Now that we all live in a world of bombastic blockbuster movies that create new and rich world that are so fully realized it’s almost scary, it’s easy to forget that Luc Besson’s film The Fifth Element was actually a pretty radical and unusual movie when it was first released in 1997. This movie tells the story of the titular fifth element, who takes the form of a young girl who goes by Leeloo, and her mission to stop the greatest force of evil in the galaxy from ultimate destruction.
The Fifth Element is a vibrant and exciting cinematic world to inhabit, and the movie is so visually stunning and spectacularly detailed that it’s a total guarantee that many of the details in the film wound up getting missed by the average audience member. So here are 10 interesting details within The Fifth Element that anyone is pretty much sure to have missed.
A Hefty Price Tag
Although its budget seems downright dinky in this new world of Marvel movies and blockbusters coming out in theaters every other week, when The Fifth Element was initially filmed it was actually the most expensive movie ever made outside of Hollywood.
The movie had an initial budget of $80 million but it seems to have gone almost $10 million over that initial figure, and its visual effects budget was also allegedly the highest in movie history up until that point. Luckily, the movie made back its budget and then some, grossing over a quarter of a billion Dollars in total.
A Massive Mini Undertaking
Despite the fact that The Fifth Element had a massive investment into it’s visual special effects, some of the visuals for the film were produced using some very old fashioned classic movie techniques. Namely, when the movie was creating their own version of New York City, they actually created the city in miniature form.
The scale models were obviously smaller than the real life buildings, but some of the models were nearly 20 feet high. The length of the miniature set was approximately eighty feet long, and the intensely detailed work on all of the buildings and landscapes took almost nine months to complete.
Musically Inspired
Chris Tucker’s character of Ruby Rhod makes a relatively brief appearance in the movie, but he is undoubtedly one of the most memorable characters in the entire film. Chris Tucker’s performance is hilarious and completely unforgettable, but the scriptwriters had some very specific inspirations in mind when they were creating Ruby.
Ruby himself was inspired by the musicians Prince and Michael Jackson, and the filmmakers were actually considering hiring both musicians for the role at one point during pre-preduction. Allegedly, the film’s producers preferred Prince for the role if they had their dream choice, but clearly Chris Tucker made the role entirely his own.
Divine Intervention
Before Leeloo undergoes an extremely convenient and exceptionally quick education on all things earthly, she meets Korben Dallas and continually yammers on with what sounds like some kind of gibberish. However, this form of speaking was actually a rudimentary language that Luc Besson came up with himself and that was meant to be some kind of divine language.
The vocabulary of the language was somewhat limited, and the film’s star Milla Jovovich actually taught herself how to speak the language fluently before the movie’s filming began. Besson and Jovovich practiced the language by writing each other letters in it and having full conversations using it.
A Hairy Situation
Milla Jovovich is a very attention getting and distinctive looking girl in her own right, but one of the most noticeable parts of her appearance in The Fifth Element (besides wearing Ace bandages as an outfit) is her electric orange hair.
Jovovich is a natural brunette, but she bleached her hair out and dyed it the bright orange needed for the film. Because the orange was so bright, her hair had to be dyed again constantly, and it got to a point where her hair basically disintegrated because of the chemical treatments. So for a large portion of the film, she’s actually wearing a wig.
A Memorable Callback
At one point in the movie, the evil Zorg states that he admires a clean, methodical, and cold-blooded killer. And then immediately afterwards, there is a huge explosion blast that bursts out of an opening. This scene is an obvious cinematic parallel to one of Luc Besson’s other films, The Professional.
In The Professional, Gary Oldman (who plays Zorg in The Fifth Element) plays a crooked DEA agent who is very much a cold-blooded and methodical killer. At the end of that film, Oldman’s character is killed by the lead character - Leon (Jean Reno) - when said character sets off a bunch of grenades, resulting in an explosion that bursts out of the front of a building.
Comic Book References
It should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with Luc Besson’s cartoonish, candy colored cinematic style, but the director is actually a big fan of comic books. Even a layman can recognize the comic inspiration that is all over The Fifth Element, but Besson was particularly inspired by the work of comic book artists by the name of Jean-Claude Mézières and Jean Giraud.
Both artists actually contributed heavily to the overall look of the film. In an interesting fanboy moment for Besson, he had them in mind when he was initially coming up with the idea for The Fifth Element when he was still a teen, and then he had the opportunity to actually work with them for the film.
An Inhuman Performance
When the Diva begins her performance in The Fifth Element, it’s easy to understand why she is one of the most famous and talented singers in the entire Fifth Element universe.
Interestingly, the trained singer who did the musical performance of the Diva saw the musical piece that she was intended to perform, and she explained to the filmmakers that the piece was physically impossible to sing, because the human voice couldn’t change notes that fast. As a solution around this problem, the filmmakers had the singer perform the notes individually and then spliced them together with the timing that they wanted.
The Blue Lagoon
The singer who is colloquially known as the Diva in the world of The Fifth Element is actually named Plavalaguna. The name is an obvious play on the Diva’s appearance, as the words “plava” and “laguna” literally translate to “blue lagoon” in a variety of Slavic languages. As the Diva has an obvious blue and very aquatic appearance to her, it’s easy to see why Besson decided on this particular name.
The name was also likely inspired by a resort in Croatia that is also called Plava Laguna, because the film’s writer and director has vacationed there a few times. And in an interesting serendipitous connection, Milla Jovovich also starred in the sequel to the movie The Blue Lagoon.
The Parable Of The Broken Window
When Zorg is explaining his whole economic philosophy and he says that destruction in turn causes production, he is actually making an argument that is a proven logical fallacy of economics. The famed French economist Frederic Bastiat wrote an essay on this idea in 1850 that deconstructed the argument and explained why it really doesn’t make any sense.
The theory is typically called the “parable of the broken window,” which essentially explains that while there can be short term benefit to specific people in the event of destruction, destruction for the sake of profit is a net loss because the value of the needlessly destroyed materials has been lost.
