'Breathe': Milla Jovovich, Jennifer Hudson and Quvenzhané Wallis tap into climate change fears in post-apocalyptic film

In Stefon Bristol's film Breathe (now in theatres), Jennifer Hudson, Quvenzhané Wallis and Milla Jovovich are in Brooklyn, N.Y., in the year 2039, when the earth is left with an uninhabitable level of oxygen. In the post-apocalyptic journey, it's the fact that this could be our future reality that made it interesting for Jovovich, in particular, to pursue.

"It's not like a zombie thing and it's not so far out of reach," Jovovich told Yahoo Canada. "This seems like something that could really come around, if not in our lifetime, in our kids lifetime."

"It struck a nerve with me as a mom, the script and seeing Jennifer as a mom with her teenage daughter, I just related on so many levels to it. ... It's one of those things that I think, for me at least, it hits these kind of scary points in my brain, like that primal fear of claustrophobia and not being able to breathe and climate change."

In Breathe we meet Maya (Hudson), her husband Darius (Common) and their teenage daughter Zora (Wallis), who have been able to survive in this underground survival bunker Darius built, as the oxygen level on earth started to plummet.

Darius is adamant that he needs to leave the bunker on a solo journey after the death of his father, which means Zora and Maya are alone. Until they get an unexpected visit by two people who claim to know Darius, Tess (Jovovich) and Lucas (Sam Worthington), but things aren't as they seem.

"She's a bad guy, but she's got good intentions, and she's trying to do something good in one sense, but then she could potentially be hurting people in the process," Jovovich said about her character. "What is she going to sacrifice? What sacrifices are you going to make to get what you want?"

"It's a very human story, in that sense. ... I don't think she intends to be a bad person, she just ends up that way, making mistakes, and there was something really heartbreaking about that for me, and very human."

Aside from the larger themes of the film, Jovovich admitted that she was a huge fans of Hudson before coming onto this project.

"Jennifer Hudson was a huge element for me," she said. "I've been a fan since I first saw her and then followed her career."

Quvenzhané Wallis, Jennifer Hudson 'play fight' to get mother-daughter dynamic

While Hudson and Jovovich mostly have more tense scenes together, there's a lightheartedness that comes from Hudson and Wallis as a mother-daughter duo. Wallis shared that it was really the time they spent together between filming that helped establish that relationship, specifically with "play fights."

"We would just play with the scene and talk to Stefon, Stefon would walk in, kind of break us out of character," Wallis said. "He'd be like, 'OK I want to play with this. Let's run this part again.'"

"We would run the scene again, right after he just said cut, without the cameras going, and find ways to play with it even more, to find ways to be even more snarky with each other and find ways to put more cuss words in, or just make it more aggressive."

'It's brutal out there'

From a practical perspective, both Wallis and Jovovich stressed how difficult it was to film Breathe in Philadelphia heat, weating these thick and hot suits and masks.

"When you shoot in these kinds of conditions, it's so hard as a person, it's much easier to shoot in a studio, but I think the performances you get and the feeling is so much more interesting," Jovovich said. "We're sweating. We're breathing hard. ... It's brutal out there."

"If I didn't struggle with the heat of having the mask on and the clothes on, and running outside, and having the guns and the props and stuff like that, I don't think I would have been able to play the character as well," Wallis added in a separate interview.

"It definitely made the whole thing intentional. ... I felt like I actually couldn't breathe without the mask."

'This movie definitely is going to be an eye opener, hopefully'

In terms of the film's climate change message Jovovich stated that a film like this, "reminds you of how much danger we actually are in."

"We're so fascinated by the apocalypse, we love to watch it on TV, and it's happening all around us. I feel like people, I think, want change. I think if our leaders made that change easier and more universal by putting things into law, it would be much easier, if people knew exactly what to do. But I think everyone's doing things on their own, little things that they can do. ... It's hard for people to know how to do the right thing and what to do, because we're not getting the guidance from the laws around us."

Wallis said that when these climate risks come up, it's certainly something she thinks about.

"When it comes up, I ponder it for a minute and I think about it, and I talk to whoever is around me about it," Wallis said.

"Just making awareness and trying to get out there, I try to use my platform for whatever I can and to talk about whatever I can when I see it. But I think this movie definitely is going to be an eye opener, hopefully."