CRITICS - who needs 'em? Not Bruce Willis, who famously remarked at this year's Cannes Film Festival that had movie reviews don't matter because people don't read any more. Not Luc Besson, either, the director of The Fifth Element, the film starring Willis which opened the festival. Besson's extravagant sci-fi epic - reportedly the most expensive European film ever made, at around $90 million - received disdainful reviews from the massed journalists at last month's Cannes Film Festival, hut that hasn't stopped it performing very respectably at the US and French box offices. "Movies are made for audiences," says the French director, when I ask him whether Cannes was the right place to launch such a big, brash, unashamedly commercial film. "All the rest doesn't matter. We showed the film at Cannes because it's a French festival, it was the 50th birthday, so it was a big fiesta. We decided that it was a good movie to open the festival with, because it's very enjoyable, and it's not typically French or typically American."
Chubby, spiky-haired and unshaven, Luc Besson looks younger than his 38 years, with an adequate but occasionally wayward grasp of English, the language in which he has made his last two films. Since his directorial debut, the post-apocalyptic The Last Battle in 1983, Besson has gone on to become France's most commercially successful director with films like Subway, The Big Blue, Niki'a (re-made in the US as The Assassin) and Leon. His films tend to be highly stylised and visually striking, with storylines which combine comic-book trashiness with a dollop of New Age mysticism and a shrewd eye for the marketplace. All these ingredients are present more than ever before in The Fifth Element, which is, in truth, a much more enjoyable experience than most of the reviews from Cannes might lead you to believe.
Cutting through the mystical gobbledygook of the plot, the film essentially stars Bruce Willis as a New York taxi driver in the 23rd century, whose encounter with beautiful alien Milla Jovovich and eccentric high priest Ian Holm leads to him saving the world from disaster. Metropolis, Blade Runner and Total Recall are the three most obvious influences, but Besson brings some refreshing twists to the hoary old business of creating the future.
He adopts an Olympian detachment, though, when I ask about the unfavourable critical reaction to his film, offering some gnomic observations worthy of Eric Cantona. "No artists would he here today if they listened to the critics. When Picasso started with the cubism, everyone said `Hey this is not painting!' The same with Modigliani and the girls with the long necks. We are not here to make a temple, we are here to open doors. These people are the ones who should help the artist, but they do the contrary. Who are they to say this is not right? Do they ever take a f***ing camera in their hands?"
Warming to his subject, he refers to Clint Eastwood's current film, Absolute Bower, as an example of critical shortcomings. "They say that the directing is brilliant, but I can tell you that half of that movie was made by the second unit. Clint is a great, great actor, and as a director he's made two or three brilliant movies, but this last one is just a job for the studio. All these critics can't even tell the difference. I don't blame them because they just don't know how a movie is made. How many days have they spent on a set? I've made seven movies, and I've spent about 250 weeks of my life on the set, so I know my job."
When it comes to creating a visually convincing fantasy world, Besson certainly does know his job. One of the things that differentiates The Fifth Element from most cinematic visions of the future is its unabashed cheerfulness and tongue-in-cheek attitude. The stunning streetscapes of 23rd-century New York, the high-kitsch Love Boat-style interplanetary cruise ship where the climactic shoot-out takes place, and most especially Jean-Paul Gaultier's witty and sexy costumes, all provide a welcome infusion of wit and humour. "I had to be funny and enjoyable somewhere, or it was going to be boring, all this stuff about saving the world," he admits. "I worked so much on the structure of this movie. I researched all the major world religions, all the theories. Then I got bored - it was all too serious. I said to myself, if I can say all this with just a smile, then that will be OK."
Perhaps unwisely, Besson has made much of the fact that The Eighth Element is based on his own teenage daydreams, although the complex world he presents in the film has, he insists, a rigorous internal logic which he devised as part of the scriptwriting process. "At 16 years old, there was no story - I was just interested in the images. I've never seen Metropolis. I started at zero, and tried to invent some lines and biorhythms to the history. I write 10 years by 10 years, all the way up to the 23rd century." (He proceeds to give me a brief history of the 21st and 22nd centuries according to Luc Besson, culminating in the introduction of cheap and easy space travel.)
One of the many unfortunate byproducts of the decline of the European film industry has been the virtual disappearance of the tradition of fantastical cinema on this side of the Atlantic. In an age where the possibilities for fantasy film have been expanded by new technologies, European fantasy has been swamped by American popular culture, agrees Besson. "Yes, and it's a shame, there's so much literature, and comic books - there's so much background. I was never a fan of American comics like Superman or Batman, but from the very beginning I bought Metal Hurlant (the French magazine reprinted in English as Heavy Metal) and the work of Moebius and Mezieres.
MOEBIUS, the star artist of Metal Hurlant, and Jean-Claude Mezieres, another of France's most celebrated graphic novelists, collaborated with Besson on The Fifth Element, helping to give the film a distinctively different aesthetic from American sci-fi. "I'd say it comes from deeper," says Besson. "In Europe, sci-fi is only a facade for a much more philosophical approach, about questions of human life. The American comics are much more one-dimensional."
At my suggestion that Tim Burton, for example, hardly fits that description, he laughs. "Yes, but Tim is the most European of American directors, just as I'm probably the most American of European directors."
This is Besson's first movie with a big American star, and Bruce Willis's part reads like a hi-tech reprise of the actor's role in Die Hard. "Yeah, I always had this vision of him, because he has this ambiguity. He can play the tough guy, but he can also be vulnerable and charming. I love to see the hero so lost in front of a woman."
To play the villain, Besson again cast Gary Oldman, who played the bad guy in his last film, Leon. "Orson Welles said that bad guys were always the more interesting parts, because they're more complicated, and that's especially true of this one, because he's bad and funny at the same time. He's a kind of nouveau riche character, but his philosophy of life is very interesting. I cast Gary again because he's one of the three best actors in the world, and he's also a friend of mine."
Besson acted as producer on Oldman's directorial debut, Nil By Mouth, one of the successes at Cannes this year. "It's a great, great movie, very hard."
A small, character-driven, socially-aware film like Nil By Mouth is much more typical of what people think of as "European" cinema than a big, brash fantasy like The Fifth Element. Does Besson think that European film-makers will be competing more in the future with the effects-driven blockbusters produced by Hollywood? "I think I've opened the door. There is the factory of Hollywood, and they know what they are doing most of the time over there. They make bad movies, but so do we. Europeans are always criticising America, but a lot of our movies are also very bad. We are like a little shop, and we make our movies one-by-one, by hand. So it's not the same at all. They're used to making these kind of big films - we're not, but we can do it. It's not impossible, which is good to know."
Despite the fact that The Eighth Element is competing in the same marketplace as the big studio films, its director is an unashamed believer in the auteur principle, blamed in some quarters for the decline of the European film industry. "I always have the final cut on my movies, although I will listen to people," he says. "But somebody has to take that position. It's an auteur movie. It's a handmade movie. In Hollywood, even if they pretend to give you that freedom, the only thing they want is what they want. Sometimes a movie will just disturb, them. But The Fifth Element was Number One in the States for 15 days. Which makes me very, very happy."
