For Luc Besson, director of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, making extravagant space opera a no-brainer
The French auteur hired three separate special effects companies to help realise his vision for the US$180 million blockbuster, which he had long considered unfilmable until the technology caught up with his imagination
When French filmmaker Luc Besson was directing The Fifth Element at London’s Pinewood Studios in 1996, his designer Jean-Claude Mézières asked why he wasn’t instead making a film of Mézières’ comic book series, Valerian and Laureline, of which Besson was, and still is, the world’s the biggest fan.
“I didn’t know the answer,” recalls Besson, 58, who drew heavily on Mézières’ cityscapes for the US$90 million French production, then the biggest ever in Europe. “So I went back home and looked at the comic and I came back and I said, ‘It’s just not possible.’ And I was right.”
Besson met annually for a drink with Mézières, who had created the series with writer Pierre Christin, and the filmmaker always concluded it couldn’t be done. After a decade the rights became available and he finally took the plunge to write and direct a film version, encouraged by his meetings with James Cameron and the technical advances of Avatar.
“The rights belonged to an American studio for many years and they didn’t know what to do with it,” Besson explains. “It took me three years just to figure it out, then seven years ago I said, ‘Let’s try.’”
At a cost of US$180 million, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, starring Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne as two very clever (and emotionally involved) special operatives in the 28th century, marks yet another Besson project that set a record as the most expensive European film ever.
