Monday, September 9, 2024



Random Fuzzy



Recall what she told Variety in 2022 while in the midst of filming Without Blood:
When Angelina Jolie read Alessandro Baricco’s short novel “Without Blood” — the basis for her next directorial effort — the Italian fable about the brutality of war and healing in its aftermath had an immediate therapeutic effect.

“I read it right as I was going through the beginning of a very dark time in my life. I read it in the month that followed my divorce [from Brad Pitt in 2016],” recalls Jolie, who shot the adaptation at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. “It had the effect on me that it’s had on so many people,” Jolie says, noting that the blurb on the cover says that the book is about the complexity of the human condition.

“I didn’t understand that when I first read it. I just knew the book had a profound effect on me,” she says. “I think it’s one of those pieces of art, of somebody’s intuition and mind, that puts something forward that has so much truth in it about who we are as people.”

She talks to Variety in the midst of shooting on a bustling soundstage where a key scene following a shootout at an isolated farmhouse is being set up. Ironically for a movie titled “Without Blood,” the wood farmhouse floor built on the Cinecittà soundstage is strewn with blood and bullets, and final touches are being put on a bullet-ridden dummy lying on the ground. “A Western?” says Jolie, about the tone of the film. “We’ve embraced that.”

“We love dead bodies; we definitely have dead bodies,” says Emmy-winning production designer Jon Hutman, who recalls meeting Jolie in 2010 on the Venice set of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “The Tourist.” He has worked on four of the actor’s five films since then.

“Having a lot of shootouts means you have to have multiples of the same costume,” says costume designer Ursula Patzak, who adds that the main visual reference she got from Jolie is “The Godfather,” which “has lots of black and white costumes.” The color palette of the film’s outfits is sober because “color distracts from the narrative of the story and from the actors.”

“My first film was about the war in the Balkans,” Jolie recalls of “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” saying she wrote it “trying to understand” how people who love each other can turn against each other. “How come in the beginning of the film they love each other and in the end of the film they’re killing each other?” she says. “The film is a study in how that happens.”

But “Without Blood,” which is told in a series of flashbacks, is a more complex work about violence, war and choices. “This film raises different questions; there is no clear good and bad in this film, even though there is clearly bad, horrible, horrific and criminal behavior.”

It complements her remarks at TIFF; helps to better understand her meaning:

"There is a time in our lives where we break. Something happens, something changes us, some relationships, some trauma, something happens. And we spend a lot of our lives trying to revisit that moment. It affects us for the rest of our life.

Sometimes we don't know how to sit at that table and address that issue or that person or have that conversation.

That is one of the most difficult things about the film. A lot of the gray area of life. A lot of the asking 'why?' A lot of the listening -- which is maybe the most important thing."

"I suppose I wish that we'd all sit together and keep talking. Just start the conversation that I don't really have an end to or an answer.

One of the interesting things within it, now that you've seen it, you understand the idea: 'Who's the bad guy?','Who is wrong?','Who is right?' This idea that there's some absolute, and how important that is.

And the power -- how hard it is to sit at that table, the hardest table to sit at, and the most important table to sit at for us to get through this life, for us to understand each other. And so much that's happening in this world because we're not able to do that. So I just hope that there's more conversation."



Without Blood (the book) has 3.9 stars out of 5 on Amazon. Not high. A parable on a thorny subject with no tidy conclusion, it was never going to be easily accesible, and neither will a film that is faithful to it.

Angelina told Scott Feiinberg in Telluride,
"I never read reviews. Not the good or the bad. I actually have read the bad in the past when I’ve directed, because I’m curious about what is or isn’t landing."

The reviews for Without Blood may keep her busy on that score.

Different views from the screening:













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