When the Fifth Element was released with a lot of noise in 1997 I felt it was visually amazing but fairly vacant. I liked Luc Besson’s Nikita, and Léon especially, but felt his sci-fi venture was all flash and no heart.

Still, visually he achieved great success with it and some of the ideas I felt weren’t horrible, just poorly executed. His producing work – with The Transporter and Taken as examples – has been wonderful.

Now comes word via the French website Fantasy.fr that Besson has become inspired to once more tackle another science fiction project, thanks in no small part to the success of Avatar. In the article, Besson says that some of the tools he used for The Fifth Element were already outdated while they were making it, but has since become a proponent of digital technology thanks to the James Cameron epic

So now he’s assembling a new film he calls “Fifth Element to the 10th power”, which he is prepping for a 2011 pre-production start and a 2012 shooting date.

For the full story head over to the French site; just be sure to take a translator with you.