Olivier Megaton

OLIVIER MEGATON takes his name from his birthday, August 6, 1965, which marked the twentieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, and gave the French helmer an oddly prophetic nom de plume – though he had never intended to dedicate himself to action cinema. He was a pioneering graffiti artist, and began working in film after a meeting with fashion photographer and music video director Jean-Baptiste Mondino.

Megaton directed award-winning short films before helming episodic television. including One Dance, One Song, Histoires d'objets and Les redoubtable, all in his native France.

His feature directorial debut came in 2002 with The Red Siren, starring Jean-Marc Barr and Asia Argento. It attracted the attention of EuropaCorp's Luc Besson, who brought Megaton into the studio's stable as a second unit director on the action thriller Hitman.

Megaton's breakthrough as a director came with Transporter 3, also for EuropaCorp, which starred Jason Statham and became the highest-grossing Transporter film, with over $100m in global box office.

He followed Transporter 3 with Columbiana, from a script by TAKEN 2 scribes Luc Besson & Robert Mark Kamen. The film starred Zoë Saldana.

© 2012 20th Century Fox