LUC BESSON
The award-winning French director, 58, drew on his love of sci-fi to make ‘The Fifth Element.’ Twenty years later, he’s back with the comic-book epic ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’ (in cinemas now). The source material is a French comic-book series that may be obscure to a global audience. I want to propose something different. All of the sci-fi films I like always propose something different. When a Blade Runner comes along, or Brazil, or 2001, or the first Alien, or Avatar, every time it was breaking the rules, so that’s my goal. What was it like to work with model Cara Delevingne? People always say to me, ‘Oh my God, you have such a talent to discover women,’ like Natalie Portman at 11 years old and Milla Jovovich at 19, and then suddenly I choose Cara and people will say, ‘Oh, why did you choose Cara?’ It’s because it’s my job. I can tell if a person has the capacity to play such a role, and as soon as I started working with her I could see she is a natural-born actress. She said her character, Laureline, was tough on the outside but a romantic at heart. I love to have these little stories, very human, in the middle of a huge story, totally inhuman, a 28th century full of aliens everywhere. It is the 20th anniversary of The Fifth Element. I didn’t do that on purpose. [ Laughs] But it’s cool. It’s funny to see how in 20 years, the film has become a classic. Sometimes, when you push things, like painters and paintings, they rehabilitate after a few centuries. I hope I won’t have to wait a few centuries! — Cynthia Wang