I would rather stop [making movies] too soon than too late.

I'm a big Star Wars fan.

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.

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

I think we have the wrong notion of commercial and intellectual or artistic film. Because all films are commercial.

It's always the small people who change things. It's never the politicians or the big guys. I mean, who pulled down the Berlin wall? It was all the people in the streets. The specialists didn't have a clue the day before.

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