Jolie good

Actor, director and activist Angelina Jolie’s film about the Cambodian genocide takes her back to the country she credits with changing her life, she tells Cara Buckley

Angelina Jolie’s latest film is her best yet, according to critics

Angelina Jolie is sitting barefoot on the porch of her luscious new home in Los Angeles, explaining why she wants to save the world, when duty calls. Her youngest son, Knox, nine, pokes his little blond head around the screen door.

“Shiloh needs you,” the boy says quietly, referring to his middle sister, who is 11.

“Shi?” Jolie calls, before disappearing with a whoosh of her black kaftan. Ten minutes later, she is back. Shiloh’s bearded dragon, Vlad, had fallen ill and was now, to Shiloh’s distress, convalescing at the vet’s. “That will be the rest of my day,” Jolie says, settling into a cushioned patio chair, “learning all about the health issues of the bearded dragon.”

Jolie goes on to lament the imbalance of a world where Californian pets get cushy care while millions of people the world over lack access to proper medical treatment. It goes unmentioned that she is saying this from her £19 million two-acre hilltop estate, in a gated pocket of the Los Feliz neighbourhood, a home she bought for herself and her six children in the spring, after her split from Brad Pitt.

Perhaps more than any other celebrity, Jolie, 42, has kept herself firmly planted in two vastly different worlds. She’s both the glamorous A-lister whose every move is tracked in headlines (“Angie and the kids left Target because it didn’t serve hot dogs,” read one recent news flash), and the humanitarian do-gooder who has made more than 60 trips to the field as part of her United Nations work. Apparent contradictions account for her elusive allure. Jolie has been enduringly hard to peg, a woman who cannot easily be lumped into a single category because she occupies many at once.

She is a peerless glamazon as well as the women’s health advocate who told the world about her preventive double mastectomy. She has a meticulously managed public profile yet professes not to care what others think. She remains near the pinnacle of celebrity’s cruel pyramid, even though her recent movies only made money when she was camouflaged

(Maleficent, Kung Fu Panda). She is obsessed over – if, in the United States at least, not exactly beloved – and fixed in the cultural firmament as America’s vixen despite having a halfdozen strong brood.

And even though the public appetite for salacious details of her personal life has long eclipsed interest in the films she has directed, Jolie doggedly brings tough, obscure stories to the screen. Three of the four movies she has made are set in wartime, including her latest, First They Killed

My Father, based on the true story of Loung Ung, who as a young girl survived the Cambodian genocide and is now one of Jolie’s close friends.

While Jolie’s earlier movies garnered tepid reviews, several critics have anointed First They Killed My Father her best yet. It is told entirely from the little girl’s point of view, in Khmer, and received a standing ovation at the Telluride Film Festival, where it had its premiere.

Jolie says she could not have made the movie had she not first directed In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) about the Bosnian war, and Unbroken (2014), based on the true story of an American GI taken prisoner in the Second World War. (She and Pitt starred together as a married couple locked in a different kind of conflict in her 2015 drama, By the Sea).

“It wasn’t a conscious plan of, I was going to make war films, it’s just what I was drawn to,” she says.

Jolie has an indelible connection to Cambodia, not least because it completely reordered her life. Before first visiting in 2000 to shoot Lara

Croft: Tomb Raider, she had been a Hollywood wild child, a ravishing Goth weirdo who, at the Oscars that year dressed like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, and locked lips with her brother. She also got publicly hot and heavy with her second husband, Billy Bob Thornton, and wore a locket with droplets of his blood.

The grace and humility she saw in the Cambodian people, along with the lasting effects of the genocide, threw Hollywood life into unflattering relief.

“Once you get exposed to what’s really happening in the world, and other people’s realities, you just can’t ever not know, and you can’t ever wake up and pretend it’s not happening,” she says, “Your entire life shifts.”

She adopted Maddox, now 16, from an orphanage, divorced Thornton, and threw herself into humanitarian and environmental work, finding lasting inspiration in wartime survivors and aid workers.

“The real will to survive, and the strength of the human spirit, and the love of the human family becomes so present, and that’s how we should all be living,” Jolie says. “When you’re around it, it’s quite contagious, and you know to learn from it.”

Although it is still August, the children – Maddox, Pax, 13, Zahara, 12, Shiloh, Knox and his twin, Vivienne – have already begun home school. They will be accompanying her to the Telluride and Toronto film festivals – Maddox has an executive producer credit on the film – and are making up for lost lesson time, working with tutors in various corners of the house, learning, among other things, Arabic, sign language and physics.

I ask Jolie if she ever feels like the coach of a small team, and she replies

that more often she feels part of a fraternity.

“They really help me so much. We’re really such a unit,” she says. “They’re the best friends I’ve ever had. Nobody in my life has ever stood by me more.”

That last sentence hangs in the air, perhaps a subtle allusion to, or indictment of, Pitt, who adopted Maddox, Pax and Zahara, and is the biological father of Shiloh, Knox and Vivienne. The dissolution of their 12-year romantic partnership came last September, after an incident aboard a private jet – purportedly involving Pitt and Maddox – prompted her to file for divorce.

Shortly afterward, Jolie and the kids moved out of Pitt’s estate, renting for nine months as she thought about whether to buy a new home.

“It took me a few months to realise that I was really going to have to do it. That there was going to have to be another base regardless of everything,” she says, her voice falling quiet and low, as it does each time the subject of the split arises. “That there was going to have to be a home. Another home.” She intimates that First They Killed

My Father might have informed her decision to leave Pitt. The film centres on Ung’s family members, some of whom survived, and Jolie says she thought a lot about what family meant during production, and how they should help each other and take care of one another (the film is adapted from Ung’s 2000 book of the same name).

“Loung had such horrors in her life but also had so much love, and that is why she’s all right today,” Jolie says. “That is something I need to remember.”

Determined to make the film as Cambodian as possible, Jolie teamed up with Cambodian director Rithy Panh, who received an Oscar nomination for his 2014 documentary, The Missing

Picture, and enlisted thousands of Cambodians as extras. Jolie says Maddox was her right-hand man, working on the script, taking meeting notes and bantering with Panh in French. Some of the scenes were shot on massacre sites, so the crew arranged for monks to pray and set out incense and offerings beforehand.

“She is very loved there,” says Panh, who served as a producer on the film. He adds that he was struck by Jolie’s humility, and how she intuitively communicated with the children on set, despite her shaky grasp of the Cambodian language. (Jolie says a suggestion in Vanity

Fair that children were hoodwinked in the casting process was “a mischaracterisation”).

Ung says Jolie, who has Cambodian citizenship, shares her countrymen’s sensibilities. “In Cambodia you don’t raise your voice, you speak kindly to people, you greet people with your hands together and bow,” Ung says, “All of this comes naturally to her.”

As our interview wraps, Jolie jokes that she will next work on a comedy. “I will get funny at some point,” she says, adding that she is working on Disney’s Maleficent 2 .“Thatwasa little funny,” she says.

Jolie also seems aware of how she might be viewed by the public; the removed ice queen to Pitt’s affable down-home Missouri boy (his interview in the summer issue of GQ

Style helped burnish his image as the more relatable one). But she grew up a punk in school, she says, and was used to not fitting in, and being someone people had opinions about.

“I never expect to be the one that everybody understands or likes,” Jolie says, walking me down her driveway, “And that’s OK, because I know who I am, and the kids know who I am.”

She quickly embraces me goodbye, and I set off into the sun and the heat, as the heavy security gate slowly shuts behind.

“I never expect to be the one that everybody understands or likes and that’s OK, because I know who I am, and the kids know who I am”