EXCLUSIVE: Caleb Landry Jones extends a gnarly bejewelled hand as he arrives on the set of Luc Besson’s gothic drama Dracula: A Love Tale.
The Three Boards and Nitram actor is unrecognizable after four hours in make-up. His already tall frame augmented by platform shoes, he towers over Besson, the cast and the crew.
“How are you?” asks Jones, staying in character with a thick Transylvanian accent and syntax, adding in response to a comment on his appearance: “They done incredible… this man back here, he make everything.”
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Jones has appeared at the end of a tour of the extensive Dracula: A Love Tale set in the vast Darkmatters studio southwest of Paris, conducted by Besson. Above is a first behind-the-scenes look at the actor as the blood-smeared Count.
Deadline is not invited to sit in on filming. Besson likes intimate shoots without distractions, sitting beside his cinematographer and close to his actors, rather than following shots on a monitor.
“On my first films I was far from the actors. I was scared of them. I was too young. Bit by bit I got closer and closer. The film that changed everything for me was Atlantis… which only had fish. I spent 11 days filming a manta ray… and I had to work out how to make it do what I wanted it to do… it freed me,” he recounts.
Talking as he walks around the set, Besson says his new movie was sparked by his “fascination” with Jones rather than by a particular interest in the Dracula tale.
The pair grew close over the course of Besson’s last film DogMan, in which Jones gives a nuanced performance in the fantasy drama as a man who finds meaning in the canine world after an abusive childhood.
“It’s not Dracula, my fascination is Caleb,” says Besson, laughing. “We were just chatting about other roles that could work for him. I said, ‘You’d be great as Dracula.’ Then, I thought, ‘You know what I’m just going to write it.”
“We got on so well on DogMan and since then I’ve only had one wish and that was to make another film with him. He’s crazily talented. It’s something I haven’t seen since Gary Oldman,” says Besson, recalling his Oscar-winning collaborator on Leon and The Fifth Element.
“On a human level, he’s a gem, kind, lovely… there’s no entourage, no agents and assistants in tow,” he adds.
Aside from Jean Reno, who appeared in six of his films including Leon, Besson says he has rarely been inspired by an actor in this way.
Even when an actor has captured his attention, projects have rarely come together, he adds, revealing how he and Julia Roberts were in talks for a decade, after a first meeting some 30 years ago.
“I love her and she’s an amazing actress. She’d come to me with stuff, and I wouldn’t like it. I’d go to her with stuff, and she wouldn’t like it… but in general, it’s not my affection for a talent, but a good subject that inspires me,” he says.
Besson’s take on a classic
Besson has framed Bram Stoker’s classic novel as a love story, following Dracula as he connects with a woman in Belle Epoque Paris, who resembles his beloved wife Elisabeta, who died in mid-15th century Transylvania.
Per legend, it was Elisabeta’s suicide that led Romanian ruler Prince Vlad III (the real-life inspiration for Dracula) to forsake God and embrace life as a vampire.
“It’s a totally romantic approach,” Besson says of his adaptation. “There’s a romantic side in Bram Stoker’s book that hasn’t been explored that much.”
“It’s a love story about a man who waits for 400 years for the reincarnation of his wife. That’s the true heart of the story, waiting an eternity for the return of love,” says Besson, leaving it open on whether the woman that Dracula meets is a reincarnation or not.
Zoë Bleu, daughter of actress Rosanna Arquette, who is not on set the day Deadline visits, plays Elisabeta and her 19th century alter ego Mina.
Other cast members include Italian actress Matilda De Angelis, as Mina’s best friend as well as Christoph Waltz, as a vampire-hunting priest who is on Dracula’s tail.
“He’s trying to capture Dracula, but will he succeed?” says Besson of Waltz’s character.
The action moves between time and the settings of Dracula’s castle in Romania’s Transylvanian Mountains and Belle Epoque Paris, which substitutes Stoker’s original UK settings of Whitby and London.
“I didn’t want to make a classic English movie with people drinking tea and saying ‘Indeed’,” explains Besson imitating a plummy English accent. “We’ve seen that a lot. I wanted to break with that.”
The Paris-set scenes in the second part of the film unfold in the lead up to July 14, 1889, as the city gears up to celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution.
“Paris is partying, but a number of other things are happening behind the scenes as Dracula falls in love and risks capture,” says Besson.
Besson filming on Dracula: A Love Tale (c) LBP
Dracula: A Love Tale is Besson’s most ambitious production since his 2016 sci-fi epic Valerian and The City of a Thousand Planets.
It comes as Besson moves on from a financially and personally turbulent period in which his company EuropaCorp went to the brink of bankruptcy, while he battled rape charges in the courts, which he denied and was cleared of in 2023. In the same period, several other women anonymously alleged inappropriate sexual behavior by the director but none pressed charges and the filmmaker has denied those claims.
For at least two decades Besson was considered one of Europe’s most in-demand and visionary filmmakers. Hit movies such as The Big Blue, La Femme Nikita and Léon: The Professional cemented him at the forefront of popular French cinema and won him admirers the world over. Successful studio movies followed with the likes of The Fifth Element and Lucy. However, his personal life has attracted more attention in recent years, as France experiences a new wave of MeToo reckoning. Besson began dating actress Maïwenn when he was 32 and she was 15. They married in 1992 when Le Besco, 16, was pregnant with their daughter. He then went on to marry 21-year-old actress Milla Jovovich, star of his films The Fifth Element and Joan Of Arc, but they divorced after two years.
The filmmaker has been married to his fourth wife, EuropaCorp producer Virginie Besson-Silla, since 2004. They have three children. She is producer on Dracula: A Love Tale, with Besson’s LBP.
Reflecting on $233M passion project Valerian and The City of a Thousand Planets, just one of the elements that sent EuropaCorp into a financial tailspin, Besson says he still loves the film, which eventually recouped its budget, even if it failed to ignite the box office.
“Films are like children. They grow up, you keep an eye on them, you love them, sometimes they do stupid things, but you love them whatever happens,” he says of the film “It will still be there in 20 years. I watched it on TV not long ago. I said to myself, ‘I was mad’… I mean in terms of the storytelling – if you compare it with American norms, the Marvel films, it’s mad,” he says.
“As I’ve got older, I’ve come to understand that the life true lifespan of a film is 20 years. It’s not just 15 days, or the first week, or weekend at the box office, especially with the arrival of the streamers,’ he continues. “A film like DogMan, within a year, will have be seen by 50, 60, 70 million people. Perhaps, it won’t have been seen in a cinema, but it will have been seen, via DVD, on a platform, or on TV.”
On set
Padding about the Dracula: A Love Tale set, Besson has a quietly focused air. There’s a sense that he has been through the wars and is now keen to get on with his passion for making films.
The director is in his element as he sets up the afternoon’s shoot with Jones in a dungeon set complete with torture instruments, including a suspended metal cage.
“It’s for interviewing journalists,” jokes Besson, whose relationship with the media has been strained throughout his career
Taking a hands on approach, he starts lighting the candelabras dotted about the room as half a dozen technicians busy themselves with other props and the lighting.
The 4,000 meter squared Dracula’s castle set also spans a decaying chapel; the vampire’s bedroom, featuring a large four poster bed carved with dragon motifs and strewn with roses; a majestic, double-staircase entrance hall, which is reached by a snow-covered driveway and courtyard, as well as a magnificent banquet hall. There are further sets featuring Belle Epoque Paris interiors.
The production reunites Besson with long-time production designer Hugues Tissandier, who has worked with the director on more than 20 productions beginning with 1999 historical epic Joan Of Arc and also including The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adèle Blanc Sec, The Lady, Lucy and Valerian and The City of a Thousand Planets.
“We’ve been working together for more than 25 years,” says Tissandier, who cites Joan of Arc as their biggest ever production with some 900 people working under his charge alone.
Besson has also reconnected with the UK armourer Terry English, who created the armoury for Joan Of Arc, to create a suit of armour for Dracula.
In the backdrop, the entire studio space is a hive of quiet activity with crew members getting ready for the afternoon shoot, while another 120 production workers build sets and props, with a handful of artists chiselling gargoyles and fake masonry out of polystyrene blocks.
Besson and Tissandier have been having fun with some of the set details. Dracula’s dining hall features a series of ancestral portraits, which on closer inspection turn out to be previous big screen Draculas played by Luke Evans, Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman, Christopher Lee and Max Schreck.
Over lunch, the pair trade anecdotes about their big-budget Joan of Arc, for which they set up a field hospital for the battle scenes, recalling one extra, who did not listen to the instructions, and unwittingly followed a stuntman up a ladder to find himself unexpectedly jumping off into the void.
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Quizzed on how his French productions have taken on U.S. studio movies in terms of their production values, Besson puts it down to the high standards.
“It’s not a question of whether it’s American or French, it’s all about being demanding,” he adds. “I’ve been watching a lot of Chinese films. They’re similarly demanding in terms of the sets and costumes. They make these monster productions but the storytelling is very different.”
Besson continues to have a strong following in China, including Chinese President Xi Jinping. Pushed by one of his assistants, Besson shares a video of Xi visibly lighting up as the director is presented to him at a banquet in Paris during a state visit back in May.
“He said, ‘I’ve seen all your films’. I wasn’t expecting it at all,” he recounts, noting that Léon and The Big Blue remain classics in the country, even if they were seen via pirated copies rather than on the big screen.
Dracula shoot
Principal photography on Dracula: A Love Tale began in June, with Besson racing to film exterior scenes on location in central Paris before shooting restrictions came into force on June 15 in the lead up to this summer’s 2024 Olympic Games.
Unseasonably rainy weather nearly scuppered these plans. Besson recounts one washed out shooting day in the courtyard of Paris’ Palais Royal involving a summer fair scene and 350 extras, in which he managed to film nine key shots during a 15-minute break in the rain, having monitored the weather via satellite.
“They do the same thing with Formula One… I had warned everyone that we had a 15-minute window and that they had to be ready to go… we shot the final shot and then the heavens opened. It was horrible,” he says.
Prior to principal photography, Besson also spent time in Finland in the spring filming winter scenes with carriages and horse. Working with the famous equestrian showman Mario Lauraschi, he had the horses transported from France to Finland.
“We wanted to shoot in the Jura but because of climate change, there was no snow,” he says referring to the low mountain region in Eastern France.
The studio stage of the shoot wraps in July, with a final round of filming set for the Jura, against the backdrop of the autumnal colors of its woods.
With the film expected to be completed in mid 2024, Besson is promising a more mainstream picture than DogMan, which won critical praise but did not ignite the box office. DogMan was billed as Besson’s ‘comeback’ movie after years of personal and career turbulence — reflecting on his journey, the director was moved to tears at the film’s Venice press conference.
“DogMan was extremely special, it wasn’t particularly accessible to the public, this will be more mainstream,” he says.