Film role for French 'Battersea'

FILM director and producer Luc Besson is heading a multi-million pound project to turn Paris's equivalent of Battersea Power Station into a European film centre.

Despite a European Commission proposal to tighten film subsidy rules, which could threaten the project, Besson has met councillors in the Paris district of Saint Denis to detail his plans.

He wants to create a complex of film and recording studios and a film theme park in the listed Saint Denis 2 power station, which has been disused for 30 years. The project is among 50 priority infrastructure schemes that were approved by the French government last month.

Besson, regarded as a French Steven Spielberg after box-office hits including The Big Blue, Subway, Nikita and Leon, would take a chunk of the space to provide facilities for his fast-growing film production company, EuropaCorp.

The plan also includes shops, restaurants and a film museum.

The complex, intended to become a pan-European film production centre with studios and full support facilities, has been earmarked for French government funding but no figure has been named.

Brussels officials have recently proposed limiting the help the European Union gives to film-makers to use their countries for location shooting. They claim such moves distort the EU's internal market. France's heavily subsidised film industry produces more films than any other in Europe.