Zoe Saldaña’s unofficial sequel to ‘Léon: The Professional’: “It’s very tricky”
In 1994, a 12-year-old Natalie Portman starred in Léon: The Professional, Luc Besson’s cult classic action thriller about the unlikely relationship between a contract killer and his young neighbour, who seeks his help to avenge her parents’ deaths. The film also starred Jean Reno and a scene-stealing Gary Oldman, and it made three times its budget at the box office. Fittingly, sequel plans were quickly set in motion, but a follow-up never materialised. However, if you ask the director of a 2011 Zoe Saldaña action flick, he claims he already made the sequel – it just has no official connection to Léon.
In the years following Léon’s release, Besson knew he wanted to make a sequel that focused on Portman’s Mathilda character as she grew up and embraced her life as an assassin. He wrote a script – simply titled Mathilda – but knew he needed some time to pass for Portman to age into the role as he had written it. So, he put the project on the back burner for a few years.
Besson eventually wound up floating the idea to director Olivier Megaton in the late ’90s. However, when he decided to form his own production company EuropaCorp, the original rights holder Gaumont reportedly wasn’t best pleased. Therefore, when he tried to migrate the Léon rights to EuropaCorp, Gaumont dug its heels in and refused to release them.
Megaton, who worked with Besson on The Transporter 3 in 2008, Taken 2 in 2012, and Taken 3 in 2014, told IndieWire, “Ten years ago we decided to make Mathilda, which was the Professional sequel, but we couldn’t do it because of the evolution of a lot of things – about Natalie, about Gaumont. Luc tried to do this movie again and again.”
After years of banging his head against a wall, Besson decided enough was enough and abandoned the Mathilda script to write a new one about a completely different female “cleaner”. It wasn’t easy for Besson, though, who had his heart set on continuing Mathilda’s story. However, Megaton believed starting with a clean slate was the only way to do the project justice. “When you write a script, you always think about what your heart is asking,” he said. “If Mathilda was there, she should have done this or that. He had to forget everything, because it’s a new story.”
Ultimately, the process became about stripping away any references to Léon that Besson tried to insert into the script, as Megaton worried that it could become distracting to viewers. “It’s very tricky, because as soon as you put some details from the past, you don’t know how the audience will take it,” he mused. “In the initial script, we had much more references to…The Professional, but after the first reading, I said maybe it’s a little too much. There was a little too much of pointing your finger at things.”
In the end, the fruit of Besson’s labour was Colombiana, a story about a nine-year-old Colombian girl named Cataleya whose parents are murdered by a drug lord. Some 15 years later, the half-Black, half-Hispanic girl has grown into a proficient assassin who swears revenge on the people who took her family from her. Saldaña was cast in the lead role during a period in which she was earning her action/blockbuster bona fides thanks to roles in Star Trek, Avatar, and The Losers.
Megaton directed the film, which earned a respectable $63.5 million at the worldwide box office on a budget of $40m. It’s hard to say whether it would have earned more if it had remained a sequel to Léon, or if the filmmakers had been more open with the press about how the project began as a Mathilda script. As Megaton admitted, “I’ve only talked about this since the beginning of the press tour. During the shooting of the movie, nobody talked about this.”
Ironically, this tale of a director being forced to reshape his sequel into an original movie inadvertently left two actresses pining for sequels that may never come to pass. Despite later admitting to feeling conflicted about her role in Léon thanks to accusations of assault made against Besson, in 2010, Portman lamented the Mathilda movie that never was. She told MTV, “Luc won’t direct it himself, and so I’m only interested if he directs. I told him, if he would do it himself, I would do it in two seconds. But he won’t.”
Similarly, in 2017, Saldaña told Glamour magazine she’d love to have another go-around as Cataleya. “That would be amazing,” she smiled. “But you guys have to send a message to Luc Besson – he’s the producer – that everyone is asking for a Colombiana 2 because I’d love to do it. It would be fun.”
