagree. He’d say the later films are still the notebook — still the images, still the fixations, still the stories that won’t leave him alone. The audience decides which images land. He just keeps writing them down, in the same notebook, in the same handwriting, with the same adolescent conviction that the image is worth the film, even when the film doesn’t deserve the image.
He wrote his two best films at sixteen and spent decades making them real. The obsession isn’t with cinema as an industry. It’s with the images that won’t leave him alone until he surrenders and puts them on screen. You can talk to Luc Besson yourself and see what happens.