by Gill Pringle
Lady Gaga, George Clooney, Kate Winslet and Jennifer Lawrence brought glamour to the red carpets of Toronto International Film Festival while Idris Elba broke hearts by making official his romance with a former Miss Vancouver. Deals were done, movies sold, champagne toasted and the parties went on until dawn.
But nobody worked the festival harder than Angelina Jolie, 42, ensuring that her Cambodian genocide drama received the widest audience.
Accompanied by her six children at multiple events, security was on full alert at Toronto’s Shangri-la hotel where she rented a suite of rooms as she tirelessly worked the promotion machine.
Reflecting on her career, she’s as surprised as anyone to note that she’s been an actress for almost 35 years now, making her screen debut opposite her father Jon Voight in Lookin’ to Get Out, aged seven.
Jacqueline Bisset and Maximillian Schell were her godparents and a Hollywood career was preordained destiny.
“I grew up around film in a town where it was all anybody talked about. My mother always told me how she wanted to be an actress and how her grandmother wanted to be an actress, and she was just so excited that I was going to be an actress that I never really thought I could be anything else,” reflects Jolie whose beloved mother Marcheline Bertrand died ten years ago of ovarian cancer, aged 56.
“I got into acting partially because of my mom because it made her so happy. It was something I was very much doing for her and it changed a little when she passed away.”
It’s of note that she only really began her odyssey as a director in the same year her mother died, first with the 2007 documentary A Place in Time, followed by 2011 Bosnian drama In The Land of Milk and Honey, gaining momentum with 2014’s WWII epic, Unbroken. A year later she would direct, write and star opposite husband Brad Pitt in By The Sea, a drama about a husband and wife whose marriage is unraveling. While the poorly received film would turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy – the couple’s 12-year relationship unraveling over claims of his drinking and abuse – today their year-long separation is on hold, Jolie purchasing a US$25 million hill-top estate in Los Feliz, half a mile from Pitt’s home.
“I haven’t done much [on screen] since my mother passed although now I do it for my kids,” says the mother of Maddox, 16, Pax, 13, Zahara, 12, Shiloh, 11, and nine-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne.
Confirming a Maleficent 2, she recalls how she struggled to develop her misunderstood villain in the first film. “I discovered the accent and everything about her while I was giving my kids baths. I think I tried about 17 different things on them before I figured it out.”
If she’s happier behind the camera instead of in front, then she’s not ungrateful for the opportunities her career has presented. “It is fun and silly, putting on costumes and acting like a crazy person. It’s a great job.”
Although she trained at the Strasbourg Institute she looks to life for inspiration. “Have a very full life, as full as possible, and listen and be aware of what’s around you. If you do that in life, you’re a better person, and if you do that as an actor, you communicate more honestly.”
She may have told the New York Times this week that she never expects “to be the one that everybody understands or likes,” but it’s certainly curious how she remains portrayed in the tabloids as a wicked temptress, despite the fact of her UN humanitarian work, undertaking more than 60 missions, five years ago anointed as Special Envoy to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Then there’s her advocacy for women’s health and frank discussion of her own double mastectomy, all the time raising six children.
The public distrust doubtless speaks more to the historic fact of her involvement with Mr & Mrs Smith co-star Brad Pitt while he was still wed to golden girl Jennifer Aniston, than it does to her rebellious youth and marriages to Jonny Lee Miller and Bill Bob Thornton.
“I went through a divorce young. Jonny is a wonderful guy,” she says today. Likewise, her divorce from Thornton was amicable.
The peculiar disconnect between Jolie as a person and her perceived wild image, has long been evident. Even as she began receiving good reviews for 1999’s Girl, Interrupted, her Oscar-winning role as a patient in a mental health institution, she notes with wry laughter how one critic wrote, “the only reason she would win an Oscar is that people aren’t sure if she’s actually crazy.”
Oddly enough, early success did not bring happiness. “I actually got very depressed. I was young and I loved to be with people and this was going to change things. I was also very aware that I didn’t have much to say and I didn’t deserve a microphone. I was still trying to figure out who I was. I was certainly no different than anybody else and I didn’t want to be on the other side of the line so it felt wrong.”
The same year as Girl, Interrupted, she starred in The Bone Collector with Denzel Washington and Pushing Tin – where she would meet Thornton – demonstrating the range of her talents.
Ironically it was her flashy role in blockbuster Lara Croft: Tomb Raider the following year that changed her life. Filmed in Cambodia, it was here she chanced upon Loung Ung’s bestselling memoir, First They Killed My Father, at the same time falling in love with the Cambodian people and adopting her first child, Maddox, from a local orphanage.
Ung was five when the Khmer Rouge overthrew Lon Nol’s military rule in 1975, turning the once-prosperous former French colonial outpost into an isolated death chamber.
Seeking out Ung shortly after reading her book, the two women became instant friends, adapting the book into a screenplay many years ago before Netflix agreed to finance the project in 2015. Enlisting the support of Cambodian director Rithy Panh, he came on as a producer and joins Jolie saying how, contrary to the damning Vanity Fair article suggesting the actress had emotionally manipulated the children during auditions, she is beloved by the Cambodian people.
“For the longest time, I never thought I could make a movie. Ever. And I never thought I could write. It wasn’t part of my plan,” says Jolie, who also recently produced animated movie, The Breadwinner, about an Afghanistan girl who disguises herself as a boy in order to support her family.
Describing her decision to become a filmmaker as an accident, she now says, “I wanted to learn more about the war in Yugoslavia because it was a war I did not understand. I wasn’t planning on making a movie at all but I was sick for a few days so I was away from my kids, so I thought I’d try to write a screenplay – just for me, for fun, nobody would ever see it. I decided to start with two people who loved each other deeply and then end with one of them killing the other.”
That of course, would be In The Land of Milk and Honey.
“If you saw me in the days before making that film; my lack of faith in myself, I was a mess.”
Today she is infinitely more at ease, although First They Killed My Father was not without its difficulties. “It wasn’t easy, standing there with your friend while you recreate scenes of her father being taken and killed.”
With her son Maddox working long hours, serving as an executive producer, she says. “I wanted him to work hard and give himself back to his country.”
As much as she is passionate about film, it’s her humanitarian work which brings the greatest satisfaction. “The people who I’ve met over the years are truly my heroes. These are people who have taught me how to be a better mother and a better person; how to appreciate life and what to value and what to live by. I’d rather remain in that world and learn from them and if I can do films that bring their stories to life, then I think that’s important.”
First They Killed My Father is available on Netflix
