My orbit keeps intersecting with Milla Jovavich. When I was in the Peace Corps in Fiji, she shot Return to the Blue Lagoon on the island of Taveuni. I was on nearby Vanua Levu teaching mathematics, physics, and economics for five hours a day. She was apparently just 15 or 16. Since I taught Forms 6 and 7 students, she was likely younger than most of my students. There was a buzz about the film production in the paper and on the radio and I think I saw it a couple of times when it ran in the theater, though not because it was any good but purely because the theaters and banks were the only places with air conditioning. I spent my 25th birthday on Taveuni, drinking beer on both sides of the 180th meridian and pretending I had a 48-hour birthday.
She went on to a mixed career, from a brief appearance in Dazed and Confused to Chaplin, and on to The Fifth Element and the infamous Resident Evil films, which had a certain visual style despite otherwise being empty video game spin-outs.
In 1997, while I was a researcher at the now defunct Computing Research Laboratory at New Mexico State University, my wife and I bought a house in the old downtown of Las Cruces, New Mexico. I was an adaptable researcher, leaning into our institutional funding for natural language processing, computational linguistics, and information retrieval in support of the defense-intelligence community. I had side interests in evolutionary algorithms, artificial neural networks, and inference via minimum description length and related ideas that I would pursue as side projects, as well as serving as the faculty sponsor and participant in a performance arts group that had a cyberpunk edge to it.
The house had been built in the late 1930s and was small and without central air conditioning in southern New Mexico! Through the years, the owners had covered the oak floors with shag carpet for some monstrous reason. It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. We immediately undertook renovations, and with not much more than instinct and a book or two on home repair. We repaired cracked plaster, stripped and refinished the wood floors with rented sanders, and even invented a contraption to fog inside a lathe-and-plaster wall that had an Africanized bee colony. A swamp cooler and ductwork was added. Our son spent his first year there.
And then we moved to Seattle when I took a job with Microsoft. But we kept the house and rented it out. In 2014, we decided to renovate it once again, add an ADU, and make it as close to energy neutral as possible with 8kW of photovoltaics interconnected with the grid. We also devised a water catchment and storage system to drip feed native plants. The rework continued for several years and was done by our prime contractor and a host of subs, including a landscape designer. It was spectacular and we moved there for a couple of years but quickly became restless and have bounced around to Sedona and the Pacific Northwest over the last decade or so.
We finally sold the house after twenty-six years and two rounds of improvements. It was sold before it really went on the market to an enthusiastic family. And this is where we reconnect with Milla Jovavich. The new owners rented the house as a set for the film, Protector, and it is featured in 20% or more of the film. It is an eerie experience seeing it again. The new owners bought some of our furniture (mostly the RH stuff…) and it is in the film as well. SWAT teams trample along the brick planters. I argued with the mason about the charge for those because he had misestimated the number of bricks and was charging by the brick. The pergola I designed using Google Sketch, and was assembled by our neighbor, is seen through an open window looking onto the courtyard. In the image above, Milla is before the fireplace, sitting on our coffee table, and a small, brass Bacchus medallion can be seen in the background. My wife bought that antique medallion on Etsy and it served as a point of visual interest in the white plaster above the fire. I taped squares of masking tape on the plaster and drove small brass nails through to mount the medallion, then peeled away the tape. The buyers of the house kept Bacchus, and he grins over their daily gatherings. I wonder if Milla, seated on our couch, wondered why that was there, small but attractive, and wondered at the hundreds of hours of design work that went into the unique vision of her set.
I won’t say much about the film, though critics are very critical. Other than the landscapes and the sets, I didn’t find it very entertaining, but I wish Milla the best of luck and wonder if our orbits will intersect again someday.