Supermodel, singer and movie star - Milla Jovovich has done it all and she'll still going strong as the star of ex-husband Luc Besson's big-budget epic, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. She seems the perfect actress to play the legendary patron saint. Paul Fischer sought to break through the armour when he met the beautiful actress in Los Angeles.

Milla Jovovich has always had a penchant for dreams. "I've had some really great spaceship dreams," confesses Jovovich, her opalescent eyes always hypnotic, always searching for answers. "Being shot up in a capsule and ending up flying, out in the universe, over the most beautiful landscapes. It's so intense. I have crazy dreams all the time." Ah yes, there's no doubt that this alluring young woman, now breathing fire and passion in the title role of the new Joan of Arc epic, The Messenger, was born to play this character. She knew this from the outset when she and then husband, audacious French director Luc Besson, discussed retelling the classic tale of zeal, passion, religious fanaticism and treachery.

For the couple, the idea for doing another Joan movie "started with a portrait that was taken and that was otherworldly. It was this very strange and androgynous portrait and I thought: Wouldn't it be cool to look like that? In the end, the more we started talking about her and reading about her from the trial, it hit us and we thought: My God this girl is so incredibly human, I've never known that about her. She's always been so distant and untouchable. We really wanted to show that." As well as tapping into her humanity, though, "we really wanted to get more into the visions and contradiction of her sainthood, without taking it away from her, and I think we did that."

Jovovich denies that she saw something of herself in Joan. For the actress, it was far more than that. "I think after I read her trial and saw a lot of her true reactions to things and some of the things that she said, between Luc and I, we had lots of amazing ideas that we thought of to represent her, a lot more truthfully than I'd ever seen her represented on screen. I didn't relate to her as ME, yet it was attractive to get to know her better, to maybe understand her and for me leave this movie with something a lot deeper than I'd come into it."

In researching the famed religious warrior, Jovovich found it relatively easy to get to know Joan. "It's really surprising to me how evident her personality is on paper, reading this academic trial that is really question-answer; this personality really jumps through history. There was just no other way to play the part - it was right there in front of me and I couldn't escape it." 500 years since the British burnt Joan of Arc at the stake, her story has attracted renewed attention, first through the slightly more simplistic Hollywood miniseries, and now this multimillion dollar screen version. One has to wonder what relevance this century-old tale has for today's teenagers. More than one might think, argues the latest actress to bring her to life on screen. "She herself was a girl who was so impulsive and perceptive at times, she really shot straight from the hip. She doesn't think a lot and acts before she thinks; that's pretty typical of teenagers. I think living in the time that she did, meant that she became a fanatic, because in a way, she had no other outlet for this questioning, this need for meaning in life. And the time period helped to create her. I think if she were alive today she'd be in college studying Theoretical Maths or space travel; she'd be like Jodie Foster in Contact. She wouldn't be mad, that's for sure."    MORE >>>

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