Besson shoots Aung San Suu Kyi biopic The Lady

by Fabien Lemercier

09/12/2010 - The secret surrounding the shoot for Luc Besson’s thirteenth narrative feature, The Lady, was revealed yesterday by Thai sources. The film will centre on the life of Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and symbol of the democratic resistance against the military dictatorship that has plagued her country since 1988.

Suu Kyi, who was recently released from house arrest where she was held for over 15 years, will be played in Besson’s film by Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Babylon A.D. [trailer], Far North). John Boorman previously tackled the subject of the Burmese democratic struggle in Rangoon (1995).

The Lady comes at just the right time for EuropaCorp. The group’s latest six-monthly accounts (for March-September 2010) showed a rising turnover of €57.2m (+21.4%), but also losses of €3.3m due to a shortage of films with strong international potential (despite the excellent international sales of The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec [trailer]).

Besides the Suu Kyi biopic, EuropaCorp has two other international titles on its production slate: Olivier Megaton’s Colombiana (scripted by Besson and starring Zoe Saldana); and science-fiction feature Lock Out by Irish duo James Mather and Stephen St. Leger (starring Guy Pierce and Maggie Grace). The company is also working on two 3D animated films: A Monster In Paris by Bibo Bergeron and The Mechanics of the Heart by Mathias Malzieu and Stéphane Berla.

Finally, three titles distributed by EuropaCorp are doing very well at the French box office, including Guillaume Canet’s Little White Lies [trailer] (5.09m admissions) and two of its own productions: Besson’s Arthur 3: The War of the Two Worlds [trailer] (3.04m viewers) and Eric Lartigau’s The Big Picture [trailer] (1.12m admissions).

(Translated from French)