After shooting to stardom in movies like Pitch Black, The Fast and the Furious, and The Chronicles of Riddick, Vin Diesel shot to even bigger universal heights in the box-office kids hit The Pacifier. After a hiatus from the sci-fi action world, Diesel returns to the genre in Babylon A.D. as a mercenary who smuggles a woman to America with the help of his sister (Michelle Yeoh) only to discover his assignment is a host that will grow into a Messiah.

At the film's junket in L.A., Vin Diesel sat down with journalists to talk about his return to sci-fi and the story behind his many tattoos.

What would you consider your relation to science fiction. What was it prior to Pitch Black and what is since? What do you feel about science fiction?

VIN DIESEL: Good question. In fairness, I’m more of a - and I always have been - more of a fantasy guy than science fiction. I love science fiction, but would rather watch Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings or read Michael Moorcock than go into Star Trek. Even though I love Star Trek, and even though I love sci-fi, I always felt that sci-fi was based somehow in the world of science, obviously, whereas fantasy allowed you this limitless opportunity to be imaginative. So, as a child, I was a huge fan of fantasy and started playing Dungeons & Dragons, I want to say, almost thirty years ago. It’s amazing that we just lost Gary Gygax this year, who was such a pioneer in the fantasy movement.

So my relationship to sci-fi - obviously very attracted to it, that’s why I keep returning. This film was an opportunity to return to the sci-fi world. The sci-fi genre by way of a French auteur’s perspective, which was kind of interesting and different from what I usually do. But for the record, much more fantasy, much more fantasy with an appreciation for sci-fi, but my roots are in fantasy.

What difference does it make for you in the film when the director can also act?

DIESEL: I actually like directors that have had experience acting. There’s usually a sensitivity to the process that you don’t always find with directors that are brought up in the CGI world or what have you. For me, being a fan of La Haine and being a fan of those independent movies that he made... It’s funny because when I was first kind of introduced as an artist I was introduced as this director for Multi-Facial, and I was in Cannes in 1995, the year that he had won for La Haine and he was kind of introduced. And I was just there with a short film, but we kind of go back - our roots are in independent filmmaking. So he’s a fan of Strays, I’m a fan of La Haine. It was cool to make a movie with a French auteur like Mathieu [Kassovitz].

Can you talk about all of the body work that went into this character, all of the tattoos and what that process was like?

DIESEL: We’ll, I’ll tell you, it wasn’t just tattoos and I don’t know if this was lost on you, but I doubt. I think you got it. There was significant work done... Did you see it? But scars and, the make-up artist, Christien Tinsley, who I think just won an award for No Country for Old Men, such a great make-up artist. He would take an hour adding little holes, widening the pores of the skin on my face - it was arduous, but it really brought out this real weathered texture that I thought was appropriate for the role. The tattoos were different than, say, Xander Cage’s tattoo design. This was a little bit more makeshift, a little bit more - It was almost jailhouse in its design, as opposed to being flamboyant like Xander Cage’s tattoos.

As far as the physical aspects of your movies, do you feel like it’s old hat or do you sit down and go, ‘Yeah, we are going to do training.’?

DIESEL: We still got to do training, because each character is unique and each character needs a different type of - It’s so interesting: You can have two characters that are both fighters, both badasses. The preparation that goes into what their style is is a huge part of their character make up. So for a character like Toorop, it’s not so traditional the training. You see when he gets in the cage fight, there are moments when he kind of doesn’t know what he’s going to do next. It’s not like he’s been training in the gym every day and he’s going to get into that ring and he’s going to hammer this guy. One of the people we used for training was this guy, Milan, who had done some of the fight coordination on the Bourne series and had experience in the Israeli army and knew a lot about the Eastern Europe Guerilla fighting, and kind of designed a fighting style for Toorop that was ‘use anything in the room,' which was different than Rocky.

Did Gerard Depardieu joke around a lot? Do you have a story?

DIESEL: Tons. There were these two Cane Corsos sitting down with us in this scene and, you know, these dogs are pretty dangerous dogs. And he kept leaning over to the dog and putting his finger in this huge dog’s face saying, ‘Babuche, babuche!’, which means ‘stay there, don’t move’ in French. It was very funny.