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.

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

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?"

Loving a film is like falling in love with a woman or with a man like you never expect it. It it's not the one you think you will be in love with, you know. You think always that he will be with a beard, and black, and big and finally he's Chinese and you know it's the same thing. There's something very organic about the film and if you forgot it, if you don't have this seed in it...this organic flavor in it the film doesn't work it's wrong.

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.

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.