I wanted to prove that I could do something, so I made a short film. That was in fact my main concern, to be able to show that I could do one.

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.

You know sometimes you're in a position of risk and you feel that you can turn good or bad.

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.

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.

We were so ready [with Valerian] that we were early, which is unheard of in the history of the sci-fi film.

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.