Besson Hopes 'Valerian' Is A Remedy For Your Sequel Fatigue

“I’m Valerian and she’s Laureline,” Luc Besson says with a smile, and gesturing to his producer and wife Virginie Besson-Silla. “She’s the clever one.”

Valerian and Laureline are the lead characters of Besson’s sci-fi epic, “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” which hits theaters Friday. They’re names that most American audiences don’t know, even though the French comic about two 28th century intergalactic cops that it’s based on, “Valerian and Laureline,” has been in existence for 60 years and influenced “Star Wars.”

The filmmakers are seated in their shared office inside the Beverly Hills outpost of Besson’s company EuropaCorp about a month before the “Valerian’s” stateside debut. He’s behind a massive rectangular wooden desk and she’s across the table from him.

Besson-Silla has a desk too. It’s off to the side, round, and much, much smaller. 

“I prefer a round table! Everyone thinks it wasn’t my choice,” Besson-Silla says.

“She could have had a bigger one,” he adds, seemingly still befuddled by it.

It’s almost another metaphor for their relationship - Besson as the larger-than-life public-facing personality who makes big statements and even bigger movies, and Besson-Silla as the one who orchestrates things in her own way just slightly out of the spotlight. She looks at her husband with bemusement, chiming in occasionally - often when he turns to her looking for the right English word.

They were colleagues before they were anything else. Now they have three children, ages 15, 14 and 11, and have found they actually enjoy being partners at the office and home.

“We were not stupid. There is a risk. We took our time and then very consciously we said, ‘Let’s try on one to see if it works,’” Besson says. “Actually it works 10 times better than I expected.”