When Cara [Delevingne] and Dane [DeHaan] arrived, I told their agent, "They need to know all this." I gave them the 600 pages. I said, "You have to learn everything. You're a cop. You need to know the names." I don't want him, when he meets an alien to go, "Whoa" like this. I want him to know if this guy is peaceful.

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]

When Cara [Delevingne] and Dane [DeHaan] arrived, I told their agent, "They need to know all this." I gave them the 600 pages. I said, "You have to learn everything. You're a cop. You need to know the names." I don't want him, when he meets an alien to go, "Whoa" like this. I want him to know if this guy is peaceful.

You know, it's not my film [Valerian], it's really their film. It's very strange. And maybe because it's more when you comes to the Marvel films it's way much more organized and plan, you know, they planned. Okay, we have Thor here, we have this and then we do The Avengers, and then we group. You know, it's much more organized. So maybe there is a little less freedom at the end for the creative people. Where I did the entire opposite. I let them help me, you know. So that's also why maybe they were so involved.

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.

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.