Milla Jovovich tells us about her new action adventure, In The Lost Lands, adapting George RR Martin, and giving the middle finger to critics.
Against a parched landscape, two figures emerge from the shimmering haze. One is a grizzled bounty hunter; the other a mysterious woman with a dark past. Neither quite trusts the other, but they’re united by a potentially deadly mission in hostile territory. Oh, and the bounty hunter has a pet snake with two heads. And the mysterious woman’s a witch.
This is In The Lost Lands, the latest movie from director and co-writer Paul WS Anderson and Milla Jovovich – actor, action star, and Anderson’s long-time wife. Like their earlier movies together – most notably the run of Resident Evil films they made between 2002 and 2016 – it’s a true collision of genres. Spaghetti western meets post-apocalyptic horror; dark fantasy rubs up against two-fisted, pistol-firing Hong Kong action.
Mad Max: Fury Road may have been a touchstone for the jagged, grimdark production design, but its scorched future also brings to mind cult anime classic Fist Of The North Star, another fusion of shattered buildings, western and fountains of gore, and Stephen King’s sprawling series of Dark Tower novels.
In The Lost Lands was originally the creation of another literary titan, however: Game Of Thrones author George RR Martin. A short story first published in a 1982 anthology, it introduces a witch called Gray Alys, cursed to grant any wish asked of her, no matter how dreadful it might turn out to be for those involved. So when a queen named Melange shows up one day and says she wants to become a shapeshifter, Alys has little choice but to utter her time-worn response: “I refuse no one…”
In the hands of Paul WS Anderson and co-writer Constantin Werner, In The Lost Lands becomes much bigger and more outlandish, with Alys and bounty hunter Boyce (Dave Bautista) fighting hordes of skeletal monsters and a fanatical religious order led by Patriarch Johan (Fraser James) and a Bible-thumping warrior in aviator shades, Ash (Arly Jover).
Already a fan of George RR Martin’s writing, Milla Jovovich first read the short story over a decade ago, when plans were first made to adapt it into a movie. “It didn’t come together for whatever reason,” Jovovich tells Film Stories via Zoom, “but Constantin and I kept in contact, and a couple of years later, the rights were coming up again. And I said to Paul, ‘We should own this.’”
Constantin and Anderson therefore began working together on a new attempt to adapt Martin’s brief story into a full-blooded action adventure.
“It’s got that spirit of this spaghetti western, but the roots of it are in the fantasy genre,” Jovovich says. “So it turns into this really awesome, new type of film, this fantasy western action movie […] We really wanted to create something that was memorable, but at the same time unique to our movie and our story and our world, and different from the world of Westeros. I think Paul keying into that western factor was such a huge part of the puzzle.”
Jovovich, who also produces, had considerable input into the script. At one stage, she tells us, her husband’s concept for the film became so focused on sci-fi action that it was in danger of losing sight of Martin’s original narrative. “Paul is so talented when it comes to writing movies, especially sci-fi action [but the] first iterations of the script were so far away, in my opinion, from what the short story was, which is a love story.”
Jovovich therefore insisted that the movie include a frisson of romance between her Alys and Bautista’s Boyce – a gunslinger whose humour and soulfulness becomes more apparent as the plot progresses.
“I said, ‘Paul, I know you don’t like to think of me falling in love with anyone, and you don’t like to see me being romantic on screen, but this is a love story in the end. So like, you gotta have these two people falling in love, you know? This isn’t just another Resident Evil movie, this can’t just be just action, action, action, The End. You can’t run away from the fact that these two people have to be connected.”
In some instances, action set-pieces conceived on the page became even more outlandish by the time filming got underway at Alvernia Studios, Poland in 2021. What was once written as a fight on a small boat crossing a river, for example, was relocated in Anderson’s imagination to a cable car suspended over a yawning abyss – but because this is a post-apocalyptic movie, the cable car has been assembled from the remains of a big, yellow school bus. And because this is a Paul WS Anderson movie, it sees Jovovich’s Alys doing backflips and lopping off religious zealots’ arms with a pair of sickles.
It’s a set-piece that sums up the outrageous charm of Anderson’s films at their best. Superhero movies may have tried to co-opt this kind of hyper-stylised, effects-augmented action, but none of them do it with quite the same go-for-broke eccentricity that Anderson typically brings to the screen – and on the fraction of a Marvel or DC movie budget.
Given her decades of experience in performing such action sequences, whether it was via her breakout role as Leeloo in 1997’s The Fifth Element or as Alice in the Resident Evil movies, Jovovich also has input into how these set-pieces unfold.
“I think it’s really helped me to build the action around the character, and not vice versa,” Jovovich says of all that experience. “I think, with people who make a lot of action movies or that are stunt coordinators, in their minds, they just want to make a scene that looks super cool… I really wanted to make sure that Gray Alys had a unique fighting style that was very much about her, and unique to this world that we created.”
Behind all the gonzo action, though, there’s the hint of something slyly anti-establishment going on in Jovovich and Anderson’s latest opus. In its nightmare future, power lies in the hands of a decadent royal family and a murderous church, the latter gleefully rounding up people like Gray Alys and executing them in public. Just to underline their villainy, both the church and the monarchy live in vast citadels adorned with skulls. And through a sequence of events we won’t spoil here, they’re ultimately brought low by their hatred of Alys and a grasping lust for power.
Although the depiction of a bankrupt church and state might sound like something that came from George RR Martin’s imagination, it instead emerged as Anderson and Constantine adapted the script. In a possible nod to A Fistful Of Dollars or Yojimbo, Alys cunningly plays one entity off against the other, all leading to what looks suspiciously like a worker’s uprising.
“Well, definitely,” Jovovich says when we ask whether there’s a subversive element tucked away in her latest film. “When you take [a short story] and have to build from that to create a film that is going to be, potentially, 90 minutes-plus, you need a real world that people can relate to and that the characters can live within… And [Anderson] having to come up with the structure of the world and what logistically is going on with the church and the state and the people that live within it.
“That was something Paul had to sit with Constantine and work up […] I mean, it’s the story of people’s history, you know: church and the state and people uprising. That’s what life is all about.”
As Jovovich herself points out, In The Lost Lands’ path from page to screen has been a long one. First announced in 2015, it finally began filming in 2022, wrapped three months later in early 2023, and went through a lengthy post-production process for well over a year after that. And while critics have been as lukewarm over it as they often are with Anderson’s movies, In The Lost Lands is arguably a rare sort of genre-mashup: filled with pop art action and spiky production design, it also has some sparky performances from Jovovich and Bautista, and a satisfyingly twisted payoff.
“Even if critics were [dismissive], people really love them,” Jovovich says of her action movies. “And that connection with my fans and that connection with my audience is something that I really treasure, because I was torn apart by the press many, many times in my career. And there’s something about… not like, [saying], ‘I told you so,’ but it’s like, you’d give the middle finger to a lot of people in the industry that didn’t want to see me succeed.”
In The Lost Lands is in UK cinemas from the 14th March 2025.
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