Luc Besson Talks Risk Adverse Studios & Joy Of Making L.A. & Smartphone-Shot Romance ‘June & John’: “It Was Just Two Actors & A Director”

Four decades have passed since Luc Besson found fame as an emerging 26-year-old director with thriller Subway starring Isabelle Adjani and Christopher Lambert.

His feature credits since range from early stylized breakouts The Big Blue and Nikita; to sci-fi hits The Fifth Element and Lucy, and historic dramas The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc and The Lady, at the same time as building film company EuropaCorp and producing blockbuster franchises Taxi and Taken.

As the 40th anniversary of his big screen breakthrough approaches this fall, Besson is rolling out ultra-low budget romance June & John. Shot entirely with smartphones in L.A. during the Covid 19 pandemic with a 12-person crew, the guerilla-style production took Besson back to his early filmmaking years.

“It was very joyous. It was really two actors and a director because of the lockdown. From the time they were first in costume to the time we finished shooting it felt like two minutes had passed,” he tells Deadline. “It felt good to be uniquely creative without the pressure of money.”

The feature releases today in France on pay-TV channel Ciné + OCS, after a world premiere at Paris’ Grand Rex cinema last week, where it garnered favorable reviews from France’s tough critics corp, which has never given Besson an easy ride.

Luke Stanton Eddy co-stars as downtrodden officer worker John opposite Matilda Price as the free-spirited June.

June rips John out of his humdrum life when she turns up at his place of work, after the pair exchange looks on the subway, and pulls off a heist. It sets in motion a crime-ridden, romantic adventure played out against the tents of the L.A. homeless, luxury villas in the hills and desert motels, interspersed with tree-hugging and a skydiving scene.

Besson came up with the idea for the film after he found himself locked down in L.A. during the Covid pandemic.

“We can’t go out, we can’t film, we can’t do anything. That’s not possible for me. I’m like a wolf in a cage,” recounts Besson with a laugh. “Virginie [Silla], the producer, my wife, said, ‘Write something and we’ll find a way, or you’re going die in this cage.”

Just prior to the pandemic, Besson had been developing a project for a major Chinese smartphone brand.

“They wanted a short film of 15 to 20 minutes. They gave me carte blanche. I started writing this little story, which was just a scene of the main character suffering and then the meeting in the subway,” he explains. 

“Covid hit and it didn’t happen, but I liked this little idea, and it got me thinking that shooting on a phone would be another way of filming and as well as a different approach to directing. It offered enormous freedom. It’s incredible. You take your phone in your hand, and you shoot,” he continues.

“That’s what interested me above all. I’ve done 21 films, big films, with big budgets and crew. The challenge was to take a phone in my hand, two actors, a 12-person crew and start again like I had done with my first film 40 or 50 years ago,” he continues.  “The scene in the little tent, for example, that was incredible. It was just us three.”

“What excited me was to see whether I was still capable of the same naivety, enthusiasm, sharpness of vision on the actors, because that was all there was.”

Most the time, Besson was shooting with a handheld phone, although some scenes were more elaborate such as a shoot-out scene that required a bigger set up.

“I placed three or four phones around the room to get different angles and also put phones on the barrels of the guns as well as the phone in my hand,” says the director.

There is also a more elaborate skydiving scene, where John offers June the chance to explore her dream of flying.

Besson reveals the scene came from a conversation with actress Milla Jovovich, who found fame in The Fifth Element breakout and was briefly his wife.

“One day we were talking about life and birds and she started crying. I asked her why, and she said: “Because I will never fly.” It struck me at the time because she was so emotional. It was the loss of dreams. We think when we’re 10, 12 that one day we’ll fly. Then we arrive at 18, 20 and understand we’ll never fly. It always stayed with me and came out 30 years later in a film.”

Besson took time scouting the film’s co-stars Stanton Eddy, seen recently opposite Robert De Niro in The Alto Knights, and Price, who the director had spotted in a music video.

“I got them to come to Los Angeles and we spent weeks together, for rehearsals and training, to make sure they were ready for the roles,” says Besson.

Another key character in the film is L.A., with Besson taking care to keep elements of the pandemic out of the frame.

“The city worked well with the story. The sort of company where John works is something I saw a lot in Los Angeles, where they never directly yell at people but put them under immense amounts of pressure,” says the director.

“Have you seen the film Swimming with Sharks?,” he continues, referring to the 1994 black comedy starring Frank Whaley as an assistant to a studio boss from hell, played by Kevin Spacey. “That type of pressure… it’s very Los Angeles. In France it’s not quite the same atmosphere… everyone shouts and then we come back and say sorry.”

Besson also addresses his own disenchantment with L.A, where he lived on and off from the late 1990s before moving back to France after the pandemic, and the studio system.

“I knew an era when the studios were led by people with a spirited intelligence, who took risks on films and directors,” he says.

“Warner followed Stanley Kubrick for 30 years. I imagine when he arrived in their offices with his plans for 2001: A Space Odyssey, they must have asked themselves, ‘What is this thing?’, but they followed him saying, ‘He’s an artist. Maybe we’ll win, maybe we’ll lose but we’re going to follow him’.”

“Today, the studios don’t follow artists at all, zero. They only follow excel spread sheets and the outcome is that they make less money. They need to have confidence in artists again. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose but at least they make good films.”

“Just because they control the purse strings, it doesn’t mean they understand everything. It’s totally false. We can see that there are lots of films that don’t work today because people are fed up of consuming films that are just tepid water.”

Besson says that while he has the advantage of having his own film company in EuropaCorp, it remains difficult to raise big budgets.

“All the time we make films with limited budgets we’re free, the minute we try to do something more ambitious, no-one wants to take a risk on creativity, no-one, it’s sad,” he says.

“I remember taking The Fifth Element to Sony. The head at the time got everyone to read the screenplay and then said to me, ‘Luc are you sure about this because I haven’t understood everything in the film’. I said it was a passion project for me and that I was sure about what I was doing, and he followed me… and it was the right decision… it was a different period, more joyous.”

The Fifth Element grossed more than $263 million at the time on the back of the $90 million budget.

As June & John finally rolls out some five years after it was shot, Besson is also gearing up for the July 30 release in France of Dracula: A Love Tale, reuniting him with Caleb Landry Jones, star of his 2023 comeback drama Dogman. He is set to return to the studio in Paris in September to shoot sci-fi movie The Last Man, featuring Snoop Dog in the cast.

Dracula: A Love Tale reframes Bram Stoker’s classic novel as a love story, following Dracula as he connects with a woman in Belle Epoque Paris, who resembles his beloved wife Elisabeta, who died in mid-15th century Transylvania.

There were rumors that the film might surface at this year’s edition of Cannes but Besson who has not shown a new film at the festival since Fanfan in 2003 says it was never on the cards.

“It’s too big and too mainstream for Cannes,” he says.

Deadline visited Besson on the set of Dracula: A Love Tale where the director seemed in his element, but he explains his experience on that production was still very from June & John.

“It’s different because we’re carrying a work by someone else that we’re trying to reframe in a different way with a new vision, while remaining respectful of the original,” he says. “Shoots are always difficult for me, apart from June & John which was so light and easy. As soon as a film is $45 million… there’s pressure.”

Besson says his favorite activity is rather writing.

“When you write there are no limits… you want a scene with 600 horses entering a valley, you write it,” he explains. “I started writing when I was 16. I wrote The Fifth Element. It began as a novel. It’s like a muscle. The morning, I make a tea and then I sit at my desk and start writing, and I’m off.”

Besson says he would love to alternate between guerrilla-style productions and bigger budget from now on, as way of working creatively without limits.

“Today, the freedom to create is over… I knew a blessed time when studio bosses had desires and could fall in love with a film… but that no longer exists.”