Angelina Jolie Talks About Her New Movie
For Angelina Jolie, the path to writing and directing "In the Land of Blood and Honey" was almost an inevitable one. Gaining fame and a vast fortune as an American actress in her twenties was paralleled with her increasing interest in the world at large, beginning, as she remembered during a press day in Los Angeles for the new film, "the first time that I went to a war zone."
That was 11 years ago, in the months before Jolie became a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador and began to use her fame to shine a light on the plight of war refugees (particularly women and children), when she visited Sierra Leone in the midst of their civil war.
"I just asked to go and I was allowed to go. I spent time in Sierra Leone and that was such a brutal conflict," she recalled with a shiver. "Seeing little kids that had both their arms and legs cut off with a hatchet, stuck to a tree. I could not for the life of me understand how this was happening. It was like someone smacked me in the face."
It was the beginning of a cosmic change in Jolie's attitude toward the world; since then, she has adopted three children from Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam, started the Jolie-Pitt Foundation with her life partner Brad Pitt and personally visited over 30 countries, many of them war-torn places. Experiencing so much suffering firsthand, Jolie decided to study more, and began to write and research the Bosnia-Herzegovina war of the early 1990s, work that eventually resulted in her first feature film.
"I'd never planned to direct anything and I didn't approach this because I wanted to make a movie. I had been haunted from years of traveling in the field by the lack of intervention with the trauma that peo! ple face with post-conflict situations and my frustration in seeing their pain and wondering if we could've prevented this, if we could've done something before," Jolie, 36, explained. "And violence against women, man's inhumanity to man, all of it made me sit down to write something privately. This led me clearly to Bosnia because it was a war of my generation, and it was one that I felt a responsibility to learn about because I didn't know. The more that I learned, the more that I was overwhelmed by the guilt of how little I knew. My passion was to get a great education and then it somehow just led to this film." "In the Land of Blood and Honey" follows two star-crossed lovers as they are torn apart by the brutal war, but Jolie insists that it is much more than just a love story. "This film is not about a couple. It's not about one woman. It's not just simply about these things. It's not just simply about violence against women," she said. "It is about how human beings are changed and how they break down when surrounded by such horror and such ugliness and such hate. Even very decent people are broken. I did this so that we would discuss this and talk about the wars going on today, talk about the situations around the world today and the things that could be happening tomorrow."
Jolie knows that the film, which she made in the country's native languages and used subtitles for the English translation, will most likely not burn up the box office like her popular action flicks "Tomb Raider" or "Salt." But that's perfectly fine with her, for she made the film for about $10 million, less than her paycheck for making one of those action blockbusters. "I just hope that it's well received as a film. I hope that people see it as a piece of art as well, and I hope that the actors involved are acknowledged for being extraordinary actors. So, my fingers are crossed for that," she said. But don't expect Angelina Jolie to write and direct another movie any time soon. She admits it took a lot out of her, to juggle her ! family l ife as the mother of six children and the key decision maker on a film project as well. "I don't know if I could put that much energy into it again. It's a lot of work. It's much easier to be an actor," she said with a laugh. "I really did not realize how much work went into the whole thing!" Jenny Peters' credits include writing on film, celebrities, restaurants and fashion for publications including USA Today Weekend," the Los Angeles Daily News, "Buzz" and Cosmopolitan. She currently pens the Variety "VPage" and "Seen and Heard" columns, and is the West Coast Bureau Chief of Fashion Wire Daily.
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