angelina jolie
Mrs Jolie-Pitt chats Brad and her most personal film yet.
What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago, Angelina Jolie was just an Oscar-winning actress, the daughter of a Hollywood star and a Lara Croft pin-up. Then she really got famous. Taking on Doug Liman’s espionage caper Mr. & Mrs. Smith, it introduced her to a then-married Brad Pitt. After his marriage to Jennifer Aniston ended, Brangelina was born – and Jolie became arguably the most recognisable woman on the planet. But you knew all that, right?
Such is the fervent interest in the soap opera of Jolie’s life – births, adoptions, surgeries, relief work – it’s almost easy to overlook the career. In the intervening decade, among other things, she’s worked with Clint Eastwood ( Changeling) and Robert De Niro ( The Good Shepherd), turned in a massive Maleficent- shaped hit and carved out the beginnings of a credible directorial career – with Bosnian war drama In The Land Of Blood And Honey and 2014’s WW2-set survival tale Unbroken.
What she hasn’t done is reunite on screen with Pitt – until now. Her third film in the director’s chair, By The Sea is undoubtedly her most personal. Set in the ’70s, she and Pitt play a fractured couple – Vanessa, a former dancer, and Roland, a writer, who are travelling through France on holiday in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage. But if you think she’s trying to tell us something, shortly before shooting in Malta last August, she and Pitt tied the knot. “We didn’t have a honeymoon,” she smiles. “This was our honeymoon! Which is very strange.”
Jolie-Pitt, as she now officially is known, is sitting on a hotel suite sofa, her slim-line frame swaddled in a beige cardigan. She turned 40 back in June; though making By
The Sea had already put her in the sort of reflective mood that crossing such milestones usually brings about. “I think it just was that time, when we were feeling like we wanted to be together more. We just wanted to not go through this life [ on] different projects. [ We thought] ‘Let’s try to be closer, let’s try to have a deeper love and a deeper understanding of each other, and let’s go further.’ It all came together at once.”
It meant directing herself for the first time, which she didn’t enjoy. “I don’t like seeing myself on camera, which made it very difficult. But I wanted to be able to have this experience with him.” Those feline-like green eyes flash
‘It’s strange to direct your husband to fight with you’
briefly at the memory. “This script sat on my desk for years and we used to just call it ‘that crazy one!’ – and then one day we decided we should just do it. We were hesitating for all the wrong reasons [ and we realised] we should just play and be free and learn about each other.”
Even so, taking on By The Sea was hardly advisable. Not a week goes by without some tabloid speculating on the state of the Jolie-Pitt union. Digging into issues of martial strife could go one of two ways: catharsis or crisis. “Going into it, a lot of our friends thought it was maybe not the greatest idea,” Jolie admits. “Because they knew that it was a very intense film about two people that are very at odds – and that’s going to bring up certain kinds of tensions. Even though what the characters are experiencing, what their personal problems are, are not our problems.”
Oddly, Mr. & Mrs. Smith broached the same topic, with its husband and wife characters unaware each other is a spy. As Jolie unwittingly told TF back in 2004 before she made it: “It’s about marriage, which is interesting because he has a great one and I have had some bad experiences.” Oh, the irony. Naturally, you might assume she’s referring to her earlier marriages – to actors Jonny Lee Miller (with whom she starred in her cyber-punk 1995 breakthrough Hackers) and Billy Bob Thornton (her Pushing Tin co-star). Both came in her more rebellious phase (drugs, knives, blood – the usual), when she was seen as a Hollywood live-wire – a force of energy that occasionally spilled onto the screen in films like Gia and
Girl, Interrupted, for which she claimed a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. But arguably, her ‘bad experiences’ also refer to her upbringing, when her womanising actor-father Jon Voight separated from her mother when Jolie was two – a fact that led her estrangement from him.
Unquestionably, By The Sea allowed her to tackle marriage head-on with Pitt. “We both pushed each other pretty far in this,” she says. “I know I’m biased but I think his performance is very strong. It’s very emotional. It was just so different. We’d never been in these kind of moments together with these kind of intense scenes with such deep emotions. You have to… You go through something when you go through a heavier drama.” Scenes of the couple fighting left her spent. “It is one of the strangest things to direct your husband to fight with you!”
Her ambition, she said, was to create a film that didn’t resolve neatly or offer easy answers. “Especially as an artist, there’s so much that comes out today – and a lot of the films I’m in! – where you feel you have to adjust to an audience. You wrap them up a little cleaner.” It’s why she set it in the ’70s, a reminder of the bygone era of more confrontational films that weren’t made by committee. “Some people will love it, I hope, and some people will hate it, but that’s OK. That’s what art should be.”
While By The Sea will no doubt send Brangelina watchers into overdrive, it’s about far more than just her thoughts on marriage. “I wrote it years ago with the thought that, ‘I want to understand grief and loss,’” she explains. Much of this has to do with her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died of ovarian cancer in 2007. With a history of cancer in her family – both her grandmother and aunt also lost their lives to the disease – Jolie wanted to explore the theme of “being out of control and not feeling complete” when she penned By The Sea.
With the BRCA1 gene – which dramatically raises the risk of ovarian and breast cancer – prevalent in the maternal side of her family, two years ago Jolie had a preventative double mastectomy. “I wrote it years before I went through certain things, then during the film, I was imagining certain things that my mother went through and certain feelings that a woman goes through, and then when I was in the editing room, I got the call that I might have cancer – while I was in the edit of the film, exploring the pain.”
Told by doctors that she also had a 50 per cent risk of developing ovarian cancer, Jolie suspended post-production and underwent further surgery. With her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed, it all makes By The Sea a very curious art-imitating-life-imitating-art movie. “It’s been a very strange experience, very cathartic at the end of the day,” Jolie nods. “But it feels very personal. That’s the only reason of being slightly shy of putting it out. There are certain things that just feel very exposing.”
Still, Jolie has never been one to hold back. “I don’t want to be somebody who thinks about what they say and censors it,” she says. She doesn’t come with a huge entourage nor does
she live near Hollywood. She, Pitt and their six children – adoptees Maddox, 14, Pax, 11 and Zahara, 10; and biological-born Shiloh Nouvel, 9 and 7-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne – now spend much of their time in Europe.
“I love it for the children,” she says. “It’s a very different mindset. A lot of the young people I know here have had their gap year and gone to Africa. It’s different and it’s lovely. And for us, it means we’re closer to go down to Europe, go to Africa, go across to Asia…” These aren’t luxury jaunts to five-star resorts. Even before Jolie met Pitt, she was pursuing humanitarian efforts as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, inspired by her time in Cambodia filming videogame adaptation Tomb Raider.
Jolie campaigns on everything from legislation to aid child immigrants to stopping sexual violence against women in military conflict zones. In 2013, she was recognised with an honorary Oscar – the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award; it was one of the rare times, she says, that she’s accepted such recognition. “Often I decline… [ simply] because I feel like it’s a privilege and a pleasure to work with refugees.”
It’s changed her life entirely – even her social circle. “My friends are mostly field officers from UNHCR!” she laughs, noting that journalist Marianne Pearl – whom she played in Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty
Heart – remains one of her “closest” confidantes now. “I’ve always felt that I would just go where I was needed. And I felt for many years I could be a voice for refugees and I could bring awareness.” But would she ever consider entering into politics? “It’s not my plan to but I want to see things change.”
Talk inevitably turns to the recent refugee crisis in Syria, something Jolie has been expecting to happen for some time. Simply dealing with the migration of thousands of Syrians is not enough, she says. “If we are dealing with it, piece by piece, with band-aids, and just responding to headlines, then we are not addressing all of the issues that lead to this crisis.” Her voice rises, full of fire. “You cannot answer global crisis with aid relief and you need a different kind of leadership [ to the one] that has been present for a very, very long time.”
Already Jolie is in pre-production on her next directorial effort. She’s been in Cambodia scouting locations for a Netflix-produced adaptation of Loung Ung’s memoir First They Killed My Father: A Daughter Of Cambodia
Remembers, set in the time of the Khmer Rouge. “The last film done on that war was The Killing
Fields – and it was shot in Thailand. This particular story is staying with the Cambodian family and it’s through their perspective.” Jolie is producing with Maddox – his first experience of bringing a movie to fruition. Making it with a Cambodian cast, Jolie predicts it’ll be “complicated” but she wouldn’t have it any other way. “I do like to be scared. It’s good in life to do things that scare you… I think that’s what we should be doing in life.” You can’t fault her ambition. “I feel I have a lot to learn. And so if I can do different types of films, it helps me to study different ways of filmmaking. I’m a student as I go through this.” So fear brings good things with it? “Always,” she
smiles. “It has to.”