Luc Paul Maurice Besson (; born 18 March 1959) is a French film director, screenwriter and producer. He directed or produced the films Subway (1985), The Big Blue (1988), and La Femme Nikita (1990). Associated with the Cinéma du look film movement, he has been nominated for a César Award for Best Director and Best Picture for his films Léon: The Professional (1994) and the English-language The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999). He won Best Director and Best French Director for his sci-fi action film The Fifth Element (1997). He wrote and directed the 2014 sci-fi action film Lucy and the 2017 space opera film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. In 1980, near the beginning of his career, he founded his own production company, Les Films du Loup, later renamed Les Films du Dauphin. It was superseded in 2000 when he co-founded EuropaCorp with longtime collaborator . As writer, director, or producer, Besson has been involved in the creation of more than 50 films. Early life Besson was born in Paris, to parents who both worked as Club Med scuba-diving instructors. Influenced by this milieu, as a child, he planned to become a marine biologist. He spent much of his youth traveling with his parents to tourist resorts in Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece. The family returned to France when he was 10. His parents divorced, and both remarried; of this, he said: "Here there is two families, and I am the only bad souvenir of something that doesn't work," he said in the International Herald Tribune. "And if I disappear, then everything is perfect. The rage to exist comes from here. I have to do something! Otherwise I am going to die." At age 17, Besson had a diving accident that left him unable to dive. In a 2000 interview with The Guardian, he described how this influenced his choice of career: "I was 17 and I wondered what I was going to do. ... So I took a piece of paper and on the left I put everything I could do, or had skills for, and all the things I couldn't do. The first line was shorter and I could see that I loved writing, I loved images, I was taking a lot of pictures. So I thought maybe movies would be good. But I thought that to really know I should go