Jossain mielestäni sanottiin, että 5th Element perustuu ideaan, jonka Besson oli saanut jo nuorena (15 vuotiaana?).
Näin on. Besson kertokoon omin sanoin:
The Fifth Element is fantastic. Where did you get the idea for this?
I started to write it at sixteen years old. I was living outside of Paris, sixty kilometers from Paris. No TV. No V.C.R. Very much in the country, and not so many friends. It was pretty boring for an adolescent. So I started to invent this world where I can be a wild cab driver [Willis's character, Korben Dallas]. It was just a way to escape at first.
You're thirty-eight, so this was all before Star Wars in 1977?
A year or two before. I read this world for a few years. No sketches but just to write [it down]. And one question brings another question. You say "flying cars," but how are they going to pay for the cab? So I invent the system for people to pay. And when Dallas goes back home, I say, "Does he buy or rent the apartment?" I have to invent this system of renting and buying and everything. At the end it was a real world, a country I know and I know how everything works. [Smiles.] I can talk about this city for hours.
So you created this world, and then left it in a drawer for twenty years?
There is this world which I really know as if I live there. But between sixteen and twenty-five, you don't know so much about life, so you don't have anything to say, really. And then life hits you. Friends or parents dying, hospital, and accidents. All these people around you. Then at thirty, thirty-five, there are a few things I want to say. I thought this twenty-third-century city would be a good setting to tell these things. Then the story arrives somewhere; it's a nice opportunity.
(
http://industrycentral.net/director_interviews/LB01.HTM)
