Luc Besson: master director of the lethal female

Los Angeles

LONG before he was the auteur behind some of the most spectacular, extravagant action movies ever made, Luc Besson was a young boy in love with a comic-book character.

He first encountered Laureline, the heroine played by Cara Delevingne in his new sci-fi spectacular Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (which opened in Singapore yesterday), when he was 10 and living some 40 kilometres from Paris. Bored by the tedium of the bucolic life, he would look forward to pilgrimages to his local store, where in 1969 he happened upon the Valerian and Laureline comic strip in a publication called Pilote.