Whatever happened to Luc Besson? That’s not Besson the writer, of course. He’s alive and well and putting the juice into revved-up action movies such as the Taxi series, The Transporter and hyper-kinetic Jet Li martial arts vehicles such as Danny the Dog and Kiss of the Dragon.

Nor is it Besson the producer, who has been even busier, signing his name to an average of 15 films a year, including Asian-flavoured discoveries such as the frenzied Thai action movie Ong Bak and maverick fare such as Tommy Lee Jones’s comic macabre western, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

No, the Besson who seems to have gone missing is the part of this one-man movie industry that we first got to know — Luc Besson the director, the man behind the stylish assassins Nikita and Léon, who went rather quiet after his last movie, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, was released seven years ago.

Because Besson’s reputation combines cultish cool with box-office appeal there are plenty of fans eager to debate the reasons for his absence.

One theory on film fan sites is that Besson was wounded by the “failure” of Joan of Arc. But although the picture received a critical drubbing, Besson is not a man to let others tell him what to think — and ultimately it did rather well at the box office.

Then there is the theory that Besson is now too busy becoming the French answer to the big-shot producer Jerry Bruckheimer to bother with directing. Finally, some suspect that Besson lost his muse with the failure of his marriage to Milla Jovovich, the star of his last two pictures.

According to Besson (who has since remarried), the truth is that he never actually stopped directing; that’s why he has two films out this year. Bearish, bearded and faintly irritable, he tells me that he has been working on an animated picture, Arthur and the Minimoys, for five years (and judging from his formidable bulk, he also appears to have spent a lot of time sitting at a computer screen). The birth of this year’s other release, a black and white metaphysical romance called Angel-A, came from “the frustration of the animated film. Because it is so long, there are 200 people on computers. It is very frustrating because I am used to actors and cameras. So after a while I just wanted to grab a camera and shoot.”

What sounds like a snap decision, however, came after long gestation. Besson says that he has wanted to make Angel-A for at least ten years. A series of chance meetings with the people who became the film’s stars, Jamel Debbouze and Rie Rasmussen, convinced Besson that the time was right. “I believe in signals. You meet someone once, then the week after you meet them a second time. I like to believe in that, I don’t know if it is true. It was also a question of timing. It was a good moment for Jamel, he is a comic. He is known for that. But he was wounded when he was 13. (Debbouze has lost an arm.) He has all this pain inside him. And he starts to feel the desire to express it. Just once in a while to do something different and serious. And here I come, with a script that he loved.”

Debbouze plays a put-upon small-time crook whose attempt at a suicidal plunge off a picturesque Paris bridge is interrupted when a freakishly beautiful 6ft blonde dives in ahead of him. Being a good- hearted chap, he leaps to her rescue and hauls her out. From this point, the fates of the two are inextricably linked.

The story, says Besson, deals with “the sickness of the century — the fact that we are not comfortable with ourselves. It’s difficult to watch yourself in the mirror and say I love you. And when I look at myself in the mirror, like many millions of men, I’m not Brad Pitt. I am very happy for him, he’s a great guy. But that’s not me. I have to deal with it, I have to build from that. If you don’t like yourself then you cannot like others. So let’s try this simple act, — making peace with ourselves — then maybe things will be better.”

The simplicity, the romanticism and the black-and-white, slightly Athena print aesthetic give the film a nostalgic feel. It could be a European arthouse film from the 1980s. And there are other links to earlier Besson work. There’s a small-scale intimacy and a theme to which he has returned time and again — exploring the male side of women and the female side of men.

For a man now so influential in movies, Besson was once rather indifferent to the medium. His family did not own a television until he was 16. “No video player, not even a stereo. My stepfather was against everything.” The young Besson had intended to become a diver until an accident stopped him. Instead, he explored his fascination with the oceans in one of his earlier films, The Big Blue. Even 18 years later in Angel-A, his suicidal loners are drawn to the water.

Besson has come a long way from peroxide-topped enfant terrible to industry power-player.Those who accuse him of populism should look at District 13, a characteristically French action movie that combines brilliantly choreographed fight sequences with dizzying “free running” from David Belle, the charismatic urban athlete who invented the Parkour movement (participants attempt to pass obstacles in the fastest and most direct manner). The plot is pretty daft, a French take on Escape From New York involving a stolen super weapon, a ruthlessly efficient undercover cop and a streetwise convict he must work with. But the result is an adrenalin rush of a movie that is tremendous fun.

In defence of Besson the producer, he does what so many others in European cinema aspire to do. He takes the American studios on at their own game. Films such as District 13 may be high-octane, low-brow escapism but isn’t that what Hollywood has been selling us for years?

• District 13 is on release; Angel-A is released on Friday