Luc Besson, director of such violent thrillers as Léon, has turned his hand to children's stories, writes Jon Henley
He's not your average French film-maker, Luc Besson. To start with, he's plump, if not positively portly, and, in defiance of all known Gallic fashion rules, continues to spike his bleached blond hair. Most unusual of all in French cinematic circles, however, he's actually quite easy to understand. And he's very likeable.
His work, too, stands out from that of his contemporaries, largely because most of it has been commercially successful (although, since Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie, other French directors have rediscovered the notion that films can be crowd- as well as critic-pleasers).
Besson's major movies have all been box-office triumphs. In France that has not endeared him to anyone much - one exception being the organisers of the Paris Olympics bid. It was Besson whom they drafted in to capture the image and spirit of the French capital in the official video film meant to win the hearts of International Olympic Committee members at the final bid presentations in Singapore.
And an even more notable exception to the detractors is the film-going public, who often seem not really to count in France. When The Fifth Element, his all-action sci-fi spectacular starring Bruce Willis, came out in 1997, Liberation devoted four pages to savaging his infantilism, superficiality, petulance and double chin.
Starting with the stylish Subway, Besson has always sought to please people, not penseurs. He followed that glossy 1985 Paris metro drama with The Big Blue, a magical and mystical divers-and-dolphins underwater epic that rapidly became one of the decade's cult movies. Then came the spy film Nikita, successful enough to spawn a shot-by-shot Hollywood remake, and Leon, the story of an emotionally handicapped hit man in New York and his bizarre relationship with a 12-year-old girl. His last blockbuster as director - though he's produced a dozen or more big French hits with his company, Europa, since - was Joan of Arc, in 1999. So how exactly did France's most popular but least-acclaimed director come to be a best-selling children's author?
"Why did I make Subway? Why did I do all that crazy undersea stuff in The Big Blue? Why did I go all black and nasty with Nikita?" he asks. "I don't know. Because I did. I do what I do because I want to do it, because I want to explore, go looking for things. This time it was kids."
Besson's fourth Arthur book, Arthur and the War of Two Worlds, is at the top of the French bestseller lists less than a month after its launch. The first three, starting with Arthur and the Minimoys - which has just been published in the UK - have sold more than one million copies in more than 30 countries.
There is also, needless to say, a film in the making. It stars Mia Farrow and Freddie Highmore (of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) in the flesh, and the voices of Madonna, David Bowie and Snoop Dogg, and is due for simultaneous release in 20 countries in time for Christmas next year.
The book started, confusingly, with an idea for a series of short five-minute films brought to Besson by friends, Patrice and Celine Garcia. "I fell in love with the drawings of the central characters, these minuscule little beings with freckles, fluffy hair, pointed ears and eyes like buttons," he says.
"I suggested they think about a feature-length movie, which they said was beyond them. So I said we'd have a go here, at my production company. It took six or seven months to make a 50-second film, combining 3D effects with real nature, but everyone loved it and I did a script. Then, of course, I couldn't bear to wait four years for a finished film. So I wrote the book."
Besson has been writing creatively since he was a teenager. He grew up wild and lonely in Greece and the former Yugoslavia, where his parents were diving instructors for Club Med. He dreamed of being a marine biologist, but an accident when he was 17 stopped him from going underwater again.
Early drafts of both The Fifth Element and The Big Blue were written when he was back in France, in the final years of secondary school, bored out of his mind in the small town of Coulommiers (known for a particularly lively cheese). "You know Coulommiers?" Besson asks. "It's deadly. You have to escape. Pen and paper were my only way out." Arthur, though, represents his first attempt at writing for children. "People often say I'm a child at heart," he says. "In fact, I think I just have access to [ my childhood], I have a very clear memory of it. We were all children once. We just need to show a bit of respect for it."
The story revolves around 10-year-old Arthur and his grandma, up to her ears in debt since the mysterious disappearance of her explorer husband Archibald and threatened with eviction by a nasty landlord. Unless a solution can be found, the big old house and gardens where Arthur spends all his holidays will make way for a high-rise housing block.
To pay off the developer, Arthur decides to look for the rubies his grandpa was said to have brought back from Africa years ago. He finds a secret passage into the world of the Minimoys, tiny beings two millimetres tall who live in a mesmerising land hidden in the back garden. With the help of Princess Selenia and her brother Betameche, Arthur sets off to find the treasure, battling to overcome numerous obstacles - including the evil Maltazard and his Seide warriors - on the way.
Part of what pleases him, Besson says, is that "as a small child, you can't wait to be big. So it must be really nice to feel big when you get back to your normal size after being shrunk almost to nothing. Also, there's the message that you can actually do more when you're really little; it's when Arthur's tiny that he can fly things and drive things and have all these adventures. It's a very inclusive idea; everyone's related, big and small, and it's together that we're strong. It's an anti-racist message."
They are deliberately moral tales, as Besson is at pains to underline. "I really wanted a classic, upright little boy, one who doesn't fib, stays true to himself, keeps going in the face of adversity, never gives up," he says. "I do think that kids today miss out on a lot of those guidelines. Parents are always at work; school doesn't necessarily give the framework; politicians are all corruption and scandal; even sporting heroes art of what are tainted with drugs and what have you. Rules are important for kids." There is a strong environmental theme, too: "The bad guy, Maltazard, he lives under the garage in all the filthy old oil. The Minimoys are a whole ecosystem, clean but fragile. I want kids to know that when they dig a ditch, it'll be like Chernobyl for anything littler than them. Kids must know the only way we can survive is by respecting nature."
But the messages do not get in the way of the story, which seems to be a rip-roaring children's yarn in the finest tradition; a little cinematographic in style, perhaps, but nicely imagined and grippingly told.
"The great children's writers were authentic, they copied no one, they didn't set out to make money or to preach ideas," says Besson. They just transcribed their dreams." JK Rowling, he says, is very good at her craft, "but a lot, the flying broomsticks and the moving furniture and that, comes from a literature before Harry Potter. Arthur? I don't know whether he's great. But he does come from the heart, I can promise you that."
Arthur and the Minimoys, by Luc Besson, is published by Faber (£5.99)