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.

I never think about franchises, to be honest. I always just do the film.

If you're someone from the government and you meet people from other countries, you want to know who you're dealing with. It's the same for them [in Valerian].

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.

Cara [Delevingne] I wanted to be sure that she would be involved. 'Cause she didn't do a lot of films before I met her, so I didn't know if she was serious and so I push her a bit.

I was kind of surprised that, about 99 percent of the people grabbed the thing [in Valerian].You know it's their thing. And I'm very impressed by that.

You know, money will never save anyone. Compassion can save someone, love can save someone, money will never save anyone. And as long as the entire society will put money first... Money should be like third or fourth or fifth, I'm not saying lets get rid of money, but how can we put money as number one? As the only value, like if you are rich, you're famous you go VIP, why? It's just insane, the way we've transformed the society.