Luc Besson is back in US theaters with “Dogman,” and he’s already hard at work on his upcoming adaptation of “Dracula” with Caleb Landry Jones. “I started shooting it already,” Besson said in an upcoming interview with The Discourse Podcast. “It comes from the from the Bram Stoker tale, but the vision for me is a love story between him and his princess – like in the book. And so you will see soon.” “Dracula” will be Besson’s 22nd film overall, but the way the director tells it, he was originally going to retire after ten films, and he claims he gave Quentin Tarantino the same idea.
“What’s funny is that I said that to Tarantino a long time ago,” Besson said. “So, he copied me. No, I was honest when I said that. I said that after like six or seven movies. And it was a way for me to concentrate and say, ‘If I have only ten bullets, I have to be careful with the last three.’” Besson’s reasoning was simple: he was getting too many proposals from Hollywood studios, and he didn’t want to succumb to making sequels or movies he didn’t like his entire career. “Because at this time, Hollywood, there was lots of sirens, coming to me saying, ‘here’s the script,’ and the projects that they proposed to me were not bad, but it was sequels – it was the Hollywood machine. And they propose with a lot of money.”
Besson created the idea of retiring after ten films in an effort to stay true to himself. “I want to stay myself, how to stay pure,” he continued. “So I need to find a way to resist the sirens of these mermaids. And the way I found to do that was to say, ‘I’m going to do ten, so if I have two more films, I can’t do that. I have to do something more like the one I want.’” Of course, Besson didn’t stop at ten films; his tenth, 2005’s romantic fantasy “Angel-A,” was his first film in six years at that point, but he’s worked steadily in and out of Hollywood since then. And Besson also didn’t stop at ten films because he kept writing scripts. “When I finally did the tenth, I stopped for a while, but I was still writing like four or five scripts per year,” he noted.
But Besson, now 65, may reconsider his retirement plans in the next few years, allowing himself a few more movies before he gets out of the director’s chair for good. “So, maybe I should do one or two more because I still have a lot [to say],” Besson speculated. “Well, now I can tell you, I’m going to do three [films] and then I stop. Oh, so we’re done after three here. So, after “Dracula,” there’s two more, and I don’t bother you after that.”
With “Dracula” in production now, expect it to premiere at a festival sometime in 2025. Maybe on the Lido at the Venice Film Festival like “Dogman” last year? And as for Besson’s (and Tarantino’s) retirement plans, don’t be surprised if they pull a Steven Soderbergh and are back in action just a few years after they call it quits.