We have [in Valerian] a bible that's 600 pages. There are five pages on each alien and where they come from. Even the address you can check on the map. On the star map. It's real numbers.

I don't want to show kids that I am smoking.

That's a KORTAN DAHUK. That's the first alien we see in the film [Valerian]. That's another artist. The first one was Chinese, the one with the space station. This one is American. Personally, that's my favorite alien. I love him. I love his profile and his face. There is such a sweetness and almost a sadness in his face.

If we wanted to make it the way I imagined I knew that we would have to wake up earlier and start very early. So we prep like crazy. And the competition you have is like Avatar, you have Star Wars, you have all the big Marvel stuff. So if you want to come in the race, you know, don't be pretentious.

My biggest surprise is probably the level of involvement of all the artists [in Valerian] who participated at every level.

Sometimes I see people finish a film and they go, "Yeah, that was good. Where are we going to eat?"

I wrote the entire history of Alpha because the space station was around for 500 years. I have 30 pages on the history of Alpha. Every ten years what happens. They took control and what happened. Every 80 years, they have to change the communication system because it doesn't work anymore. Some aliens come with new technology, and suddenly you can change the electric system. We wrote the entire story [for Valerian]