Lucy hits theaters next week, and we were going to make this week's episode
Things You Didn't Know About Scarlett Johansson's Tasty Hoots, but for
reasons I still don't understand, our legal team strongly discouraged that idea.
Instead, let's talk about a different movie from director
Luc Besson that is beloved by a lot of you Internet-y types.
And we're not just doing five things, because it would be catchy and make sense.
Here are nine things you didn't know about The Fifth Element, probably.
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Since The Fifth Element takes place in the future and all that junk,
the costuming was pretty important.
But most people don't know that the same guy who did the costumes for the film,
creating looks like this, and this, is the same guy who designed this.
That's right, Jean Paul Gautier, the guy responsible for
Madonna's famous cone bra also designed costumes for the Fifth Element.
He and Luc Besson actually met at a party for Madonna in Cannes.
Next thing you know,
Gautier was whipping up designs for Mila Jovavich's tasty hoots.
Ba-zing!
Crazy costumes paired with Chris Tucker's performance are what
really brought Ruby Raw to life.
What you may not know is before they settled on Tucker,
the film makers considered Lenny Kravitz for the role.
I know, crazy right?
But you want to know who else they considered?
Prince.
Yes, the purple one himself.
To be honest,
Prince probably had something really close to these costumes already in his wardrobe.
So they probably could have saved some money.
(Sound) The first scenes of the movie,
which are meant to be in the Egyptian dessert, were really shot in Mauritania,
a northwestern African country over by Morocco.
They were actually the first scenes shot for the film, and
these boys were all locals.
But the scenes immediately after the exteriors that were inside
the temple were actually shot in England at Pinewood Studios,
which means all the boys we see in the interior shots are different boys.
They were cast to match the Mauritanian locals from the exterior shots
as much as possible.
The old let's recast and hope no one notices trick.
Classic Hollywood, am I right Roseanne,
Fresh Prince, Game of Thrones, and True Blood?
Am I right?
Yeah, I'm right.
(Sound) The sequences with the Mondoshawans were
some of the hardest to create in the entire film.
It took three months just to detail exactly how they should look.
Then once the design was in place, they had to put out a casting call for
actors who were 6' 9" tall, since only the freakishly tall could fit the costumes.
Plus, it took three people 20 minutes to dress one Mondoshawan.
Getting a gig playing a Mondoshawan was no picnic, either.
The costumes were extremely hot and the actors had to have
TV monitors inside just to kind of, sort of see where they were going.
This scene, where they marched down the corridor into the temple was a nightmare
to shoot, with six crew members on walkies trying to
keep the actors from walking into walls or falling over.
The placement of the Mondoshawan's robotic heads didn't let the actors see
out at all.
Speaking of those robot heads, all of them were identical.
This made for easy swapping out of the ones that broke down during filming.
But the Mondoshawans to differ from one another in how many spikes they have
on their shoulders.
More spikes means you're a higher ranking Mondoshawan.
Boom, bonus thing you didn't know and it wasn't even about tasty hoots.
(Sound) Pretty much anyone would agree that
the Mondoshawans are up there in how iconic they are to The Fifth Element.
But there is nothing more iconic to the film than the Leloo's hair.
Early on in filming they were actually dying Jovovich's
real hair the mandarin colour.
But as the weeks went on, one too many dye jobs caused her hair to literally break.
So they made a Leeloo wig which wound up at the Dumont museum in Paris afterwards.
I'm not sure where her orange suspender thong thingy ended up but
if any of you guys know please leave a comment, and directions.
And if you have them, schematics to the building.
(Sound) Speaking of Leloo,
let's talk about how Leloo speaks.
(Inaudible) >> What is she saying?
>> Director Luc Besson actually created Leloo's language himself.
Mila Jovovich was tasked with memorizing it before reporting to set.
By the end Besson and
Jovovich were able to have full on conversations in the language.
And they actually got married seven months after the film's premiere,
even though Besson was already married to French actress Maiwenn Le Besco,
who plays the diva, at the time of the filming.
Uh-huh, I wonder what Besson and
Jovovich might have been talking about in that secret Leeloo language.
Probably doing it.
(Sound) For our next thing,
we've got an easter egg.
When Corbin's alarm goes off in this scene, the date is March 18th.
March 18th is Luc Besson's birthday.
It's also his favorite day to cheat on his wife.
Kidding!
(Laugh) Totally kidding.
And the time on the alarm,
2 AM, is Luc Besson's favorite time of day to cheat on his wife.
Still totally kidding.
According to legal, I'm kidding.
By the way, Bruce Willis' birthday is March 19th, so that's also kind of fun.
Moving right along to explosions.
In this explosion, the stuntman's timing was just slightly off, and
they ended up engulfed in flames.
You can actually see them vanish into the fire when you put the clip into
slow motion.
Yikes! But
the good news is they were all right in the end.
There were a couple other near misses on The Fifth Element set though.
Take this other explosion.
It was one of the largest explosions ever filmed on a sound stage, and
the fire got so out of control, it took 20 minutes to put it out and
the stage had to be evacuated.
Or this scene where Leeloo bumps her head on the pod.
Milla Jovovich actually did really hit her head in that shot.
She says she was covered in bruises by the end of the film shoot.
Head to toe bruises, rambling in a made up language, and broken orange hair.
Yeah, I'd still totally hit it.
(Sound) Last thing, to create the futuristic world in The Fifth Element,
the visual effects team used a lot of models.
The floats in paradise model weighed 7,500 pounds and
was the largest model ever built for a movie at the time.
And all of the exterior shots of New York here are a massive model built
by digital domain.
The clocks you see in the shot are really just pocket watches.
And, by the way, that's just a stunt double for
Mila Jovovich jumping onto a bag in a studio.
Damn, I am really hooking you guys up with the bonus things you didn't know today.
That’s it for this episode, but let us know in the comments below what you
want to see on the next episode of Things You Didn’t Know, and
if it’s not totally stupid we might think about doing it.
Thanks for watching and be sure to check out cinefix.com and subscribe for
more true-ish things about movies, and sometimes tasty hoots,
right here on Things You Didn’t Know.
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