Back in March we got the first details from Luc Besson on his next project Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Based on a French comic book series, Valerian will star Dane DeHaan (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) as the titular hero and Cara Delevingne (Suicide Squad) as his female companion Laureline.

Besson made a fleeting appearance at San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday to show off some early concept art for Valerian – including designs for spaceships and alien lifeforms – and offered up some more details about the project. The director said that the movie – which is set to be his most ambitious to date – was inspired by James Cameron’s Avatar:

“I saw Avatar and had to throw the script into the garbage…it was too normal…it was not good enough.”, Besson continued, “All the directors in the world have to thank him because every five years he comes out with a movie and pushes us.”

Besson has been working on the script for a number of years but after seeing Avatar he went back and rewrote almost half of it. The movie centres on a temporal agent called Valerian who travels the universe through space and time. The original comic was first published in 1967 and ran on and off until 2010. It was considered a landmark in science-fiction writing and has notably had an influence on many other better known science fiction properties across various mediums.

Besson of course is no stranger to the genre but admitted, “This is the biggest adventure of my life. The Fifth Element is a short film compared to this.”

Regarding the concept art, THR are reporting that Besson visited many art schools looking for talented artists with the creative ability to be apart of his design team. Besson initiated a round robin style elimination process to whittle the group of potential artists down to four, whom he has been working with for nine months now. Besson admitted, “We don’t talk about money or shooting. We are in our world and just create.”

Filming is set to get underway in January 2016 with a release date sometime in 2017.