It was a 16-year-old who envisioned this French film grossing $264 million worldwide.

Released in theaters in 1997, The Fifth Element is a minor sci-fi classic. A feature film that grossed $264 million worldwide and allowed Luc Besson to finally establish himself on the international stage. But did you know that this ambitious work, one of the greatest successes of French cinema in the United States, was born in the director’s imagination when he was just a teenager?

In 2017, Luc Besson revealed that he had the idea to make The Fifth Element, one of those rare films in which the hero and villain never speak to each other, when he was exactly sixteen years old.

“I started writing The Fifth Element when I was 16 and shot it when I was 30, so I had time to think about it.”– says Besson At the Nerdist mic. “But when I started writing it, it was more of a novel. In my mind, it wasn’t a movie, and I never thought about turning it into a movie.”

“I had a lot of problems with the script for The Fifth Element. I was young, I had little experience, it took me forever to figure it out. And you know how I found the theme of the movie?”Besson then asks.

“My sister was 13 years old at the time and I was helping her with her homework”he says. “He was doing an exercise on the Greek philosopher Plato who wrote about the five elements. There’s water, earth, fire and air. And the fifth element is man. I read that and I’m like ‘F***’ **! That’s exactly what I miss!” So I have to apologize because I stole from Plato.”

The Fifth Element, which earned Besson a César for Best Director, plunges viewers into a strange and colorful world in the 23rd century, where any hope of survival is impossible without the discovery of the fifth element. The feature film starring Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich and Gary Oldman was a huge success in French cinemas with 7.7 million viewers.

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