In Protector, star and producer Milla Jovovich’s Nikki is called a “force of nature,” and there’s just no better way to describe Jovovich’s presence on screen. No matter the movie, no matter the role, whether it be The Fifth Element or Alice in Resident Evil, Jovovich commands the screen with a ferocity unique to her. This time, however, she tells Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, the job was personal: “I needed to tell this story.”

From director Adrian Grünberg (Rambo: Last Blood), Protector is an action movie that will appeal to fans of Taken, with propulsive fight sequences, and the “reigning queen of kick-ass” herself leading the charge. For Jovovich, who plays special ops soldier Nikki Halsted, and a mother who will stop at nothing to save her kidnapped daughter (Isabel Myers), it’s a powerful story that resonated with her own personal life.

In a recent Q&A with Nemiroff, Jovovich hit the stage to highlight the team that made their low-budget, 23-day shoot a reality, from condensing the script to a tighter 90-minute feature, all the way to the editing process. She shares her experience not only as the star, discussing why Protector is the most challenging action of her career, but also as the producer. “It’s the first movie I’ve ever taken from point A to point Z, and I am really proud of it,” she says, explaining how involved she stayed throughout, from evolving the script on set to handling the simpler matters at 4:00 in the morning. “It was the chance of a lifetime, and I never expected that I could do something like this.”

You can watch the full conversation in the video above, or read the transcript below.

Milla Jovovich Goes “Back to the Basics” With ‘Protector’

“There’s been such an overwhelm with big visual effects movies.”

MILLA JOVOVICH: We literally locked the picture less than two months ago. So, it’s been this whole year just editing and doing the soundtrack and scoring and editing and more scoring and color grading and editing and re-editing.

PERRI NEMIROFF: Not to jump ahead to the score, but it’s got an A+ score. I feel like the theme for your character almost has this booming The Shining-type feel. I just really enjoy those sounds!

JOVOVICH: Yeah, we definitely wanted Nikki’s theme to be strong, so when you hear that dun, dun, boom, you know it’s going to go down. You know something’s going to happen.

I need that to play every time I walk into a room.

Going back to the beginning now, from the perspective of an actor, when this material first came your way, is there anything about it that made you stop and go, “I would have something to gain from this as an actor who’s always looking to challenge myself in new ways and evolve my craft?”

JOVOVICH: When I got this script, definitely, for me, it always has to resonate, and, like, “What can I bring to it?” in a sense that immediately I can feel that this is something I could really bring something to. The script was very different when I got my hands on it. It was beautifully written, but it was all in Korean, and it was kind of translated. I don’t know, it kind of felt a little bit translated by ChatGPT, maybe, but the essence of it was so powerful, which is really like the relationship of the nightmare the parent goes through when their child is taken from them. In a way, for me, what I found that I could do with this is I sit up at night thinking of what I would do to somebody that took my kid, and here’s my opportunity to make a movie where I can actually put that out there, and get that out of my system, while also highlighting something that is so prevalent in this country and so prevalent everywhere right now in some of the highest circles of society.

Image via Trent Barboza

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Now, to look at the other hat that you wear on this production, you’re not only the star of this movie, you’re also a producer on it, and I’m always curious to hear about this part of the process. When the material comes your way, at what point do you figure out, “I can best serve this movie by not only starring in it, but also serving as a producer, too?”

JOVOVICH: When I realized that it needed to be rewritten to condense it, to get to the meat of it, and simplify it so that the concept would be able to be something that would come across to an audience in like 90 minutes. It was much more sprawling. The original took place in Bangkok and many other places, so I wanted to bring it to a place where we could make it for the amount of money that we had, as well, but also make it well.

I’ve been very lucky to work with our DP and the cameraman, Vern Nobles, on many of the films I’ve made in the past with my husband, and he happens to live 15 minutes away from our house, so we called Vern and said, “Listen, there’s this film, and we need you because we need cameras.” And he just happens to collect cameras. He literally has, like, 15 cameras in his garage, so he took his U-Haul. He had just worked with the director, Adrian Grünberg, on Rambo: Last Blood, and he said, “There’s this great director that I think would really bring a lot to the film because we have a very short shooting schedule, and we need someone who knows what they’re doing, who knows how to shoot action really well, and who knows how to keep to a budget and keep to a timeline.” And of course, that’s super important. So, we were able to bring this team together that was very close, that had worked together before.

A lot of films, I feel like they start, and nobody really knows each other. It’s like starting a new company. By the time you wrap, it’s like a well-oiled machine, but at the beginning, it’s like everyone’s still getting to know each other. Here, we had that core team that knew how to work together. We had experience of over 10 years working together, so I think that really helped.

And of course, having such an awesome cast and being able to get such great actors, being able to shoot in Las Cruces, where so much of this actually happens, it was incredible to really be able to take this film and make it as gritty and raw and realistic as possible. I think there’s been such an overwhelm with big visual effects movies, and I’m part of the problem. [Laughs] I’ve done a lot of them. So for me, it was actually really fun to go back to the basics and really use the practical effects, really make sure that my fight sequences were something that a woman trained as I was in the special ops in the military, using our close friends, who were military advisors on other films that I had been on to really develop the character from the ground up, and make sure that the style of fighting that Nikki had was something that a woman could do. It wasn’t just about, “Let’s do some wire work and fix it in post and do some Hong Kong flips and some butterfly kicks and some crazy martial arts,” which, actually, on my first day, there was a lot of that, and I was like, “Okay, guys, calm down. This is different. This character needs to be real, and I want to portray her in a way where any woman watching this with that military experience, any woman, let’s say in the military, watching this with her experience, would be like, “Yeah, I could do that.”

Obviously, it’s a movie, and obviously it’s action-packed, and it’s supposed to be exciting and fun to watch Nikki kick ass, but it’s really rooted in reality, which I love. It’s got that gritty feeling to it, that raw, practical, we-did-it-ourselves feeling. I mean, when I was hanging upside down, that wasn’t makeup. I literally was a newborn baby, like purple and blue. [Laughs] That was not makeup. That was for real.

Image via 828 Productions

There was something Adrian said in our press notes about that that really wowed me. He was saying that you can hang upside down for about 1.5 minutes and then you start to get dizzy, but you did it for 4.5 minutes-worth of the cameras rolling. How? How do you do that?

JOVOVICH: Well, I felt fine, first of all. I wanted to get it because it was 2:00 in the morning, we had to wrap in a few hours, and it was one of the most important scenes in the film. It’s so beautifully shot, as well. It’s such a great sequence. I really wanted to get it right. So, a lot of it was just because I was hanging upside down, and every time they would put me down, everyone would disperse. Everyone would go get coffee, go to the craft truck, and talk, and this and that, and it would take like half an hour to get everybody back and get me up there again. So at one point, I was like, “No, no, no, just keep rolling. We have two cameras.” So at this point, I’m talking to the other actor, Manny. I said, “Manny, at this point, take my head, but be aware of where the camera is. Just turn my head, and don’t block me because light is there.”

It was just really so much in a way like you would do it on stage. It was just one long scene, and we just continually reset so that at the end it was almost choreographed in that sense to where we knew each beat so that the cameras and we were all in sync, and we could just get it done.

‘Protector’ Has the Most Intense Action Milla Jovovich Has Ever Done

“Let’s make it brutal. Let’s make it real.”

I have so many stunt-specific questions. You leaned into this a little bit before, but I love digging into the specifics of what it takes to fight like someone with this kind of military background. Given all the action movies you’ve done, do you come into this project mostly prepped, or are there any specific things you really have to brush up on to get just right for this kind of person?

JOVOVICH: For me, the action was some of the most challenging I’ve ever done in a film, period, because it was really happening. It wasn’t like, “Oh, we’ll do it in post. We’ll fix it in post. Oh, it’s a green screen. Let’s just get the double in.” But yeah, I have 30 years of experience of being an action hero, and so I come with that experience. I think what really sets this movie apart for me was that, as a producer, I had the ability to really tailor the action sequences to Nikki’s character, so it wasn’t just kind of redundant and didn’t feel generic in that way. It felt real, and it felt different from the movies I had made before. It felt like, “That’s Nikki Halsted. That’s the way she fights.”

There were a lot of things that I learned and that we all learned when we had to fix the way we were looking at it, which was this isn’t about taekwondo. This isn’t about wushu. This isn’t about big flourishing stuff. This is about tight combat. This is about using your mind. This is about really taking people by surprise. This is really about using your wits, being sharp, and being fast. People, I think, really underestimate the element of surprise. In most fights, number one, you end up on the ground, but in reality, you have to do what people don’t expect because you win half the battle just by putting people off, and I think that’s what she does in the end is using her skills, but at the same time, using her brain to be able to really have the element of surprise on her behalf, and using it to the best of her ability.

So many follow-up questions! You emphasized before that some of the stunts you did in this movie were some of the most difficult of your career, and it made me want to ask this. Of all the movies you’ve made, is there any particular stunt from a past film that you would deem the toughest, and how does the toughest in this movie compare to that?

JOVOVICH: Well, this isn’t the first time I’ve hung upside down. But again, in the past it has been easier because we had more money, we had more time, we had more cameras. We had more freedom. The action sequences, for instance, in the Resident Evil movies, we would have days to do them. On this, we would have a few hours. We shot for 23 days, and literally, over three weeks of that were nights. So, it was really hard for me on my body, because when you’re shooting nights, and then it’s six-day weeks, you have that one day to recover, and usually that one day was spent talking to my military advisor, Natalie Mallue. She’s a lieutenant colonel in the Army.

We were lucky because we got to shoot a lot of it in the order that you see it in, and so there was a lot of thought that went on, where it was like, “Okay, now I’ve shot this, so are we going to just go by what’s in the script? But maybe we need to change it.” So there was a lot of just talking with the director, and talking to the writer, and being able to, on the spot, change dialogue, change where Nikki’s coming from, what she does in a certain situation. Like that whole scene with Sullivan, where I shoot his kneecaps off. That was something that happened literally on the day, because of the fight where I said, “I don’t like to repeat myself.” I was like, “Let’s do that again.” [Laughs] Because at this point, this guy is pissing me off. He’s not answering my questions, and now he’s down on the floor, and she’s going to kill him anyway because he deserves it, so let’s make it brutal. Let’s make it real.

Also, I’m not one for just gratuitous violence in that sense. I love fantasy. I love sci-fi. I love horror. I love the fun of it. But this movie, I did not want the violence to feel gratuitous; I wanted the violence to feel satisfying and validating, and I wanted every person watching it to go, “I would have done the same thing.” It’s just something that comes from your gut, where you just want to destroy somebody.

‘Protector’ Is Personal

Jovovich shares why this is more than an action movie for her.

Image via Trent Barboza

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Of all the ambitious set pieces you have to do in this movie, going into filming, which did you think was going to be the most challenging for you, and ultimately, was it, or did a different one catch you by surprise?

JOVOVICH: This is a question for the audience because I’m really interested, coming from the writing and the editing: did you guys see the ending coming?

AUDIENCE: No.

JOVOVICH: Good. [Laughs] For me, through the editing process, that was one of the things, there was always talking with the other producers about, “How much do we show? How much do we show?” And so many times in cinema, and especially, I think, not to say anything adverse about Western cinema, but it almost feels like people feel like they need to spoon-feed it to an audience, and I really felt like I wanted people leaving the theater with questions. I didn’t want to put this big bow on it. This is a woman who’s suffered such trauma in her life, and I think in the end, it wasn’t about the action sequence; it wasn’t about killing the bad guy at the end. That happens, but actually, that’s not the end of the movie. That’s not the reality. The reality is what it is, what you saw, and that was so hard.

For me, being a mother of three girls, obviously, it was something that I really felt like I needed to tell this story. It was really important for me when my eldest daughter watched the movie to see it because I did it for her, and I wanted her to know how hard it was for me to make, because I was thinking about her the whole time. The scene where I finally find her, I was just sitting on my phone and looking at all these pictures of her as a baby and growing up and getting ready to do the scene. Emotionally, it’s crazy because I’m not a method actor in any way, but at the same time, I feel like every character you do leaves an impression on you, and changes you because you do end up living in someone else’s shoes and seeing through their perspective no matter who they are. So, it does kind of change you in a way.

But coming to this film as a producer, as well, my husband produces all of our movies, and I’m constantly asking him, “Why do you need to do that again? Why do you need to go to the sound edit? Why do you need to go to the color grade?” And then suddenly, here I am doing what he does and understanding, like, “Oh my god, if I’m not there, that’s what the movie’s going to look like. If I’m not there, that’s what it’s going to sound like. If I don’t take it and just kind of hold it close and really work on it to the best of my ability…”

My god, this whole last summer, we were on vacation, and I tell you what, I know a lot of people say after vacation you need a vacation, but we had three kids on vacation, and we were waking up at 4:00 a.m. because our sound engineer and Don Cherel, who did the soundtrack with us… He’s a fabulous musician and was also a cameraman. He’s also a friend of Vern’s. Everybody did everything. It was amazing. But he’s on the East Coast, we were on the West Coast, so it’s three hours ahead for him, so we would be waking up at 4:00 in the morning just to sit down and go through the sounds of stupid, simple things, where you go, “What does this slide sound like? That slide just sounds so eh. You need like the slide to be like…” There are so many slides you can have, and you never realize how difficult that is until you actually experience it, and you realize how different a movie can be when you give it that love, and you give it that energy and that time. Especially not just with my scenes, but with the scenes in the police station, with the scenes with the other actors, the scenes that I wasn’t in, to really be able to keep the momentum going, to have the right music, to make sure that the way it was cut together to form the relationships that I knew were there, but just needed to be found.

Image via Trent Barboza

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As an actor, I think it gave me a really great upper hand because I was looking for performance, and a lot of times I would find moments that you wouldn’t even think. It was like a moment, even sometimes, where the actor didn’t even know they were being filmed. They were just reacting. I was like, “That’s real.” In the end, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing.

This is a great story my mom told me when she was in film school in the former Soviet Union. She was watching this senior actor on stage, and it was the last show. The graduates of that year would do their big performance, and he had this big speech, and at the end, he did this pause, and everybody was just watching him, like, “What is he thinking?” And then he finally said the line, and everybody was just overwhelmed. After the show, they came up to him, and they said, “What were you thinking when you took that pause?” And he goes, “You see those lights at the end of the theater? I was counting every single one.” [Laughs] I mean, the fact is, sometimes it’s as simple as just being real. It’s not about emoting or pretending or method acting. It’s just being real. Just doing something real.

Sometimes when I’m doing a scene, I’ll pinch myself, just something to get a reaction that I know is going to make my face do something. It might not be “respectable,” it’s not method, but it’s real. For an audience watching a movie, you need to make it real for them. In the end, we’re making movies. We’re not living real life, right? So we don’t need to really do drugs to play a drug addict, we just need you to believe that through our ability to trick you, right? It’s smoke and mirrors, and it’s the ability to have the education and the experience to make those smoke and mirrors work so well that people have that, “Wow!” They believe it, you know? In the end, that’s what performing has always been about, from the very beginning, from when people were on stage doing vaudeville. It was just that magic of bringing people into a story and then having them live with you through it and having you believe it — not because the special effects were the best, it was just because it was a great story. The actors, we’re giving you something real, and you went with it, and you bought it because you wanted to.

But this movie, it took a lot out of me. I mean, here I am still in the middle of it. It’s going to get released, finally. Finally, it’s going to be behind me. Not in a bad way, but just in a way of like, I can release it and move forward with my life because I’ve been obsessed with it for a year, and I need to take a step back and put Nikki to bed, finally.

‘Protector’ Shows a Whole New Side of Milla Jovovich

“It was a chance of a lifetime.”

Image via Trent Barboza

For anyone out there who watches Collider Ladies Night, you know we always end those interviews with this particular question, and the way you’re describing how all-in you were with this production and how close to it you’ve been for so long is making me want to ask you this right now. Before I ask the question, I will just stress that when we were watching the credits, every single name you saw is of the utmost importance to making the movie. It’s a team effort, and every single one of those people is invaluable, but I find that in film and television, not enough of us stop to tell ourselves, “Good job,” nearly enough, so I want to know something that you accomplished making this movie that you know you’re always going to be able to look back on and say to yourself, “I’m so damn proud of what I did there.”

JOVOVICH: It’s such a funny question. It’s a great question because I think I am really hard on myself. I guess in the end, you do your best, and I know I did my best to make this movie the very, very best that it could be, and the story moved me. Everybody involved worked so hard, and I’m so grateful to the cast and to the crew for putting their all, for coming back to do some reshoots for free, literally in our home. People were there for real. Even when we were filming, a lot of times, they’ll say action, and some of the crew will check their phones and this and that, but people were watching. People were there with us.

But it’s the first movie I’ve ever taken from point A to point Z, and I am really proud of it. I am really proud of it, regardless. Some people are going to love it, some people are going to hate it. That’s the business I’m in, right? It is what it is. Some people are going to love it, some people are going to hate it. But it was a chance of a lifetime, and I never expected that I could do something like this. I never in my life expected that I could do something like this, so yeah, I am very proud of it.

As you should be! Let’s take a couple of audience questions now.

AUDIENCE: Did anybody ever figure out how many people you killed throughout the movie?

JOVOVICH: You know what? My dad is a great person who will be able to answer that because he keeps a really good body count. Because every time I call him, he’s like, “Kiddo, how many did you kill today?” [Laughs] So I know he’s going to be keeping score! I hope I don’t lose my crown as the reigning queen of kick-ass with this movie.

AUDIENCE: What made you decide to go from modeling to acting? What was the draw? What was the attraction?

JOVOVICH: Acting was something I was always going to do. My mother was an actress. We came to America with nothing, and she taught me what she knew because she realized that we needed some way to make our way in a new country. She didn’t speak the language. She was young, and she was gorgeous and so talented, but she wasn’t going to find work in a new country. So, she kind of put all of her energy into me. So I never really had a choice of what I was going to do, because I had a family to support. That was always very ingrained in me from a very early age, was that we all have to do our part to help our family make it to move forward in a new country.

AUDIENCE: It just seemed like you were so big as a model.

JOVOVICH: But, you know, at the same time, if you look at my early work, like Return to the Blue Lagoon, for instance, I was 14 years old when I did that press tour, just turned 15, and I got ripped to pieces. The kind of things that grown people said about a child, like how horrible I was, what a horrible actress I was. I’m in the middle of a press tour, and I’m having to read these reviews and then go on national television and try to hold my head up and be professional. It gave me a really big chip on my shoulder for a long time.

Thank god I had music. I love to sing, I love to write, and I had something else to do to kind of take my disappointment in myself, knowing that my mom was this amazing actress and I could never live up to her, and here was the proof. And at the time in a kid’s life that’s so pivotal when you’re a teenager, it was very hard. I think it definitely made me who I am. It’s still things that I’m dealing with today, of trying to love myself and accept myself, and go, “You’ve done a lot of good and inspired a lot of people with your career,” and to remind myself of that, because in the end, that girl who got those bad reviews is still there going, “Will I ever really be good?”

Image via Trent Barboza

I do feel like this film was one of the first of my career where you kind of see, not the real me, but definitely a part of who I can be. Not the fun me, but the me that, in a disaster scenario… [Laughs] My family will laugh because there have been times when we went on vacation, there was a tsunami warning, and I started hiding food under the table. Then they were like, “It’s coming! It’s coming!” and I took my hand luggage, and I started walking like 50 feet up, and I was like, “Come on, family! We’re going 50 feet up,” as if that’s going to save us. But that part of me that’s like, “I’m going to take care of my family no matter what.” It’s just this calm.

That’s what I love about Nikki. I find in a lot of parents, and with myself, as well, in some of the most traumatic situations with your kid, when they get hurt or are in the hospital, you get this calm. You don’t panic because you have to take care of your child, so you can’t be like, “Ahh!” So, it’s almost like a shark, when their eyes glaze over, and you just have to do what you have to do. That is so what Nikki is all about, until that one moment where she almost dies, and she snaps. That was the one moment where I wanted to show her let go, and to show the human behind that machine of, “I’m gonna make this happen. I’m gonna make sure that my daughter gets found. I’m going to save her. I’m not going to panic. I’m never going to panic. I’m just going to go from one point to the next,” like a machine, almost. That was very real for me.

PERRI NEMIROFF: I’m so glad you brought that scene up. There are so many standout beats in this movie, but that particular one left me breathless.

JOVOVICH: That scene was written in the midst of everything. Again, this movie evolved, and that scene in particular really stood out for me because when it came to the day of shooting it, I talked to Isabel Myers, who played my daughter, and she’s such a wonderful actress and such a wonderful collaborator, and I said, “This has to be real.” We talked to the DP, and I said, “You can’t be like this angelic figure with this light around you. I want people, for a second, to go, ‘Wait a minute, is that her daughter sitting right next to her?’” Again, to just strip away all of the fluff and really just have that moment of, “Wow, this is what I’ve wanted to say to my kid all this time, and I never could because we didn’t leave it on a good note.” And I just want her to know that I’m going to do everything I can to get her back, to get her home. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

Protector is in theaters now.