On the occasion of the release of his autobiography "enfant terrible", the director Luc Besson confided on a period of his rather original life, Sunday on Europe 1. At the microphone of Isabelle Morizet, the director told how he had lived and slept with a lion while he was still a baby!

INTERVIEW

Guest of the show There's more than one life in life , Luc Besson, whose autobiography Child terrible (Xo) was released last October, has returned to an unusual moment in his life. When he was only eight months old, he lived with ... a lion, in Paris, in the small family apartment!

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"There was incredible freedom"

"For a few months, my father had a lion of 80 kilos", tells, amused, Luc Besson. At the time, his father worked in a circus and, to help a friend, he had brought a lion in the two rooms of the Boulevard Sébastopol family in Paris. "He made him cross the boulevard Sebastopol at 7 o'clock in the morning, so that it would not be too much, and he was going to make him do his poop in the square of La Gaîté Lyrique which is right in front," says the filmmaker. "Apart from the caretaker who was a bit scared, people thought it was just fun or offbeat to have a lion but that was all, it was happening [...] It was another time, there was incredible freedom ".

Twenty-nine years before making Le Grand Bleu , little Luc Besson, eight months, regularly finished his siestas in the basket of the big cat. What to quickly be fascinated by the animal world. "There is something cash in an animal that looks at you, there is no judgment and it is something that we miss a little today in the society where we are always judged," says the director .