Angelina Jolie: Taking a new role in the director’s chair with In the Land of Blood and Honey
But here’s Jolie on the phone, after several last-minute cancellations. It’s the end of the day and she sounds tired, but it demonstrates how passionate the 36-year-old actress is about the film she both wrote and directed about a Bosnian Serb soldier Danijel (Goran Kostic) and Muslim artist Ajla (Zana Marjanovic) who find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict in the Bosnian War in 1992. It opens here Jan. 20.
She is doggedly promoting In the Land of Blood and Honey not because she’s fulfilling a studio-mandated publicity contract, but because it means so much to her that people see it and learn from the experience.
“I never considered myself a writer or anything,” said Jolie, a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador who has been on field missions around the world, including Bosnia. She wrote the story in her journal as a kind of “homework” to learn about the area.
“I’d been travelling over two years going to and from conferences, seeing how society is damaged by war and lack of intervention, how people can cave to just how society is broken,” Jolie said. “I write sometimes in journals. I just decided to do it in different form, but it was going to be private. This would be good for me to have an excuse to finally understand what happened during the Bosnian war because I was 17 when it happened.”
The script explores the violence of war from women’s perspective, following Ajla and other captives in a female prison, most of whom are sexually brutalized by their captors. One of the guards, Danijel, was in a relationship with Ajla before the conflict and now she has been imprisoned and they must live in a new reality that changes everything between them.
Jolie’s spouse, Brad Pitt, was the one who convinced her to take her writing public.
“Brad had read it one day and said, ‘It’s kind of good,’” said Jolie, adding she thought the idea of making a movie from the story was crazy.
“I’m not a writer, but let’s send it to people from all sides of the conflict without my name on it and get a response,” Jolie suggested. “And if by some miracle, people are willing to do it and we can pull together people from this region and get them to help us to understand the (nature) of this conflict, it would be an extraordinary life lesson and I’d be compelled to do it.”
Funding was problematic, so Jolie and Pitt put up a large chunk of money toward the rumoured $13 million budget. She explained doing so and signing on as director gave her control of the movie and allowed her to use actors from the former Yugoslavia who had lived through the war, as well as being able to shoot two versions of the film: in English and in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BSN).
“I was happy to be that person only because I wanted to spend my money that way and I believed in the story with this kind of tone,” Jolie explained.
The film has faced controversy. Early on, there were erroneous reports it was the story of a Muslim woman who falls in love with her Serb rapist in a prison camp, which almost killed the project when female victims of war protested. More recently, writer James J. Braddock accused Jolie of plagiarizing his 2007 book The Soul Shattering. She has denied the claim.
“Like I said, it happens a lot,” Jolie said patiently, referring to claims of plagiarism, the weariness about having to answer the question for the hundredth time barely masked. “People like to report it.”
Jolie steers the conversation back to the movie. She talks about the difficulty of working in another language when shooting in BSN. “It was really hard. But they were so prepared. I’d never known actors that prepared.” She also comes back repeatedly to the sense of stewardship she felt over the project. It was more than just a movie for her actors and Jolie respected that, feeling the pressure to get it right as she moved through the final editing process.
“You hope that you make the movie that everybody will have put their faith in,” she said.
“For them, it’s not just a film. For them, it’s something personal, it’s something at home for them; they’re still living it.” Jolie added. “There’s still hate, there’s still so much to recover from. There’s still so many fresh wounds in (their) own home.”
Jolie is less concerned with the commercial potential for the film than she is with its ability to educate and inform. And she’s not convinced she’ll direct again unless the script has meaning for her and a message for viewers.
“It’s all so new for me. I loved the experience, but I don’t know,” she said. “I think (if) I’m driven that will mean something to me, and more than just the craft of filmmaking. So that if that shows itself, then I might try. But right now, I still don’t understand how I ended up doing one,” she concluded with a chuckle.
I can’t resist observing that Jolie must find it refreshing to talk to a reporter for half an hour and not once be asked about Pitt, her kids, marriage or pregnancy.
“I’m just so used to it now. I find it all fine, but I’m very grateful that (I’m being asked about) what I’ve done,” Jolie allowed, adding she has spoken not just with movie beat writers, but also with reporters who covered the war in Bosnia who shared their stories with her. “I’ve had the most in-depth conversations with journalists that I’ve ever had in my career.
“It’s nice to have something else to focus on that we all know is more important than all these other things.”
Jan 6, 2012 7:19 PM
Post-production sound company Soundelux in Hollywood, Calif., reports that Supervising Sound Editor Becky Sullivan faced an unusual task in creating sound for In the Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie’s powerful, new film about the Bosnian War. Jolie produced two versions of the film, one in English, and the other in Serbo-Croatian; as a result, Sullivan and her crew needed to produce two complete soundtracks, one in a language that none of them spoke.
Marking Jolie’s debut as a writer and director, In the Land of Blood and Honey centers on a Bosnian Muslim woman and a Serbian soldier who fall in love even as both are swept up in the region’s terrible conflicts.
The film’s cast, which includes Zana Marjanovic, Goran Kostic and Rade Serbedzija, is entirely made up of local actors, many of whom lived through the war as youths. The same actors appear in both versions of the film, which were shot simultaneously.
Sullivan was presented with two edited versions of the film and two sets of dialog tracks. As neither she, nor any of the members of her crew, spoke Serbo-Croatian, a translator was brought in to help them with the language. “In the Serbo-Croatian version, we wanted to be sure that the actors were speaking the language correctly,” she explains, “because within that language, there are many dialects that relate to different ethnicities.”
Editing dialog for the English-language version film presented a different sort of challenge. “The actors were speaking in what was their second language,” Sullivan says. “And so, we had accent issues and interpretation issues.”
“We did a lot of ADR recording,” she adds. “We wanted to ensure that the accents weren’t too thick so that English-language audiences could understand their words.”
Goran Kostic (left) and Rade Serbedzija in a scene from In the Land of Blood and Honey.
Along with delivering clean dialog tracks, Sullivan and her crew (including Dialog Editor Glynna Grimala and Sound Effects Editor Ben Wilkins) produced sound effects to help tell the story. Given the grim nature of the film, and the fact that it is based on real events, the sound team aimed for realism. All of the gun and artillery sounds, for example, are accurate with regard to the weaponry used in the war. “It’s almost like a documentary,” Sullivan notes. “It’s definitely not a slick, Hollywood sound job.”
At certain points, however, the sound departs from strict realism in order to accent dramatic points. As an example, Sullivan cites a scene in which a group of Bosnian women are used as human shields by Serbian soldiers. “The women are distraught; they’ve almost lost their minds,” Sullivan explains. “And so, there, we went into something that is unrealistic, surreal—it’s all gunfire and laughing. They’ve ‘checked out’ mentally, because it’s so devastating.”
Sullivan also used sound to help capture the war’s pervasive atmosphere of fear. A number of scenes, for example, occur in a small room where Ajla, the film’s heroine, is confined by Serbian troops. “She is being held by the Serbian lieutenant, who’s in love with her, and so she is safe…or is she?” Sullivan says. “People are being raped and killed, and so there is a sense that she could be taken out at any minute. It’s a scary, insecure place.
“We kept the tones cold and the threat around her high by having the shoes of a guard walk by her door and by placing voices outside her window. Later, when the threat recedes, the tones in the room grow warmer and the exterior threats become less distinct.”
That sort of subtlety and restraint is typical of the film’s sound; the intensity of the subject matter required little augmentation. “We didn’t overdo it,” Sullivan notes. “We kept it sparse. It’s cold, brutal and real.”
Visit Soundelux at www.soundelux.com.
