With a week left of shooting on Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Luc Besson roams around the vast Cite du Cinema studio with a dazed look, appearing even more unkempt and bedraggled than usual. As he describes it, “I’m like a runner in the last 15 meters of a marathon. Exhausted. Deeply. Physically.”

”But,” he sighs, “that’s good. If I have no more strength left, it means I put all my strength into the movie. I want to have zero juice at the end.”

The massive Cite, which Besson himself envisioned and opened in 2012, is France’s largest production facility, forged out of abandoned 19th-century factory grounds. The campus is literally the heart of French cinema. Looking down the central building’s cavernous nave, on one side of the hall sits the Ecole Nationale Superieure Louis-Lumiere, the official French government film academy—co-founded by Louis Lumiere himself.

On the other side sits Luc Besson’s own film school, the Ecole de La Cite. If the Lumiere is heady and austere, Besson’s admission process is a little less stuffy: “One of the [application] questions was, what do you need to do crepes? For us in France, if you know how to make crepes, it means that you have a relationship with your grandmother—because the only person who tells you how to make crepes is your grandmother.”

“What we want to avoid is nerds—guys who have no relation with no one in the family and are on the computer all day,” he continues. “That’s not the kind of guy we want. We want people to be able to exchange with the others. So the guy [who] knows how to make a crepe, it’s someone who has his senses open, is talking with his family and cousins and neighbors. Even if it has nothing to do with cinema, it tells a lot, just by that.”

Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element, 1997, and Cara Delevigne in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Left, From Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection; right, © 2016 VALERIAN SAS – TF1 FILMS PRODUCTION.

At 58, and safely in “living legend” territory thanks to a string of genre-bending, thinking-person’s action films, Besson himself has never been one to make a film halfway. But if he were to pick a moment in his career for leaving nothing on the table, this is it. Valerian is not only his own multi-decade dream project; much of his extended empire hangs on its fate. Budgeted at a reported $180 million, the sci-fi epic is the most expensive European production ever undertaken (although moderately priced by U.S. tentpole standards). Riding on its success is the very studio that surrounds us on this June 2016 day, not to mention an entire movement built around the director, a counter-revolution in French cinema that has now thoroughly bested the establishment.