“The average person uses 10 percent of their brain capacity,” reads the poster for “Lucy,” featuring a close-up of Scarlett Johansson. “Imagine what she could do with 100 percent.”
Well, she wouldn’t have made “The Island.”
In the movie, Johansson plays a mule who has a bag of experimental drugs rupture inside her body, allowing her to use ever-increasing percentages of her brain.
At 20 percent, she’s able to gun down five evil henchmen in seconds. At 40 percent, she can knock enemies unconscious with the wave of her hand. At 80 percent, she can explode the head of the person texting during the film when you see it Friday.
The premise may sound similar to the 2011 Bradley Cooper film “Limitless,” but “Lucy” writer-director Luc Besson started his movie nearly a decade ago.
“I worked on research for a couple of years before I started the script,” he says. “I want to have a base of truth, even if it’s a film and everything is fake.”
That Besson, 55, should have any time for research is surprising. The filmmaker is one of the busiest around. He has written, directed and produced dozens of movies since he began working in the early 1980s, turning out both artsy French films and Hollywood blockbusters. On this side of the pond, he’s best known for 1994’s “Léon: The Professional,” a hit-man thriller starring a young Natalie Portman; 1997’s “The Fifth Element,” with Bruce Willis and Gary Oldman; and the “Taken” and “Transporter” franchises.
For “Lucy,” Besson picked the brains of neuroscientists, laying out his theories for what would happen if someone’s cognitive abilities increased so dramatically.
“I thought the first level would be control of yourself, and the professors agreed,” Besson says. “The second level would be control of others, and they agreed. The third one is control of matter. They kind of agreed. When I said that the ultimate one would be control of time, they were mute.”
“Lucy” is a departure from his last movie, 2013’s “The Family,” about a mob boss (Robert De Niro) moving his family to France.
“My mission as an artist is to try and push and push and try something else,” he says. “Otherwise, I’d be making ‘Léon: The Professional 7.’ I don’t want to do that.”
The director says he loves all his films — except 1990’s “La Femme Nikita,” about a convict-turned-spy played by Anne Parillaud.
“Two weeks before the end of the shooting, I realized the end was not good, and I stopped shooting and rewrote another ending,” Besson says. “It doesn’t make me very proud.”
The movie was still a big hit and spun off an English-language remake in 1993 called “Point of No Return,” with Bridget Fonda, and two TV series — in 1997 and 2010.
Besson has given up trying to figure out hits and misses.
“I give my best and sometimes the people want to see the film and sometimes not so much,” he says. “When they ran to see ‘Taken,’ we were very surprised . . . We thought, ‘Great, it brings money so we can do more films.’ ”
One recent critic of Besson has been Gary Oldman. In an off-the-handle Playboy interview last month, Oldman said he was unhappy with most of his film work. Of “The Fifth Element,” he said, “Oh no. I can’t bear it.”
“I didn’t read that,” Besson says. “I think he changed his mind, because at the time, he was very happy about it.”
Oldman later apologized for his remarks. C’mon, Gary. Make like Lucy and use your brain. Or more than 10 percent of it.