25 things you didn’t know about your favorite action movies

The Fifth Element – A new language just for Leeloo

It takes a lot of creativity to work as a filmmaker, but to come up with an entire language for a movie is a completely different story. Writer-director Luc Besson went above and beyond to make The Fifth Element its own world.

Taking place in the 23rd century, life as we know it is being threatened by the arrival of Evil. When this happens every five thousand years, the only person who can stop the Evil from taking over is the Fifth Element. A cab driver (Bruce Willis) unwittingly gets involved in this battle when the Fifth Element, named Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), drops into his cab, and he joins her on her quest against evil.

Besides a funky, futuristic wardrobe provided by fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, the film also featured a brand new language. The “Divine Language” spoken by Leeloo, as we said, was invented by Luc Besson. He worked with Milla Jovovich to refine the language, who picked it up almost effortlessly, considering she was already fluent in four languages.

The language was only four hundred words, but Besson and Jovovich had conversations and wrote letters to each other in the language to practice. By the end of filming, they were fluent and would hold full conversations in this unique language.

Obviously, Leelo’s special language is not included in the film’s closed captioning. Only a handful of words are, like “big ba-dah big boom,” while everything else she says in her language is listed as “Unknown Language” or after it’s specified, “the Divine Language.”