Cost In Space

Luc Besson, Proven Master of the Sci-fi Genre, Bets His Studio on a Race of Pricey, Pearly Aliens

- Chris Lee

WHEN LUC BESSON’S now classic The Fifth Element arrived in theaters two decades ago, American viewers were stumped. The campy sci-fi romp, featuring Bruce Willis as a taxi driver reluctantly saving the universe, was called “one of the great goofy movies” by Roger Ebert, but it was also that year’s worst-performing summer film.

“We did a screen test in Arizona that was painful,” Besson remembers. “When the opera singer [played by Inva Mula] came out, the guy sitting next to me said to his two kids, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ And they left. It was too weird. It was too European. It was too much.”

Besson is telling me this as his latest film, the $180 million sci-fiepic Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, is about to be released, perhaps as a way to prepare Americans for yet another WTF moment. The film concerns the Pearls: a celestial tribe of long-limbed, silver-skinned humanoids from the planet Mül, whose enviro-friendly existence is destroyed by the arrival of space invaders. When I mention that the Pearls sound suspiciously like the Na’vi in James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster Avatar, Besson blanches. “I had my script ready to go,” says the 57-year-old filmmaker. “I watched Avatar. I took my script and threw it in the garbage. And I started again.”