Léon: The Professional

Léon is an Italian hitman (or "cleaner", as he refers to himself) living a solitary life in New York City's Little Italy. His work comes from a mafioso named "Old Tony".

One day, Léon meets Mathilda Lando, a lonely 12-year-old girl. Mathilda lives with her dysfunctional family in an apartment down the hall, and has stopped attending class at her school for troubled girls. Mathilda's abusive father attracts the ire of corrupt DEA agents, who have been paying him to stash cocaine in his apartment. After they discover he has been stealing the cocaine, DEA agents storm the building, led by sharply dressed drug addict Norman Stansfield. During the raid, Stansfield murders Mathilda's entire family while she is out shopping for groceries. When Mathilda returns, she realizes what has happened just in time to continue down the hall to Léon's apartment; he hesitantly gives her shelter.

Mathilda quickly discovers that Léon is a hitman. She begs him to take care of her and to teach her his skills, as she wants to avenge the murder of her four-year-old brother. At first, Léon is unsettled by her presence, and considers murdering her, but he eventually trains Mathilda and shows her how to use various weapons. In exchange, she runs his errands, cleans his apartment, and teaches him how to read. In time, the pair form a close bond. Mathilda looks up to Léon and quickly develops a crush on him, often telling him she loves him, but he refuses to reciprocate.

When Léon heads out for an apparent assignment, Mathilda fills a bag with guns from Léon's collection and sets out to kill Stansfield. She bluffs her way into the DEA office by posing as a delivery girl, only to be ambushed by Stansfield in a bathroom; one of his men arrives and announces that Léon had just killed Malky, one of the corrupt DEA agents, in Chinatown that morning. Léon, after discovering her plan in a note left for him, rescues Mathilda, killing two more of Stansfield's men in the process. An enraged Stansfield confronts Tony, who is violently interrogated for Léon's whereabouts.

As Mathilda and Léon recover from the ordeal, Léon tells her about how he became a cleaner; when Léon was young in Italy, he was in love with a girl from a wealthy family. The two made plans to elope, but when the girl's father discovered their relationship, he killed her out of anger and escaped justice. Léon killed the father out of revenge and fled to New York, where he met Tony and trained to become a cleaner.

Later, while Mathilda returns home from grocery shopping, a NYPD ESU team sent by Stansfield captures her and attempts to infiltrate Léon's apartment. Léon ambushes the ESU team and rescues Mathilda. Léon creates a quick escape for Mathilda by smashing a hole in an air shaft; he tells her to meet him at Tony's place in an hour, and tells her that he loves her, moments before the police blow up the apartment. In the chaos that follows, Léon sneaks out of the building disguised as a wounded ESU officer; he goes unnoticed except for Stansfield, who follows him and shoots him in the back. As he is dying, Léon places an object in Stansfield's hands that he says is "from Mathilda"; Stansfield discovers that it is a grenade pin. He then opens Léon's vest to find a cluster of active grenades, which promptly detonate, killing Stansfield.

Mathilda goes to Tony, as Léon had told her to do earlier. Mathilda tries to convince Tony to hire her in Léon's place, but Tony flatly refuses to hire a twelve-year-old, and tells Mathilda he had been instructed by Léon to give his money to her if anything happened to him. He gives Mathilda $100 from Leon's funds as an allowance, and sends her back to school, where the headmistress re-admits her after Mathilda reveals what had happened to her. She then walks onto a field near the school to plant Léon's houseplant, as she had told Léon that he should "give it roots".

Léon and Mathilda's apartment building on the northwest corner of E 97th St & Park Ave, pictured in 2003

Léon: The Professional is to some extent an expansion of an idea in Besson's earlier 1990 film, La Femme Nikita (in some countries Nikita). In La Femme Nikita, Jean Reno plays a similar character named Victor. Besson described Léon as "Now maybe Jean is playing the American cousin of Victor. This time he's more human."[9]

While most of the interior footage was shot in France, the rest of the film was shot on location in New York City. The final scene at school was filmed at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.[10]

A soundtrack for the film was released in October 1994 by TriStar Music. It was commercially successful in Japan, being certified gold for 100,000 copies shipped in December 1999.[11]

Léon: The Professional was released in France on 14 September 1994.[1] On its first week in Paris, the film sold 243,285 tickets and a total of 797,939 tickets in Paris on its initial theatrical run.[1] In France overall, it sold 3,330,703 tickets.[1] The film was a commercial success, grossing over $45 million worldwide on a $16 million budget.[3]

In the 2013 book, Poseur: A Memoir of Downtown New York City in the '90s, Marc Spitz wrote that the film is "considered a cult classic".[24] In 2014, Time Out polled several film critics, directors, actors and stunt actors to list their top action films; Léon: The Professional was listed at No. 42.[25] The character Norman Stansfield has since been named as one of cinema's greatest villains.[26][27][28]

The British band Alt-J released a song about the film, titled "Matilda" [sic]. The first line in the lyrics, "this is from Matilda", refer to Léon's last words to Stansfield, shortly before the grenades detonate and kills them.[29] The Bollywood film Bichhoo was inspired by Léon: The Professional.

South Korean comedian Park Myeong-su and singer-songwriter IU released and performed a song inspired by the film, "Leon", for a bi-annual music festival of South Korea's highly popular variety show, Infinite Challenge, in 2015.[30]

Besson wrote a script for a sequel, Mathilda, but filming was delayed until Portman was older. In the script, Mathilda was described as "older" and "more mature", and was working as a cleaner. However, in the meantime, Besson left Gaumont Film Company to start his own movie studio, EuropaCorp. Unhappy at Besson's departure, Gaumont Film Company "has held The Professional rights close to the vest – and will not budge".[31]

In 2011, director Olivier Megaton told reporters that he and Besson used the script for Mathilda as the basis for Colombiana, a film about a young cleaner played by Zoe Saldana. Like Mathilda, her character goes to war with a drug cartel as revenge for the murder of her family when she was a child.[32]

There is also an extended version of the film, referred to as "international version", "version longue", or "version intégrale". Containing 25 minutes of additional footage, it is sometimes called the "Director's Cut" but Besson refers to the original version as the Director's Cut and the new version as "The Long Version".[33] According to Besson, this is the version he wanted to release, but for the fact that the extra scenes tested poorly with Los Angeles preview audiences. The additional material is found in the film's second act, and it depicts more of the interactions and relationship between Léon and Mathilda, as well as explicitly demonstrating how Mathilda accompanies Léon on several of his hits as "a full co-conspirator", to further her training as a contracted killer.[34]

The extended version of Léon was shown as "version longue" in French cinemas in 1996, and then released on VHS. It was subsequently released as "version intégrale" on LaserDisc and later Region 2 DVD in Japan. It appeared as the "international version" on Region 1 DVD in North America in 2000, and was re-issued in 2005. It was first released in the United Kingdom in 2009 as the "Director's Cut".

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