Unleashing Lucy

His limited output during this period included Angel A (2004), a fantasy that didn’t quite catch on, a little-seen pair of sequels to Arthur and the Invisibles (2009 and 2010) and the fantasy The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec (2010), which failed to get much play beyond Besson’s native France. Besson also directed The Lady (2011), a biopic about Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and the modestly successful crime comedy The Family (2013), which starred Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Fortunately the 54-year-old Besson appears back on his A-game as an action director and primed for a box-office bonanza with Lucy. The pulse-pounding thriller, which stars an international cast that includes Morgan Freeman, Scarlett Johansson, Choi Min Sik and Amr Waked, will release soon.

“I think I need to be in love with the subject,” Besson says. “I started at 20 years old, so after 15 films you need to have something to excite you. I need something more, definitely something about the brain, intelligence, the universe and the creation of everything.”

What he needed was Lucy.

Johansson plays the title character, a young American woman in Taiwan who finds herself forced to serve as a drug mule for the brutal crime lord Mr Jang (Choi), with a large package of a powerful new synthetic drug implanted in her stomach. The package breaks, however, and the leaking drug slowly transforms Lucy into a superwoman who can access 100 per cent of her brain capacity, which allows her to defy gravity, control people’s minds and manipulate matter and even time itself.

As Lucy’s world turns upside down and as Jang’s thugs race to recover their drugs, she turns for help to a diligent French cop (Waked) and for guidance to Samuel Norman (Freeman), a professor with an understanding of the brain’s potential.

“Lucy is not the most stupid girl in town,” Besson says, “but she’s an average girl who suddenly has the ultimate power. And the arc, that I like, is that most of the time the person with power is the villain and wants to destroy or conquer or to steal. Lucy, when she gets the power, says, ‘I don’t know what to do with it’.”

“So I said, ‘OK, what can we do with Lucy’s power? How can we show how she gets the power, how she controls others and controls matter and then, finally, how she controls time?’ Controlling time, for me, is the big thing, and trying to show that with images was a real challenge,” continues Besson. “We go to the limit of the universe and, for a few seconds, to what is behind that, what is after that, past the wormhole. It was very exciting.”

Johansson appears in nearly every frame of Lucy and gives a fierce performance. Besson jokes that the versatile American actress impressed him right away simply by showing up on time for their first meeting about the film.

“It’s rare for actors to come on time,” the filmmaker says, laughing. “She looked me in the eye for two hours and bombarded me with questions, and I could feel that she wanted to know why —why I did this, why Lucy does that, why I wrote something a certain way. And that’s what I was expecting, somehow. I wanted that kind of actress for this part, because it’s not an easy role to play.”

The part has not only considerable demands in terms of action, but also an unusual and complicated character arc. Lucy talks mostly in a detached, monotone voice and displays the fading vestiges of her humanity only through her eyes.

“Once Lucy reaches 20 or 30 per cent (of brain capacity), she can’t use her emotion, her background, her knowledge, anything. Every 10 per cent she has to redefine herself and what she’s becoming.”

Given Besson’s track record in developing films that evolve into franchises, one would surely expect a Lucy sequel if this first film’s success warrants it. Surprisingly, though, Besson pooh-poohs the idea, at least for the moment.

Apparently waiting for another Lucy-like inspiration, Besson doesn’t yet have a next project to direct. As a producer he’ll be represented in November by The Homesman, starring William Fichtner, Tommy Lee Jones, Meryl Streep and Hilary Swank. He also has written and produced Taken 3, which reunites Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen and Maggie Grace, and will open in January 2015, and is set to write and produce a new Transporter trilogy, the first film of which has recently begun filming.

The busy slate begs an obvious question: If Lucy uses 100 per cent of her brain capacity, at what capacity does Besson operate?

“I will say at 10 per cent, like everyone else,” he says. “I think Einstein was probably at 10.1.”