When I got the camera on the shoulder, they give me a nickname. They call me 'the tripod' because I'm kind of short and kind of strong. So if I take the camera and I lock myself, you think that you're on a crane.

I won't be able to do a film just for bad reasons, for money or for - I just can't. If I have one more where I feel I can bring you something, I will do it.

Be humble and say okay, all right, I have to prep myself. So everybody prepped, and we finished the film [Valerian ] four days before the end.

When Cara [Delevingne] and Dane [DeHaan] arrived, I told their agent, "They need to know all this." I gave them the 600 pages. I said, "You have to learn everything. You're a cop. You need to know the names." I don't want him, when he meets an alien to go, "Whoa" like this. I want him to know if this guy is peaceful.

I did The Fifth Element and [Jean-Claude] Mezieres, the artist of Valerian; he was working on Fifth Element. And he's actually the one who say, why don't you do Valerian? And I said because we can't make it. And you really have to wait for Avatar and to suddenly think oh okay, maybe we can think of it. But before Avatar, just forget it.

That's the storyboard that we have in the beginning [of Valerian]. It's an easy shot. It's just a spaceship coming in. That's the first layout. On the first layout, we see the timing of the shot and the speed. It starts to get some shadows, and we see that everything is moving in the back.

For example, in your house, you have the heater on the ground itself. Here, it's the gravity. No matter where you are, that's where the gravity is coming from. It's almost like a carpet that you put down. If you're on the other side, it doesn't matter to us because we're still walking on the ground. Actually, at the beginning of the film [Valerian], we see when they install the gravity system.