Let me fill you in on a trade secret: as a reporter and interviewer, there’s this thing I do to celebrities that gets them almost every time. I bring up that one project I know they love that no one’s heard of. Suddenly they want to talk to me; suddenly I’m the one reporter at a table of reporters who really understands them. When I sat down with Milla Jovovich, who was promoting the latest Resident Evil installment at the recent Comic-Con, I knew exactly what to bring up: Million Dollar Hotel, her independent film directed by Wim Wenders that featured songs on the soundtrack sung by her.
“So do you miss doing artsy stuff like Million Dollar Hotel?” I ask.
“Well, listen — I really think it depends on, you know… Artsy stuff sounds kinda — douche, to be honest. Who wants to do ‘artsy stuff’? Either you make art or not. But I’m very lucky to be doing what I’m doing.”
Did she just call me douchey? Okay. I guess that didn’t work.
I still can’t get over the fact that I was sitting across from Milla Jovovich. All my thoughts were about being a 15-year-old marveling at Jovovich’s character Leeloo and her white Gaultier outfit (Google those terms and you will marvel as well). Like a kid with Tourette’s I just wanted to shout out “MULTIPASS!” at random points in the conversation. But to do that, I’d have to earn her love, so I took another swing — I tell her I loved her 1994 album, “Divine Comedy.”
She smiled and turned to me, oh so slowly: “Oh, thank you.”
Yaay!
“I’ve actually got a song called Electric Sky right now. You can see it on YouTube. I put it out there, we just made a video. The reason being I decided that this year I’m not gonna be doing any movies. I just want to spend time with my daughter; take her to school, and pick her up. It just so happened that I have friends who are musicians and I have my own studio. So in the evenings, when I put her down, I work on music. I recorded an EP this year, which is amazing. I can still do all the wonderful things I did in the past but, in a way, being 36 years old and still relevant to a teenage audience is quite incredible. I mean, art schmart, I get to do the things I love to do because of this (Resident Evil) franchise. It’s brought consistent work to my life for 10 years, and as an actor, to be able to work consistently at any point is amazing.”
This was, after all, the roundtable for the franchise’s fifth installment, Resident Evil: Retribution. In it Jovovich reprises her role as Alice, the ass-kicking heroine out to destroy the evil Umbrella Corporation which is behind the deadly T-Virus that turns humans into undead, freakish creatures. The character has become sort of definitive for Jovovich: it’s arguably her most famous role, and it’s also how she met her husband and father to her children, writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson.
It’s nice to see the same faces again, and it’s wonderful to be back with the team. It’s weird to think that 10 years has gone by since the first movie. Definitely, it’s surreal being back, but it makes me so happy too. And it’s not just the actors — the stunt guys, the art department, the special effects dudes. To think that our crew has literally been together for almost a decade, it feels like coming home.”
Anderson agrees. “I think I would have needed a time machine to go forward and see that there would have been a fifth movie. It’s a big franchise at this point and there’s no way you would be able to predict that kind of success. I mean, to get to five movies and still be successful and still have the same people in front of the camera and behind the camera? I think that’s pretty unheard of. When we shot the first film we shot in Berlin and we had no American distribution for the film. I always refer to the first one as ‘The Little Movie That Could.’”
Now that she’s the mother of his kids, though, is the director more careful with her when it comes to jumping off exploding buildings and stuff?
“Good luck with that,” says Anderson. “Milla will do everything and want to do everything. The biggest arguments I ever get with her are when I want to stop her from doing something she shouldn’t be doing. She gives her all when she commits to a movie. When she reads that action script she’s going to want to do action. She knows that when she does it it’s going to look better. I think it’s one of the strengths of the Resident Evil films: there are fantastical worlds, and it’s only through an actor that you believe the world because you can see the world through her eyes. If you believe the actor is in the scene I think it helps the audience believe in the scene. Her commitment to doing the stunts is terrific.”
So how invincible is Jovovich?
“Umm… It depends on how many drinks I’ve had. Three is the limit, and then the perfection ends. “
Retribution is the most ambitious Resident Evil film yet. Aside from being shot in 3D, we find Alice battling her way through ravaged Tokyo, New York City, Moscow and Washington DC. Other cast members are Sienna Guillory (Jill Valentine from the previous movies, who has now become her nemesis), Kevin Durand (Lost), Shawn Roberts and the return of Michelle Rodriguez, who hasn’t been around since the first movie. Didn’t she die? Whatever.
Although you should all be pretty sure that more sequels are in store, Anderson made sure to point out that this particular film signals the beginning of the end for the series.
“Everything has to come to an end. That’s the natural way of things. And we can’t make Resident Evil movies forever. There could be another movie after this. Certainly in this movie a lot of people die. I won’t tell you who, but there are a lot of character deaths.”
To end the interview I ask Anderson how he thinks Resident Evil will be remembered amongst the canon of zombie flicks, especially now with the big comeback of this genre.
“I think the cool thing about Resident Evil is that it doesn’t have to be remembered at the moment because it’s still a current ongoing thing. It’s not part of the history or the continuum, it still very much has a life. I mean it was the movie that kicked off the whole resurgence of the undead in cinema, which is one of the reasons why I did the first one. I was a big fan of the George Romero movies, and when I started playing the early Resident Evil games it made me think it was about time somebody made one of those movies. And I think Resident Evil was a great template to do that with.”