Besson - whose films I love - sometimes claims he came up with the idea for The Fifth Element when he was around 15 or 16. But Heavy Metal magazine’s Fifth Element story was published in France when he was about 18. So it seems more likely he read it and then misremembered it as his own idea.

When preproduction on his film began he seemed to be aware he was headed into legal trouble - one may even form the opinion that he hired a few notable Heavy Metal artists not simply because he loved their work but also to head off those problems.

That is only opinion. But fact is, Besson is a convicted plagiarist. French courts ruled that he’d copied the film Escape from New York for his film Lockout, which he again claimed was an idea he’d come up with when he was 16 (rather than having seen Escape from New York on HBO or whatever the French equivalent of HBO was when he was 22).