by Back on the origin of a successful saga with the action comedy “Taxi”, which had had a hard time starting.
Today, it is easy to say that the Taxi saga is one of the important successes of French cinema in the late 90s and early 2000 but at the time, few people believed it. Initially, Luc Besson planned to write and stage the project for La Gaumont but, Besson lacks time, taken by the fifth element that is fast approaching, a large -scale international blockbuster.
The Gaumont is scared, Patrick Bruel in the cast …
Europacorp
Besson therefore signs in just one month the script for this Parisian pizza delivery man, Daniel, who decides to become a taxi driver in a Peugeot 406 that he “pipped”. Following a series of chance, Daniel soon finds himself helping the Emilian police officer to capture German banking robbers, the Gang des Mercedes, who has yet escaped any prosecution, in the literal sense as in the figurative sense.
At the start, the film was supposed to take place in Paris, but the Gaumont intervenes: the authorizations to shoot car stunts in the streets of a big city will be much easier to obtain in Marseille. The action is therefore transposed into the Marseille city, and Patrick Bruel and Vincent Perez are envisaged in the casting. Except that in the meantime, Luc Besson officially announces that he will not be able to make a taxi and leaves to make the fifth element.
The blood of the leaders of Gaumont is only a tour: they leave the project.
Luc Besson passes the second
Europacorp
Besson then decides to do without one of the largest French production firms, debauchery Pierre-Ange Le Pogam, then one of the laying of Gaumont, and founded Europacorp, his own company.
At the project's controllers, he recalls Gérard Pirès, who has not shot fiction since 1981 (give me the key! With Guy Marchand and Jane Birkin) but who signed a few years before an advertisement for … Peugeot, precisely:
Luc Besson also changes the cast to favor new faces: it will be Samy Naceri and Frédéric Diefenthal. And it is ARP selection which will distribute the film which, like its soundtrack entrusted to the rapper Marseille Akhenaton, cardboard.
Taxi was released on April 8, 1998, and totaled 6.5 million admissions, leading to a first following 10 million admissions two years later, then a taxi 3 (2003) at 6.1 million and taxi 4 (2007) with 4.5 million.
