Luc Besson Quotes

Something like 'Alien,' that was not so easy. If there's any genre I wouldn't mind not having to do anymore, it would be science fiction. It's just all to do with the toys, and there's so much hanging around.

Starship Troopers was great. It was great fun to work on something with blue screens and big budget special effects. Denise Richards was nice to look at too, of course.

I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction.

'Alien' is a great movie. So is 'Close Encounters.' But I'm not the guy who goes out to the science-fiction festival. '2001's good.

I did have an offer to direct one of the Alien movies but I wasn't too excited about all the effects work.

In this movie they took them up in space. They're floating around and doing zero gravity stuff. Well, they had to do it all on wires. All the wires had to be painted black against this black background. If you didn't light it properly you could see the wires. Drove them crazy!

I've never seen one Star Trek in my whole life.

Making the unbelievable believable is different on a set with 'Fantastic Four,' where it's like, 'Wind machines! Because the airship is coming in and you're pretending to be afraid!'

'Galaxy Quest' was cool to work on. When I first signed on, I really didn't know anything about it. I read the script, which I though was cool, but it wasn't until I saw the designs for the CG stuff that I knew it was going to be pretty sweet.

Aliens are definitely real.

While I was filming 'Kong' - and I don't play a very capable Army Ranger in 'Kong'; I play a completely different character - but we had a lot of Army Rangers there, former Army Rangers, and Navy SEALs, who were working on the movie with us for the other characters, for the Army guys in the movie.

Fictional realms are usually terrible places to vacation, as they tend to be full of monsters and conflicts - Narnia and Middle-earth would both be good places to get killed - but I wouldn't mind visiting the worlds of Iain M. Banks's 'Culture.' You'd just have a hard time getting me to leave.

In science-fiction films the monster should always be bigger than the leading lady.

I read about some movie where they did everything on blue screen, and the actors were not even connecting to each other.

That's the storyboard that we have in the beginning [of Valerian]. It's an easy shot. It's just a spaceship coming in. That's the first layout. On the first layout, we see the timing of the shot and the speed. It starts to get some shadows, and we see that everything is moving in the back.

I learned so much about the making of Star Wars and that became a real drive for me, right from the time I was 12 or 13.

I believe that the physical effect, the physical set, whenever you can, is ten times better than the digital effect.

If you are only getting two takes and you are on a crazy set where there is a lot of noise and distractions and it is hard to focus - that is frustrating. But I don't mind two takes if there is a healthy respect with the work going on with the actors.

Being on set and seeing all that green screen, and how it activated my imagination, was amazing to me. I fell into that world very easily, and it was incredible to be a part of.

Anyone can buy CG technology. It's not that it's easy to make those films. Those films are just as difficult, they're incredibly hard to make.

You don't have your film finished when you have your director's cut finished. It's just a bunch of green screen.

I feel like the beauty of this age of filmmaking is that there are more tools at your disposal, but it doesn’t mean that any of these new tools are automatically the right tools. And there are a lot of situations where we went very much old school and in fact used CG more to remove things than to add things.

I'm a huge Star Trek fan. I've seen all the shows, I've seen all the movies, but ultimately I just want a 2-hour movie that takes me to another time and place - something that entertains me.

At times, there are misunderstandings [during shooting]. Especially with green screen and not really knowing what it is that you're looking at, you really depend on the director to create that world for you.

I enjoyed being at Jurassic Park, with Jeff Goldblum and Sir Richard Attenborough. It's funny, because Steven Spielberg would actually operate the camera sometimes. He'd consider the camera, and he'd be kind of looking at me. He actually shot a few of the things that I'm in, in that lab, with that long ash dangling off that cigarette. Hogging that fake cigarette. Because I had quit smoking, and he wanted to make sure I didn't go back, so he got me the worst-tasting fake cigarettes ever.