Director courts controversy in France amid tax credit stand-off.

Dane DeHaan Luc Besson Cara Delevingne

Luc Besson is threatening to shoot his ambitious sci-fi picture Valérian and the City of a Thousand Planets in Hungary rather than France if regulations governing French film credits are not tweaked to accommodate the production.

The ambitious $180m production is not eligible for a 20% tax credit for French films, due to the fact it will be in English and star a mainly non-French cast, and does not qualify for the Tax Rebate for International Production (TRIP) either because it is a local production.

“I’m in a legal hole,” Besson said in an interview on a culture programme on French radio station RTL this week.

“I’ve contacted the authorities because I’d really like to shoot the film in France. There is a tiny little problem: the tax credits.

“In France, they’re set at 20% for French films and 30% for foreigners but I am a French film in English, so I’m eligible for nothing as a French film.

“And as foreign film, I’ve the right to zero support because the producer is French.”

Besson said he was considering shooting in Hungary where the production would be eligible for a 30% tax incentive. If Valérian heads to the country, it will follow in the wake of Ron Howard’s Inferno and Nic Mathieu’s Spectral.

Valérian - an adaptaion of the best-selling French comic book series by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières that has run since 1967 - will be a game-changer for the film industry of whichever country ends up hosting the shoot, generating up to 1,000 crew jobs.

“It churns me up. I want to shoot in my country with French crew,” added Besson. “There are close to 1,000 jobs at play and I don’t want to take them abroad. But I cannot make the film if I don’t have the tax credit. It’s not materially possible.”

Government response

Besson’s comments have sparked a mixed response at home.

French Culture and Communications Minister Fleur Pellerin said that there was a strong possibility Besson’s dilemma would be fixed by upcoming changes to French fiscal law.

“It’s true that Luc Besson finds himself in legal blind sport but measures I’m working on at the moment could result in a solution for this particular case,” Pellerin told French media.

Film-maker and producer Pascal Thomas, who previously presided over the commission governing the advance-on-receipt film subsidies of France’s National Cinema Centre (CNC), took a different tack.

He told radio station Europa 1 that Besson should simply shoot the film in French.

“Do Americans shoot their films in French, Italian or Spanish… It’s simple. French films should be shot in French,” he said.

Off-shoring

The off-shoring of French productions to neighbouring Belgium and Eastern and Central Europe has been a growing issue for France’s films industry over the past decade.

According to recent figures from the country’s cinema technicians guild FICAM roughly a third of French productions were shot outside of the country in the first half of 2015.

Love of France

Besson’s attachment to his native France and its skilled film crews is legendary.

He reportedly spearheaded the construction of Les Studios de Paris - in which his company EuropaCorp holds a stake - in response to being forced to shoot The Fifth Element in London in the early 1990s due to a lack of suitable facilities back home.

A number of EuropaCorp productions have shot partly at the facility since it opened in 2012, including Malavita, Three Days to Kill, Lucy, Taken 3.

The threat to take Valérian shoot elsewhere follows Besson’s move to US at the beginning of August to be closer to Hollywood directors and writers as part of EuropaCorp’s ambitious international-focused strategy.

In the backdrop, pre-production on Valérian continue apace with Clive Owen recently announced as the latest star to join the cast also featuring Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne.

The picture is due to start shooting in early 2016.