- I said, "Listen, what about bandages?"
[machine whirring loudly]
And Jean Paul was just like, "Oh genius, I love it!"
Which of course, you know,
ended up being like this iconic costume.
Hey Vogue, my name is Milla Jovovich,
and I'm here to talk about "The Fifth Element,"
my character Leeloo, and how it all came to be.
[film reeling loudly]
[tense rhythmic music]
[marker scribbling expressly]
[upbeat exciting music]
I was born in the Ukraine.
My mom is Russian.
Back then, it was the USSR.
And my mom married my father,
who was from former Yugoslavia.
She was lucky enough
to be able to leave Russia at the time with him
because he wasn't a citizen,
and we moved to America in 1980, 1981.
My mom very quickly realized that with her Russian accent
and not a great grip on the English language,
she didn't have much hope of pursuing a career.
There was a lot of pressure, a lot of hopes pinned on me
to kind of help the family move forward in a new country.
I started acting really young.
[camera snapping consecutively]
I don't think I ever really wanted to be an actress.
I mean, that was something that, you know,
my mom told me I was gonna do.
Really at that point,
didn't really think that I would ever get into action movies
or anything like that.
At the time of course, "La Femme Nikita" came out.
And I was a huge fan of Luc Besson,
so of course when my agent told me they were casting
for Luc's next movie,
I was like super, super excited about that.
I guess Luc was looking at a lot of models,
and so I was told to go in and look glamorous,
and, you know, wear something nice.
I've always been very into like vintage clothes,
and blocky heels, and green eyeshadow,
and literally like the opposite of what he wanted, I guess.
I didn't know at the time.
I obviously never heard back from him.
And then a few months later,
I was at the Chateau Marmont Hotel with a friend of mine,
and we had like partied the night before
and everyone was exhausted, so I was down at breakfast.
And Luc just happened to be at the pool,
and he saw me and was like,
"Oh, that's the girl that I met in New York
who looked crazy, [Milla laughing happily]
with her green eyes shadow and stuff."
But he wanted to put me on tape again.
[curious rhythmic music]
He put me on tape again and I definitely realized
this was not an ordinary character
because he was asking me to do weird things like,
"Dance, but as if you don't know how your body works."
You know on the one hand,
you feel like such an idiot, right?
But then on the other hand, here's this incredible director
who I trust implicitly because I'm a fan,
going "Well if he thinks this is what I should do,
then I'm just gonna go for it."
I heard back that they had me on a short list of girls
to go to London and do a screen test.
They did this kind of crazy makeup on me.
And it was really interesting,
never had done a screen test like that before for sure.
Then he sat me down and said, "You are Leeloo.
You're the one I want for this."
I can't even describe how happy I was,
I mean this was really a dream come true
because I knew that this character was beyond unique.
She was like something
that had never been seen before or since, you know,
she was just extraordinary.
[gentle string music]
[Leeloo panting frantically]
So Jean Paul Gaultier did all the costumes,
and if you see the movie, there are thousands.
And he literally single-handedly designed
every single extra, every single actor.
It was massive,
like the work he put into that movie was a Herculean feat.
[Milla laughing amusingly]
Something Luc and I had actually talked about
before meeting with Jean Paul was like,
"How do we shoot the birth scene of Leeloo?"
[gentle string music]
[machines beeping gently]
She gets put together through this DNA slicing machine,
and she's naked,
but like she can't be naked throughout the movie,
so like what do we do?
And you know, something that hit me
was like being in a hospital for instance,
they put like a robe on you that's open in the back
so that they can reach in, and give you injections,
and put like tubes in you and things.
So, you have to almost have like as little as possible,
but for the sake of modesty, you know,
you have to cover up too.
So like, how do we do that?
And that's where the bandage idea came from.
[machines whirring loudly]
I said, "Listen, what about bandages?"
Like you know, when people get wounded,
they just put bandages to cover the necessary bits.
You know, Luc and Jean Paul talked about this bandage idea,
and Jean Paul was just like, "Oh genius, I love it!"
It's been amazing to see how much Leeloo has affected style,
and how much fun people have with her character
and embodying her spirit.
I mean, the amount of memes that I see
of people wearing the costume are amazing, you know?
The way she looked was obviously really, really important.
He wanted to do something very different,
like he wanted her hair to be like a flame.
We kind of talked about it and it was like,
"Do we go blue like the bottom of a flame,
or do we go like orange or red like the top of a flame?"
So I knew at the time that we needed a real visionary
to come in and help us.
And you know, coming from the fashion industry as I did,
I had worked
with some of the most amazing hairdressers in the world.
And a good friend of mine named Ward,
he was working with all the best photographers.
And so I called Ward and I said,
"Listen, I'm doing this film.
It has to be like something we've never seen before."
He suggested to do the blonde roots
and then this fluorescent orange hair.
And it all looked really great.
We were able to shoot
the first kind of 20 minutes of the movie
with this new hair color, and hairstyle, and cut,
and everything that he did, and then he left.
And then the other people took over after that,
and we very quickly realized since I have dark hair,
that my roots are gonna grow really fast.
So it was like, "Oh my God,
we have to like dye the roots blonde."
And so the girls would put peroxide in my roots,
and they didn't realize
that if you don't do it super, super careful,
peroxide after peroxide, your hair is just gonna break.
And so at one point like a few weeks into the shoot,
my hair started falling out.
Like literally, I would take a shower
and just start pulling out clumps of hair.
And yeah, at that point it was kind of a disaster.
And so we had to make the Leeloo wig
because I literally had only like half, like clumps of hair.
Like it was, [Milla laughing nostalgically]
it was really awful!
[gentle string music]
Once the wardrobe was set, there was a lot of training.
I did dance training, and martial arts training, and acting.
And there was a lot of language.
I had to learn a whole new language,
which Luc had written this dictionary.
You know, we would sit together
and put all the words together,
and we actually spoke in this language together
which was hilarious.
It was also just the way she spoke
and the way the words came out,
like Luc was very adamant that like,
"Don't take a breath before you say something."
So like, most people go and then start talking,
but for Leeloo it was like...
[Milla shouting robotically]
You know like, [Milla laughing amusingly]
just don't breathe, just talk.
[Leeloo yelling in gibberish]
So it was like little details like that
that just made her not human.
Nobody could relate to her
because she was just so, just so unique.
[deep calming tones playing]
I was destroyed when the movie was finished.
I mean, going for whatever it was,
seven months to do a film.
At that point, being 19, that was a huge chunk of my life.
When it was done, it was so hard to say goodbye.
It was so hard
to feel like I was never gonna be this girl again.
But also, I left with so much more strength
and so much more appreciation for every moment around me
because I had Leeloo inside me,
and I knew that she would be there for the rest of my life.
[camera snapping consecutively]
I think in America, "The Fifth Element" came and went.
It took time,
and it took like the movie coming out on video,
and then streaming happened,
and then parents are showing it to their kids.
And now it's like,
I have like eight-year=olds coming up to me years later,
being like "Leeloo!"
And I was really lucky
because Leeloo is such a bright, positive character.
She's so inspiring and she brings out the best in people.
And she is the best in all of us, you know?
She is love, she is "The Fifth Element" in that sense.
So, the identity crisis only helped me actually discover
who I was, and who I wanted to be, and who I could be.
Something that was probably
very underappreciated in North America at the time
became this cult classic later.
It was the people that saw it, and related,
and got lost in the world, and loved it, you know?
For me to say that Leeloo changed my life
is an understatement.
What I do teach my daughters,
or especially my eldest at this point,
is to just have this joy for life
and this appreciation for very mundane things
because everything to her was magical.
Like she had never seen a microwave,
she had never seen a telephone,
she had never...
You know everything was new, everything was special.
This is what Leeloo's all about.
Like Leeloo kind of reinforced that appreciation
for the small moments in life
that make up literally our whole life for the most part.
And you know, Leeloo made me focus on those small moments.
[ethereal electronic music]