Inside a train depot on a misty October night in Clichy, northwest Paris, a man is engaged in a swordfight with four futuristic-looking Russian soldiers who have barcodes stamped on their necks. The swords, however, are plastic, the barcodes sprayed on and the supposedly Moscow-bound trains really SNCF carriages. In fact, the Russians are actually French and American. An exhausted looking Luc Besson, dressed completely in black – socks, pants, sneakers, and polar jacket – murmurs instructions to the actors in French and in English.

Tonight Besson is deputising for French director Xavier Gens on the set of Hitman, a big-budget 20th Century Fox movie based on an assassin-themed videogame. Besson is also the film's producer.

The iconic 48 year-old filmmaker can be forgiven for the multiple bags under his eyes. His current day job is directing the second instalment in his partanimated Arthur et les Minimoys trilogy, a higherprofile affair than the pathologically shy Besson would like. Costing €65m, the first film was the most expensive French film ever made and while it was a local hit, the US version, re-voiced by Madonna and Robert DeNiro, bombed spectacularly, resulting in a public spat with equally short-fused US partner Harvey Weinstein. Meanwhile, over the last few months Besson has been attracting as much scrutiny on the financial pages as in the gossip sheets.

In an attempt to raise funds to produce more English-language films in the €50m-plus range, and to hire the sort of US stars who can demand €15m-plus paydays, Besson took his company EuropaCorp SA public on 4 July, listing 21% of the production and distribution company on the Paris Eurolist, the small-cap market of the Euronext exchange. The issue raised €70m, which valued EuropaCorp at €314.7m. This means Besson heads France's third publicly traded film company, alongside award-laden BAC Films and Gaumont, which financed several Besson films, including breakout hit Leon and underwater epic The Big Blue.

'Europe has trailed America for a long time. It has taken a long time for Europe to accept that cinema is entertainment,' says Besson, between takes. 'But I believe European directors are now more open, are more at ease working internationally, and are taking on more and more ambitious subjects.'

The French business press has nicknamed EuropaCorp the 'mini-major,' and, indeed, the line-up of the company's 50-plus films made to date runs the gamut from Westerns to kung fu; from auteur cinema to French romantic dramas; from animation for children to thrillers, and comedy sequels. Today the company produces about 10 films a year.

Down the road, the company aims to produce four or five bigger-budget films a year, CFO Pierre Ange Pogam says. EuropaCorp models itself in part after two US film companies: DreamWorks, a highly successful maker of animated films, and Lionsgate, a prolific producer of smaller budget films that has seen a string of box office successes in the US. Both are enticing business models for EuropaCorp, as ways for an independent producer to thrive.

'It's important to create a European base so that ambitious European talents are no longer obliged to go to Hollywood, and in the reverse, so Americans who aren't at ease in the Hollywood system have another outlet,' Besson says.

To that end, a subsidiary, EuropaCorp Studios, has an option until the end of next year to own a complex of 65,000 sq m of state-of-the-art film studios, Cite du Cinema, which is slated for construction inside a former thermal power plant in the near-north Paris suburb of St. Denis. Current French film production facilities are outdated, and Pogam said the company would save travel time by producing films locally, rather than its employees spending months working at a studio abroad.

Apart from creating what sounds a little like Star Wars creator George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch in California, what sets eight-year-old EuropaCorp apart from other European film production companies is Besson's business model. 'His strategy is based on the US model, which is unique in Europe,' says Benjamin Le Guillou, an analyst with Euroland Finance, an independent firm specialising in smallcap stocks. 'He uses the same methods of prefinancing films that they use in the US.' For films distributed internationally, EuropaCorp aims to lock up 94% of the financing before cinema release. 'Box office sales are a bonus.'