AZIN MÖ
“Azin Mö are very important on Alpha, because
they’re able to reproduce any kind of cell. If
your liver doesn’t work or you have a brain
tumour, they can make cells that will help you.
And you can’t see the difference — it’s like
a fake Chanel bag you buy in China. The Azin Mö
consult as doctors on Alpha, and they are very
precious, because anyone who has a problem
can buy a couple of cells.
“Most of the time when you see aliens in
a film they want to destroy or steal. But in this
movie almost all of the aliens do good. There
are a few troublemakers, though. When Cara
and Dane arrived on the film, I gave them
hundreds of pages of information to read, so
they would know what they’re dealing with.
They had to learn the entire thing, as if they
were in the army. But you know what? When
they saw an alien coming, they knew who they
were. They were able to think, ‘This fucker is
going to give us problems...’”POULONG FARMERS
“The Poulong farmers grow cobalt. So they’re also
in the north, the liquid part, and have huge farms.
Cobalt is at this time very important for the
mechanism of the entire space station.
“They look very skinny, have big eyes
and are underwater with big tubes. There’s
a shot in the trailer of them, which is basically
a recreation of a panel from Ambassador Of
The Shadows [Valerian Vol. 6]. We have filled
the movie with little details you might not catch
even on your third time watching it. There’s
a scene on a market planet where there are aliens
everywhere. And the guys at ILM and Weta went
crazy adding in little jokes, like a creature from
The Fifth Element or a picture of Bruce Willis’ cab
stuck on a wall. Sometimes even I miss it, and I’ve
seen the shot 15 or 16 times. You could spend a
month with the remote control.”OMETLITES
“These guys are in charge of Alpha’s finance and
banking. So they work on computers and have
these giant walls, which look like a circuit board
with thousands of connections. Except it’s almost
500 metres long and 200 metres high, and there
are hundreds of them. The Ometlites swing about
on ropes, fiddling with connections all the time.
They’re the super-geeks of the 28th century.”