"You try to be a sponge, you follow the people, and you follow what you feel," he said.

But one should never dwell on balancing a film's commercial value, that is, the box office, with its artistic value, Besson cautioned.

"The best way to maybe have a success is not to think about it and do the real movie," he said. "You have to put your soul, your heart, your brain. You have to give, and that's it."

The artistic value of Dogman, a crime thriller packed with both canine and human action, and tinged with spiritual and psychological undertones, is undoubtedly greatly enhanced by the towering performance of the American actor and musician Caleb Landry Jones.

Jones, who won the Best Actor award at last year's Cannes Film Festival for Nitram, spent nearly six months preparing for the role, much of which sees him in a wheelchair.

In his words, the purpose was to "understand how it feels to be disabled and how people look at you".

Starring as Douglas, the protagonist who is abused in childhood by his violent father and then turns to his canine companions to alleviate his loneliness, Jones was thankful to have stepped into Besson's world and participated in his new project.

"I've never had a role where I had to talk as much as I had to in this film," said Jones. "It was a very challenging film in many ways."

Fortunately, as a master of the filmmaking craft, Besson had created such a space where Jones said, self-deprecatingly, he just needed to "follow Luc's vision and energy".

In Dogman, a central theme of the vision is about pain in life, according to Besson.

"The pain is everywhere," he said.

But more importantly, it is about how to face, and eventually overcome and even conquer pain.

"Love is what we need," he continued, "to replace the pain'.'