Following on from his success with “Lucy,” filmmaker Luc Besson is returning to the space opera genre which he last tackled with 1997’s “The Fifth Element”.
“Valerian” will be a whopping $180 million adaptation of the famous European comic of the same name, and is a project the helmer considers the largest challenge of his career.
Speaking with Heat Vision, Besson says he first tried to tackle Valerian years ago but: “I saw Avatar and had to throw the script into the garbage… It was too normal, it was not good enough. All the directors in the world have to thank him [James Cameron] because every five years he comes out with a movie and pushes us.”
Challenged by Cameron’s intense world building, Besson has apparently retained only around half of what he originally wrote. The story follows a 26th century time-traveling galactic agent and involves only five living actors along with a bunch of alien species all living on a spaceship twelve miles in diameter.
There will be a love story amid a larger story of good versus evil, but he wants to escape the film patterns of a villain introduced early and events being on a pre-determined course.
Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne star in the film which aims to begin a six month shoot in January ahead of a 2017 release. Besson admits: “The Fifth Element is a short film compared to this.”
Source: Heat Vision
