Angel-A

[The Perineum Falcon]

From the good folks at Twitch:

Poster and Stills From Luc Besson's Angel-A



We reported a month back that Luc Besson had secretly gone out and shot himself a new film titled Angel-A and had it slated for a December release. All that was known at the time was that it was shot in black and white, was a romantic comedy and starred Jamel Debbouze and Gilbert Melki. You probably don't recognize either of those names, but trust me, you know Debbouze from Amelie.

Well, hey golly, that report turned out to be true and AICN has come across some stills and the poster for the film here. As you'd expect from a Besson flick, they're purty ... I like Debbouze a lot and I think it'll be good for Besson to take a stab at a smaller film, one which involves no stabbing, so I've got high hopes for this ...

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

Release Date: March 23rd, 2007 (limited) 

Starring: Jamel Debbouze, Rie Rasmussen, Gilbert Melki, Serge Riaboukine, Akim Chir 

Directed by: Luc Besson 

Premise: A moralistic tale about a man, Andre, who gets a second chance in life when he meets Angela, a tall, femme fatale whom he saves from a suicide bid in the Seine River. The two spend a memorable summer night in nearly deserted Paris where Angela exposes herself as a true angel, sent down to save Andre from himself.

[MacGuffin]

Throughout his career, writer/director Luc Besson has always created strong female characters. From Anne Parillaud in La Femme Nikita to Milla Jovovich as Joan of Arc and now Rie Rasmussen as Angel-A in the film of the same name. After such large scale productions as Arthur and the Invisibles and The Fifth Element, Besson has created Angel-A, a powerful film without fighting or special effects. The film takes some unexpected turns as the two main characters played by Rasmussen and Jamel Debbouze spend much of the time just talking and discovering what it is in themselves that deserves to be loved. I got a chance to talk with Besson and Rasmussen on their recent trip to New York City.

Daniel Robert Epstein: Did the two of you know each other before the film?

Luc Besson: Yes.

Rie Rasmussen: I had worked with his company doing a short film. Actually I had harassed him to see if he would let me do my feature film as a writer/director and he refused because I was a little over anxious. He said, "Here, make a short film." [laughs] I was like, "Come on, give me $17 million. I can do it right now." Then I made a short film and it was nominated at the Cannes Film Festival and he said, "Wow, maybe I should look a second time."

DRE:Are you making the feature?

Rie:We're on our way.

Luc:She's going to do it in the fall.

DRE:Will it be based on the short film?

Rie:No, no, no, a whole new one.

Luc:Sometimes you see young people and you smell that they're talented and full of imagery but the process of making a feature film has a certain digestion of things. You need a minimum of time to secure a few things. So even though she had done so many things the last two or three years, she was in the process of learning everything by doing two shorts, being on Angel-A for ten weeks and being part of the whole process. So now she's ready.

DRE:Rie I read that when you were working on Femme Fatale you would go watch [Femme Fatale director Brian] De Palma even during the scenes you weren't in. So to get to work so closely with Luc must have been a great learning experience.

Rie:Yeah, it was very fun because I worked with [cinematographer] Thierry Arbogast on both Femme Fatale and Angel-A. I was following him around half-naked on the set saying, "Thierry, remember in La Femme Nikita..." and he was like, "This girl's crazy." Then I got to work with Luc which was a thrill. Luc is a hero and an idol of mine. He has shaped me as a female with Le Femme Nikita so to be right there and let go of control and let him direct me was fantastic. I am an observant young girl so I was able to learn and I did.

DRE:Was this a difficult shoot?

Luc:It was about seven weeks. But some of the days were very short because there is the magic hour in Paris where you can't fight the light. Sometimes we would rehearse a lot then we would get together and just shoot for an hour or two.

Rie:Then that would be it.

Luc:That would be it for the day. We were able to shoot full scenes in that short time though. For example, when they fight on the bridge, it is two Steadicams and a third camera on my shoulder.

Rie:That took like an hour and a half. But we would always do a full scene, no matter the number of pages, like a small theater piece.

DRE:Luc, you have always included autobiographical elements in your films, like Arthur and the Invisibles and The Big Blue, was Angel-A in any way autobiographical?

Luc:The scene in the mirror happened to me with a girlfriend of mine, like probably 15 or 20 years ago. We were fighting each other and she grabbed me and pushed me in front of the mirror and said, "Okay, look at you and say it." I couldn't. I couldn't say it. I said, "What's wrong with you? Of course I can say it." She said, "Okay, then say it" and I couldn't say it. I thought "Why is it so difficult? Why can't I say it? What's wrong with me?" I never forgot this feeling and it took me like 20 years to understand that nothing was wrong, you just have to accept it. At least now, I can watch myself and say, "Okay, I like you, all right? Don't bother me."

DRE:Luc you're probably 15 to 20 years older than Rie.

Luc:Yes but she's at a much more mature place. She can go to the mirror and kiss herself.

Rie:[laugh] I love myself. My parents were so supportive of me in everything I do, and they love me immensely; therefore, I do not have this question.

Luc:That little rejection of yourself always comes from your parents. They give you a reflection of yourself that you don't like.

Rie:I have an extended, huge family. They live for the kids. There are nine of us and we are the gods, we are the religion and my parents are exceptional parents. That is their world. I would never question that because they love me.

Luc:My parents divorced when I was really young and then they remarried and they made other kids. That's very difficult for you to love yourself because you are the only sibling that has seen that it didn't work. My parents didn't understand that, they were too young. They loved me a lot, but they didn't know how to explain it or to say it. That stays with you.

DRE:Did you think of Rie when you were writing the film?

Luc:No, I've had this story in my head for a long time. But I never found the girl and I never found the boy.

DRE:So you might have made this a long time ago if you had found the right actors?

Luc:No. The script was in stand-by, but I never went more with it because I didn't know if I could finish it. I met Rie and then I met Jamel [Debbouze] a couple of months later. I thought, "Oh. Maybe the guy I've seen over there and the girl I've seen over there would be good together."

DRE:Rie, did you and Jamel have chemistry right away?

Rie:We were exactly what Luc needed us to be. We had the perfect energy on screen. Through Luc's brilliant casting, we worked perfect as Angel-A and André.

DRE:Luc, your films often have a lot of talking in them but this film is pretty much only two people talking, was that the way it was always going to be?

Luc:Yes, from the beginning there was only this.

Rie:The film has a very important premise, love yourself, and others will love you. Respect yourself and others will respect you. If you can love yourself with your flaws, then you can love your neighbor with their flaws. Then maybe our cultures could start talking, maybe then the world would start functioning and we wouldn't have to kill each other. The point of this film is a little social commentary about that no matter how different we look or we seem, with a little bit of love, a little bit of acceptance, we might make this things work easier.

Luc:When I make films, I am more interested in the content than the shape. But most of the time when I read papers and talk with people, it seems that people are much more impressed by the vision, the color, the shape and the music. For me, that's the easy part for me so maybe unconsciously this was a way for me to fight that. To say, "It's a man and a woman and they're going to talk all day long." But I couldn't help myself because the film is still beautiful.

DRE:Rie, what did Luc do to motivate you?

Rie:You got Luc Besson, that's enough fucking motivation. He is the producer of the largest grossing, highest profit film company in Europe mainly because of his writing. He's hands-on all day long. When you come on set, you better know your shit because this guy's going to turn it out. It is the respect for him as a producer, as an artist, as a director that motivates me. You're working with Luc Besson; he's a fucking hero. So do it and do it well.

Luc:I think that the preparation is the most important. The relationship with the actor or the actress, talking about the script, knowing the lines by heart, rehearsing little by little so if you really prep enough, shooting is easy. It's the signature at the end of the paper.

Rie:The preparation that we did was spot on, Jamel and I, we would never go out in front of the camera without having rehearsed the scene with Luc a hundred times minimum. There was no improvisation in this movie. As an actor, you can improvise once you know your character completely. But you can't improvise if you don't know the text by heart because then you're just bullshitting. Picasso could draw silly, funny-looking ladies only after he could do complete realism.

Luc:Laure Manaudou is a 19 year old French girl that is the world champion of swimming, the French one. She has a big smile. She's cute. She's a big hero in France because she won many gold medals. When I was talking with her, she told me that she swims 16 kilometers a day and does three hours of pushups. So when she does a race, of course she wins. It's only 400 meters. She says the race day is easiest one.

DRE:Angel-A is in black and white, you haven't done that since The Last Battle [released in 1983]

Luc:Yes my first film was in black and now my last one.

DRE:What made you decide to shoot Angel-A in black and white?

Luc:Black and white gives you that feeling that you don't really know if it's real or if it's a dream or if it's a poem because black and white is not reality.

Rie:I like the stark contrast.

DRE:Did the two of you ever have debate of the nature they had in the movie?

Rie:No.

Luc:Not so much. Making a film together is like being a football team. You're all like, "Yeah, we're going to make it." Part of it is the experience of being together all the time.

Rie:Film is not the actors' vision. I can be super-excited about anything I want to do but ultimately he may say no. There's no reason to argue against that because he is right, he is the director. It is his vision and that's what you follow so there's no like back and forth because he is the master. No is no.

DRE:I would like to ask you about Femme Fatale because to be in a Brian De Palma film is amazing thing, but to do a nude sex scene in a Brian De Palma film is...

Rie:Fucking cool, man. [laughs]

DRE:I spoke to Rebecca [Romijn] about Femme Fatale years ago, but she said De Palma is not crazy.

Rie:No, he might have been once but he does live in a mysterious Brian universe. He's very quiet, very reclusive, very tired until his naptime. He's the opposite of Luc, I would say.

DRE:Really?

Rie:Yes, Luc goes out and talks to all the other young people and meets new ones and gets inspired by the bird in the sky and whatnot. Every time I see him he has a new project running. Whereas Brian's like, "Look, I'm going to take my time. I'm going to have a nap. I don't want to talk too much."

Luc:It's funny because when I was younger, Brian inspired me a lot. I really like him a lot. I met him like two years ago and he's older now and you can feel a little sadness. I think that the few times he tried to go the more commercial route through Hollywood hurt him a lot. It makes him sad. But I think when you are a real artist, and he is a real artist, you always have a moment in your life the Hollywood mermaid comes and says, "Here's the money; here's the power." Sometimes you get attracted to it and say, "Yeah, maybe I should try" and I think this is what he thought. But I say never do it.

DRE:So never do the whole "one for them" attitude?

Luc:Don't even try it. If you're an artist, stay an artist. There is nothing to win. It doesn't mean the Hollywood system is bad. It's just another system.

Rie:Luc has always written everything he's directed. He's never been a writer/director for hire. But he started a company in Paris that will give a chance to young directors and it is profiting immensely so he knows how to create a flow of books and music and I think he gets his creative juices satisfied. He doesn't have to look for money because he's funding it himself with his own creativity.

DRE:Arthur and the Invisibles did very well all over the world except in America. Why do you think it didn't connect here?

Luc:I've worked in the movie business for 30 years now and for each film I work 40 different distributors around the world. The American distributor on Arthur [The Weinstein Company] was the worst I have worked with in my entire life, in any country. I think this is the essence of all the problems. Why the critics didn't like Arthur was because they changed so much of the film and tried to pretend the film was American. The critics aren't stupid. They watched the film, they vaguely smell American but they can feel the film is forced for an American audience. The film is European. It's made by a Frenchman. This was the only country where the film was changed. The rest of the world has the same film as France.

DRE:Many people on SuicideGirls are obsessed with The Fifth Element and Leeloo especially. What inspired her look?

Luc:What I really liked was to say that the savior of the universe would be a woman. She won't be full of muscle. She would have no weapon. She won't speak any language that we know. I liked this funny idea of the world being saved by this tiny, charming girl who wasn't there for the last 10,000 years. She's just come back in town and she's discovering everything. She's speaks 9000 languages except this one. At the time, I tested so many girls for the role. The test was so funny, for example I would point the camera at them and say, "Close your eyes and when you open them I want you see the world as if you have never seen it before." The first time I did the test on Milla [Jovovich] she thought she was terrible and she was very surprised when we called her back for the second round.

DRE:Rie, do you know when you're going to be starting your feature?

Rie:Top secret details, I don't know what I'm allowed to say.Luc:In the fall, in the fall [laughs].

DRE:What's it about?

Rie:It's basically about borders. The little red lines in the sand that creates little countries that Mother Earth wasn't born with, meaning that all that violence and bloodshed and terror would be gone if the red lines were gone. I have a sister from Vietnam who was trying to get papers to get to Denmark for five years. My family wants her here but she's not allowed to live in the country that her family lives in. We have protected those red lines on the map with bloodshed and terror for so long because we think this little piece of ground is so important to us. Also it's the female's point of view of dealing with equality.

DRE:Are you going to be in the film?

Rie:Yes, I've directed myself in my own short films and I know the dialogue because I fucking wrote it. So I won't be the little bitchy girl who won't get up in the morning.

[MacGuffin]

Le Cinéma du Blockbuster
Source: New York Times

ON the sliding scale of Frenchness, "Angel-A" — a low-budget black-and-white romance in which a desperate couple travel the streets of Paris, alternately running from and chasing after a gangster as they debate the nature and meaning of existence — would seem at first glance to register pretty high. Unless you were a member of the French cinematic elite, in which case your animus toward the writer-director, Luc Besson, long the most Hollywood of French filmmakers, might make you suspect its authenticity. When it opened in Paris in December 2005, critics were predictably hostile: Under the headline "Besson Stupid and Talkative," the reviewer for the newspaper Libération sneeringly wrote, "Besson thinks he can buy himself the title of auteur, but all he attains is a parvenu's vulgarity."

In the United States, Mr. Besson is primarily known as a superior director of stylish, mayhemic, even soulful films like "La Femme Nikita" and "Léon: The Professional." But in France, across Europe and throughout Asia he is a bona fide celebrity: auteur and entrepreneur, star maker and mogul, and a first-class purveyor of blockbuster escapist fantasy. Over a 30-year career he has not only directed 10 features (Sony Pictures Classics will release "Angel-A" here on May 25) but has also written and produced dozens more, including a handful of the most commercially successful French movies ever. In the process he has almost single-handedly dragged French cinema, kicking and screaming, from the art house into the multiplex.

To the chagrin of French critics and cinephiles, the scale of this success has reoriented French filmmaking away from the literary-intellectual tradition for which it is famed. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Amelie," a sentimental crowd pleaser that straddled Hollywood and French romantic comedy conventions, would be unthinkable without Mr. Besson; so too the slick, explosive big-budget genre films like "The Crimson Rivers" and "Brotherhood of the Wolf" that have played around the world.

As a result Mr. Besson has routinely found himself under attack by critical essays with titles like "Besson Murdered My Cinema." Mr. Besson, nothing if not obstinate, makes no apologies for his work. "In France we have this problem," he said. "We cannot admit that movies are also an industry, that a movie is also fun."

At 48 the broad-shouldered, husky Mr. Besson exhibits few of the qualities of the auteur, beginning with his unprepossessing appearance (rarely will you encounter him in anything more formal than a pair of black Levi's and a dark-colored thermal T-shirt) and extending to an aversion to typical French-artiste habits like cigarette smoking, or coffee or wine consumption. Perhaps things would be different if he had gone to La Fémis, the French National Film School. But as Mr. Besson tells it, when he was 18, in 1977, he applied, and in a preliminary interview, an administrator asked him which directors he most admired. Mr. Besson named Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Milos Forman, before the interviewer cut him off, saying: "That's enough. I don't think you belong here."

Throughout his life Mr. Besson has never quite belonged. He was born in Paris, to parents who led a nomadic life as Club Med scuba instructors in Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia. A natural swimmer, diver and student of sea life, he was also a solitary child. When he was 10, his parents moved back to France, divorced and married others. "Here there is two families, and I am the only bad souvenir of something that doesn't work," he said. "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."

He escaped by diving deep inside himself, writing long, fantastic adventure stories, which he didn't show anyone. A few months before high school graduation, Mr. Besson's stepfather arranged for him to assist the crew on a short film shooting in Paris. When he returned home the next day, Mr. Besson informed his mother he was leaving school to work in film production. He packed his things and never looked back.

Having neither attended film school nor logged much time at the cinémathèque, Mr. Besson's repertory of movie references can have shocking gaps. Though "Angel-A" concerns a man who is about to take his life by jumping off a bridge, only to come under the wing of a guardian angel who guides him on a retrospective tour of his life, its statuesque star, Rie Rasmussen, said that when she tried to talk to Mr. Besson about "It's a Wonderful Life," she was surprised to find he had never seen it.

Yet while Mr. Besson tends to hatch scenarios from his imagination, they are designed to entertain. In 1979, when he was a 20-year-old production assistant, he took a trip to Los Angeles. With a friend he visited Universal Studios, where he lucked into an invitation to visit the set of "The Nude Bomb," a comedy based on the television sitcom "Get Smart." Though Mr. Besson could see it wasn't a great movie, it was still a revelation.

"Just to see how they are shooting," he said, "and then to return to France, already I can see the difference. There was something wrong. This was very light, easy, fun. In Paris everything was about ego and pretension. Almost everybody is there for bad reasons."

Mr. Besson's fluid camera sense was evident from the opening sequence of his low-budget debut feature, "Le Dernier Combat," made in 1982. He became a phenomenon, however, in 1988 with his third film, "The Big Blue," an English-language love story drawing on his childhood, set in the world of the endurance sport of free diving (deep-sea diving without breathing apparatus). When the film had its premiere on opening night at the Cannes Film Festival, it was mercilessly drubbed, but no matter; it was a smash. Embraced by young people who kept returning to see it again, the movie sold 10 million tickets and quickly became what the French call a film générationnel, a defining moment in the culture.

Mr. Besson's next films were harder and more vicious, establishing him as a world-class action maestro. A return to French-language filmmaking, "La Femme Nikita," released in 1990, spawned numerous imitators (including Quentin Tarantino, who appropriated the figure of the "cleaner" — a high-level crisis manager for killers — for "Pulp Fiction"). "Léon: The Professional" (1994), which was shot in New York in English, saw Natalie Portman's debut as a smoldering nymphet who bonds with the Euro-hitman played by Jean Reno.

In subsequent films Mr. Besson realized his ambition to meld visionary, megabudget Hollywood-style spectacle to French sensibility. The tongue-in-cheek, brink-of-the-apocalypse "Fifth Element" starred English-speaking actors, including Bruce Willis and Gary Oldman, but much of its impact derives from Mr. Besson's engagement of the French comic book artists Moebius and Jean-Claude Mézières to visualize the film's rococo-futurist settings, and Jean Paul Gaultier to design the costumes. Similarly, "The Messenger: Joan of Arc," though shot in English with an international cast, has a subject as deeply embedded in French national mythology as George Washington is in ours.

For nearly 100 years Hollywood has courted foreign directors who display an affinity for its idiom. Yet Mr. Besson has remained in Paris: acting locally and thinking globally, he makes popular entertainments, with Hollywood budgets and production values. Mr. Besson's films are now produced by EuropaCorp, the studio he established in 2000 when Gaumont, which had financed his films as a director, declined to support his ambitions as a producer.

Since then EuropaCorp has produced more than 50 movies, 20 of which Mr. Besson has written or co-written, and two that he wrote, produced and directed. Since opening in Paris last Christmas his "Arthur and the Invisibles " — a Harry Potteresque children's adventure that is a hybrid of live action and innovative 3-D animation — has earned nearly $110 million. And "Taxi 4," the latest in a series of action comedies that Mr. Besson has written and produced, has taken in over $50 million in France alone in since mid-February.

But if Mr. Besson's Hollywood-style productions have made French cinema a global industry, American audiences still perceive something subtly foreign about them. His films tell European stories and feature European characters, and retain a distinctive European identity and flavor. The box office returns here also lag behind lesser but more familiar Hollywood product, unlike elsewhere in the world, where EuropaCorp releases compete with Hollywood's on more level ground. (If there's a historical precedent, it would be the Italian director Sergio Leone, whose 1960s westerns, shot in Spain, in English, with Clint Eastwood and other American stars, were at once recognizable and alien.)

Instead Mr. Besson has been a consistent "long tail" filmmaker in America, accumulating a significant following among people who discover his work on cable or DVD. Ms. Portman says that 13 years later "Léon: The Professional" is the film strangers most want to talk about when they first meet her. "It's a lesson," she said, "in how to separate the quality of a movie and how it stays with you from any kind of criticism or money."

If the films that he writes and hands off to others (including the James Bond-style "Transporter" movies and the thriller "District B-13") are primarily check-your-brain-at-the-door entertainments, then those he directs inevitably represent a more complicated and personal set of preoccupations and obsessions. "Angel-A," which he calls "my story," was made in 2005 during a lull in the drawn-out process of perfecting the computer-rendered world of "Arthur." Mr. Besson shot the film quickly, on the cheap, frequently driving around with a small crew and spontaneously finding shooting locations. After so many blockbusters, it was a return to the way he made his earliest movies.

A character-driven film, focusing on the evolving relationship of a couple, "Angel-A" is the closest thing to a traditional French film that Mr. Besson has made. Mr. Besson, who refers to his print adversaries as "de-press," has often spoken of retiring after directing 10 films. And beyond its sense of self-searching, "Angel-A" has a genuine valedictory quality. Mr. Besson admits that the film's dialogue, by turns inarticulate, comic and poetic, is his attempt to dramatize his own inner dialogue and arrive at some measure of self-acceptance.

After all these years what Mr. Besson continues to enjoy most is writing, diving anew into his imagination to test the mettle of a sensitive, poorly socialized heroes who, faced with the unjust thwarting of their desire, are forced to exact savage retribution.

"I feel lucky, because this is what I wanted to do when I was 17," he said. "But you know, I meet young guys and the thing in their eyes is to be like Luc Besson. It's crazy. For so long I was so unhappy with myself, I couldn't imagine someone who wants to have my life."