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 Mila Jovovich and I'm here to talk about the fifth element.

My character leleu and how it all came to be.

Thank you.

Mm hmm.

Yeah, 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, 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.

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 going to do really at that point, I didn't really think that I would ever get into action movies or anything like that at the time.

Of course Lafayette Nikita came out and I was a huge fan of luke Hassan.

So of course when my agent told me they were casting for luke's next movie?

I was like super super excited about that.

I guess luke was looking at a lot of models and so I was told to go in and look glamorous and you know, wear something nice and 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 luke 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 like looked crazy cause they're green eyeshadow and stuff.

But he wanted to put me on tape again, He put me on tape again and I, I definitely realized this was not an ordinary character because he was asking me to do weird things like, like dance, but as if you don't know how your body works, you know, on the one hand, like 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, they had me on a short list of girls to go to London and do a screen test that 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 know you are li lu you know 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 like just extraordinary.

So jean paul Gautier 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 herculean feat.

Something luke.

And I had actually talked about before meeting with jean paul was like how do we shoot the birth scene of leeloo?

She gets put together through this D.

N.

A.

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, 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 to so like how do we do that?

And that's where the bandage the idea came from and I said, listen, what about bandages?

Like, you know, when people get wounded, like 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 and how much fun people have with her character and, and embodying her spirit.

I mean the amount of memes that I see of people wearing the costumes 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 the 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 and he was working with all the best photographers and so I called Ward and I said, listen, you know, I'm doing this film, there's, it has to be like something we've never seen before.

He suggested to do like the blonde roots and then like 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, you know, the other people took over after that and we very quickly realized since I have dark hair, that my roots are going to grow really fast.

So it was like, oh my God, we have to dye the roots blonde.

And so the girls would like put peroxide in my roots and you know, they didn't realize that like if you don't do it super, super careful, like peroxide after peroxide, your hair is just going to like break.

And so at one point like, you know, 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 um yeah, at that point it was kind of a disaster.

And so we had to make the leeloo wig because I literally, I had only like half like clumps of hair.

It was, it was really awful once the wardrobe was set.

You know, 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 like a whole new language which luke had written like this dictionary, you know we would sit together and like 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 luke was very adamant that like don't take a breath before you say something so like most people go and then start talking but it was like for leeloo was like you know just like don't breathe, just talk so it was like a little details like that that just made her not human, nobody could relate to her because she was just so it's just so unique.

I was destroyed when the movie was finished.

I mean You know going for whatever it was seven months to do a film at that point being 19 like that was a huge chunk of my life when it was done.

It was so hard to say goodbye, it was so hard to, to feel like I was never going to 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 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 like parents are showing into their kids and now it's like I have like eight year olds coming up to me years later being like lei liu 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 5th 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 that saw it and and related and got lost in the world and loved it.

You know, you know, for me to say that leeloo changed my life is an understatement.

What I do teach my daughters, 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 we lose all about.

Like leeloo kind of reinforced that that appreciation for the small moments in life that make up me literally our whole life for the most part and you know, leeloo made me focus on those small movements.