La femme Nikita connection?

After Nikita was released, Reno asked Besson for a script based on a character like Viktor. At that time, Besson was focused on developing The Fifth Element. Unfortunately, he determined that the technology available to him was not good enough yet, so he set this project aside, and wallowed in a depressive state (he had also lost his first marriage to divorce). He spent his downtime writing a depressing script about a near perfect match for Viktor, someone who killed indiscriminately and soon ended up dead himself. He also gave him a clueless teenage girlfriend who died at the end blowing herself up as a suicide bomber (a bunch of grenades hidden under a coat) in revenge for Leon's death.

Besson told his casting director to find a girl between the ages of 15 and 18 for the part, but he was unable to find anyone who fit what he wanted, and Besson ended up radically changing the script to get the 11-year-old Natalie Portman to take the part. He also changed the hitman character to include aspects of the medieval knight Reno played in a highly successful French comedy earlier in 1993.

Changing the character of Leon into a noble knight, the teenager into a pushy child, and the script from a downbeat drama into a tragicomic fantasy energized Besson. He wrote that exploiting the contrasts (e.g. large/small, aggressive (Mathilda)/passive(Leon), education/experience, young/old, contract killer/knightly code) energized him, and he described his role as that of a medieval minstrel, i.e. creating a tongue-in-cheek fantasy that poked fun at a long-suffering knight who had to go to great lengths to protect and prove his worthiness to an impulsive princess.