Luc Besson, the director behind hits like Leon, The Fifth Element, and Lucy, has been conspicuously absent from the limelight the past few years. The reason? Rape allegations against him by an actress, which he recently beat. Now he’s back with a new movie.
In 2018, actress Sand Van Roy claimed Besson made her his “private Barbie doll” and that their sexual encounters “became more and move violent.” She said that on May 17 she got “a heavy blow to her back that made her lose consciousness” and she was raped.
The legal battle went on for five years, with potentially irreparable damage being done to his career. Last June he was acquitted of all charges by the French equivalent of the supreme court.
In an interview with Variety, Besson explained that “it’s not my problem” whether people want to work with him or not; at the end of the day he is an artist.
“I’ve been trying to focus on my work for the last several years. I consider myself an artist and the most important thing to me is to write good scripts, like Dogman. I want to write better and better stories because I only have a few more films to make – and in 20 years, the only thing that will remain are the movies.”
As for whether he’ll still be able to attract top talent, he said “the only rule that prevails in this industry is that if you have a good project, people will want to be a part of it.”
To illustrate this point he remarked that “On Dogman, TF1 and Canal+ came on board in 24 hours. That’s how it works. As for the rest, it’s not in my control.”
His story highlights an oft ignored part of the transformative “me too” movement: how does one recover a reputation when being cleared of charges makes much less noise than being accused?
He does not care. He wants to make art unimpinged by the outside forces of the world around him. Besson wrote Dogman during the years fighting his rape complaint. He cast the then virtually unknown actor Caleb Landry Jones, and the set had 60 dogs at a time on it.
He said he shared an osmosis with the actor and that helped everything go more smoothly. Does he see himself making the same connection with a female star in the future?
“Sincerely, I don’t care about this, I was in love with Jean Reno for years after I made The Professional and no one cared. What’s a film apart from feelings? We might as well give scripts to ChatGPT if the point is to sterilize everything. Artists are there to shake up society. It’s dangerous to scrutinize the artistic process.”
Dogman tells the story of a man who was abused as a child and finds a way out of it through his love of stray dogs. The idea came to him, he said, after he read a news story about a French couple who kept their child in a cage.
Dogman will release on Sept. 27 after a run at the 80th Venice International Film Festival.
Published: Aug 31, 2023 04:29 pm