Screenwriter Kamen is taken with director Besson

Now, having teamed up with Besson, he's on top of the world. "When I was living in L.A., I was like most screenwriters, spending years taking meetings with 25-year-old studio executives and dealing with the nightmare of the studio development process. I'd write a great script and it wouldn't go anywhere. It was frustrating as all hell. Film scripts aren't books that belong on a shelf. They're meant to be made. The thing Luc said when we first met that impressed me the most was that he promised me he'd make everything because he couldn't afford not to."

Kamen and Besson were introduced by "Gran Torino" producer Bill Gerber, who, in the early 1990s, was a top Warners executive. "Bill called me and said he had this crazy script that he didn't know what to do with," recalls Kamen. "It was a 180-page mess, but I loved it, because you could see that the visuals would be spectacular."

Gerber brought Kamen in to meet Besson when the filmmaker came to town. It didn't go well. "He was this pudgy French guy who was already scowling before I started talking, and the more I critiqued the script -- I think I started with 'Your title sucks' -- the more he scowled," Kamen recalls. "After the meeting was over, Billy looked at me and said sarcastically, 'Well, you really helped a lot.' But a week later Luc called, asked if I'd work with him and sent me a plane ticket to France."

When Kamen arrived, Besson picked him up at the airport on his motorcycle and said he'd take him to lunch. As someone who appreciated the finer things in life -- Kamen now owns a winery outside of Sonoma -- the screenwriter expected that Besson would take him to a swank bistro. Instead, they went to Besson's place, where he put some pre-cooked food in the toaster oven. For two weeks, they hammered away on the script that eventually became "The Fifth Element," Besson's most commercially successful film.

The collaboration lasted for several years, with Besson learning to rely on Kamen's ability to help broaden the filmmaker's Gallic sensibility. Kamen says he rewrote "The Professional," which, as puts it, "was really, really French, in the sense that in Luc's version, the hitman slept with a 13-year-old girl, which Luc thought was totally normal."