In 2009, actor Milla Jovovich married director Paul WS Anderson. Longtime partners and creative collaborators, the two met on the set of 2002’s Resident Evil, an adaptation of the Japanese video game franchise which pushed the limits of the PlayStation in the 90s. Starring the former and written and directed by the latter, the production – which would inaugurate a six-film, billion-dollar franchise – was not without its hiccups.
The story goes that Jovovich, unhappy with script revisions which palmed her action scenes off to her co-stars, threatened to walk. But instead of leaving, she and Anderson spent hours amending the script: the genesis of a fruitful partnership, both professional and personal. Most significantly, the rewrites returned to Jovovich’s character (the amnesiac Alice) the film’s defining scene, in which she runs up a wall, spins, jumps and kicks a zombie dog square in the face.
