France forced to grant tax perks to keep English-language film

Cara Delevingne. Photo / Getty Images

France has been forced to swallow its linguistic pride by pledging to change the law to keep Europe's most expensive film production on home soil, because it is in English.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, a science-fiction blockbuster starring American Dane DeHaan, 23-year-old British model Cara Delevingne and Britain's Clive Owen, was due to start shooting outside Paris early next year. With an estimated budget of €170 million (NZD $304M), it will be the costliest film ever made in mainland Europe.

However, in a coup de theatre late last month, director and co-producer Luc Besson - whose past hits include Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson, The Fifth Element, and the Taken and Transporter movie franchises - announced he was moving it to Hungary.

Besson, who has raised eyebrows in France for living and paying tax in the US, said he had little option but to drop his native country because current legislation meant the film was not entitled to generous tax breaks only granted to films shot in French.

"There's a small problem called tax credits... I have a French film being made in English so I have the right to zero (credits) as a French film," Besson told radio station RTL radio.

Even if he tried to pass the movie off as a foreign production, also liable for tax credits, he said he would still not qualify because his production company EuropaCorp is French. "I'm in a legal black hole," he complained.

As a result, the director said he did not know if he could produce the film in France, even though, he added, "I want to make it in my country with a French crew".

He pointed out that, if he filmed in Hungary, he could recover credits worth up to 40 per cent of his company's investment. He added: "I'm a patriot, but €15-€20 million starts to get a little heavy."

The production is to employ 1,200 mainly French crew over a six-month period.

With the French economy stagnant and unemployment high, the country's Socialist government was reportedly desperate to avoid the negative publicity that would follow if Besson took his production abroad.

According to Le Parisien, a behind-the-scenes row ensued between the finance ministry - unhappy at bending the rules - and the culture ministry.

Finally yesterday, Bruno Le Roux, president of the Socialists' parliamentary group and MP for Seine-Saint-Denis - a suburb north-east of Paris where the film was due to be shot - said the "situation has been resolved".

The cabinet, he told Le Parisien, would today consider an amendment to a new finance law, extending tax relief to English-speaking French productions. If it stays in France, Valerian will be shot in the Cite du Cinema, a film studio complex dubbed "Hollywood-sur-Seine" opened in 2012, the brainchild of Besson himself.