No one is more suited to playing a godlike otherworldly creature. Yet no one, surely, needs this kind of movie less. Unless…
Ben Child
@BenChildGeek
Fri 8 Oct 2021 06.09 EDT
There is something going on with Eternals, Oscar winner Chloé Zhao’s debut dip into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Perhaps it’s that this is one of the first MCU episodes to arrive almost fully formed, without endless teases and character introductions during previous instalments. Maybe it’s the way August’s final full trailer seemed to apologise for this in advance, explaining that Earth’s cosmic guardians had not bothered taking down mean ol’ Thanos during the Earth-shattering events of Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame because they had been told not to by some pesky unknown entity. But more likely it’s that ... hang on, is that Angelina Jolie in a blond wig and silver spandex?
Yes, the almost infinitely famous Jolie is playing Thena, an elite Eternal warrior who can form any weapon out of pure cosmic energy. And why not? For if there is a human more suited to playing a gorgeous, godlike otherworldly creature who has lived for more than 7,000 years (but not aged), I have yet to meet them.
And yet Jolie is an outlier in the Marvel universe, a star so bright she does not need the might of any studio to power her through the Hollywood cosmos. Nor does Marvel need her, for it has turned unknowns, has-beens and fast-climbers alike into A-listers in its 20-film journey.
Jolie, however, is more like a AAA-lister, so famous that it is barely possible any longer to distinguish the character from the actor.
She is not Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man, an actor trying to rebuild his career after slipping off everyone’s radar for a few years. She is not Glenn Close in Guardians of the Galaxy, a veteran playing her fantasy role as knowing semi-cameo, aware that everyone knows who she is but is happy to suspend disbelief because it’s so nice to see her chewing scenery like a badass in natty blue spacewear. She’s Angelina Jolie, for frick’s sake! These days, for her to disappear into a role would require the special-effects whizzes to digitally disintegrate her at a subatomic level and rebuild her from pixels made of cherry blossom. And even then we would still see Jolie on screen.
Why is she in Eternals? Did we accidentally tune into a DC movie trailer by mistake? For Jolie would make total sense turning up as a magical mer-titan in an upcoming Aquaman sequel, or perhaps in a Batman film as the object of Bruce Wayne’s affections. After all, Nicole Kidman has done both, and she is almost as illustrious a screen presence as Jolie. But no, Eternals is most definitely a Marvel movie – they namechecked Thanos.
Could it be that despite her incredible celebrity, Jolie needs the Disney-owned studio after all? Her efforts in the high-profile Maleficent movies did not receive much love from the critics, and she hasn’t really prospered in lower-key dramatic fare recently.
If this were an episode of Entourage, the classic 00s TV show about an actor trying to make it in Hollywood, starring in a Marvel movie is exactly the kind of trick Jeremy Piven’s super-agent Ari Gold would try to pull off to get his client’s career back on track. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it any less weird that Jolie is in this movie. She has the power to blow everyone else off screen yet currently never quite does so.
Yet if Marvel can adopt Jolie and supercharge her career to the point where, in a decade’s time, we think of her as one of the superhero mega-saga’s main players, this could be the most impressive stunt since Tony Stark invented time travel using sticky-back plastic and an algebra textbook.
Saturday, September 4, 2021
Random Fuzzy
Best to read just her quotes and not the writer's comments and assumptions. Like the advance article that was taken down, it is riddled with false or misleading info. Instead of trying to understand the meaning of what she is saying and connecting the dots, the writer could not see beyond his preconceived notions and his total fixation on "domestic abuse allegations." While he notes that "so much nonsense written about you over the years, it’s impossible to distinguish between truth and fiction," he then proceeds to quote the nonsense as though they were facts. I don't think she will be all that happy about this interview write up -- many people have criticized the quality of the writing and esp. his ridiculous lede. She said she "didn't want to derail the book into stories about Harvey" but that's exactly what happened. Headlines were split between Weinstein and Brad's insistence on working with him and her "fear" for her family -- with little or no mention of her book. At least Guardian changed the title from the advance article's blatantly made-up quote to one she would approve: that she just wants her family to heal.
She didn't give much new detail about her "bad experience" with Weinstein that she first revealed to the NYTimes in 2017. She didn't mind Brad working on Inglourious Basterds even though Quentin Tarantino at the time had a long and ongoing association with Weinstein because Tarantino operates independently and Brad was only the star and not a producer. She attended both its Cannes and L.A. premieres. But Brad approaching Weinstein to work as a producer (he is not listed as such) of Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly, a Plan B production of which he is the star and a producer was crass and callous. "It was hard for me when Brad did.” “We fought about it. Of course it hurt."
"I am those things I don't like. That is a part of me. I can't deny that. I have to accept that. And in fact, I have to embrace that. I need to face that and take care of that.
In his voiceover for Ad Astra ("We set out to make a very sincere film, bare, raw honesty. You get older and you just get tired of protecting yourself): "I'm selfish. I'm selfish. I've let so many people down. I'm just a selfish person."
Perhaps it was his concession to her that Weinstein's name is not in the list of Killing Them Softly's filmmakers, but The Weinstein Company was still the distributor. Persisting with his desire to work with someone who had attempted to sexually assault his partner and despite her vehement opposition was incredibly selfish and insensitive. The children, who were too young to comprehend in 2012, would have been very upset when they finally became aware of it. It's likely they had a family discussion about this, MeToo and Times Up in 2017 and it led to Pax wearing a Times Up lapel pin to the Globes in January 2018. Brad's broad confessions in his 2019 Ad Astra press was obviously about more than just the plane incident and the kids.
"I’m realizing, as a real act of forgiveness for myself for all the choices that I’ve made that I’m not proud of, that I value those missteps, because they led to some wisdom, which led to something else."
“I’m hoping to deal with all my regrets. It takes some forgiveness of self as well. And if there’s someone that you need to [apologise to], something you need to clean up, then you clean it up... Then maybe we can dispense with those regrets if they’re handled. I’m a big believer in making amends.”
She accepted his apology and forgave him long ago -- long before they were married (KTS started filming 2011 and premiered in Cannes in May, 2012 -- where Brad's reply that Angelina was not with him caused palpable disappointment.) She said in a March, 2012 interview:
"In our house, we're split 50-50. The girls know that Daddy is the biggest pushover," Jolie said, according to The Chicago Sun Times.
"I will say, 'Brad, you can't just give the girls anything they want'. He will look at me, smile, and say, 'I have no choice. My girls are perfect'."
"Brad has called me on things too. He said, 'Angie, you let the boys walk all over you'. The truth is I do. Boys can push a mom. Girls can't.
"Maybe that's because women know women. We know little girls. I'll say, 'Girls, I know exactly what you're doing. You're working Daddy for that cookie'. Men can never say no."
"Brad shows my girls how a woman should be treated by a man."
As he and the rest of the family read the interview and with the younger kids just now having a better understanding of these matters, he will likely be making amends again. It may have been all these other "regrets" popping up that made the reunification process drag on for as long as it has, dealing set backs to his efforts to regain the children's trust and respect. If it was strictly the plane incident, they may have been out of it within the 6 months - 1 year original estimate. (I feel for De'Longhi, this was not a good time to launch their campaign.)
- "It took a lot for me to be in a position where I felt I had to separate from the father of my children.”
She repeats what she said in a prepared Q&A last year for Vogue UK: "I separated for the wellbeing of my family. It was the right decision. I continue to focus on their healing." Separate not divorce. She did not separate willingly. She was put on the spot and forced to choose where the alternative meant she could not be with the kids while they could not be with Brad.
- The writer kept repeating throughout the claim that she "made allegations of domestic abuse against Pitt". This has been thoroughly disproven by the FBI leak. The Guardian writer is in all respects a lot worse than the writer of the disastrous interview for Vanity Fair. Since any interview with her is a sure fire driver of traffic, she should have been in a position to choose her interviewer. There was a failure here in vetting him.
- "It has been so horrific that I almost have to see it as a godsend to be in a position to be able to fight this system. It doesn’t start with the violation [the plane incident]. It’s so much more complicated than that."
She is fighting the system -- notBrad.
- “I think at the end of the day, even if you and a few people you love are the only people who know the truth of your life, what you fight for, or what you sacrifice, or what you’ve suffered, you come to be at peace with that, regardless of everything going on around you.”
This makes it very clear that the truth about their lives is hidden from the public and not something they can openly acknowledge. What the public sees -- the petition -- is not the truth. Hence their silence on all matters pertaining to the case, because they aren't true. She has hinted at this before: "Sometimes you get hurt, you see those you love in pain, and you can’t be as free and open as your spirit desires." The children suffered from trauma and were upset with Brad, but is was Brad who was in pain -- filled with remorse and regret.
"We care for each other and care about our family, and we are both working towards the same goal.
"We are and forever will be a family. I am coping with finding a way through to make sure that this somehow makes us stronger and closer.
“It’s just been the hardest time, and we’re just kind of coming up for air. [This house] is a big jump forward for us, and we’re all trying to do our best to heal our family.”
"We’re all just healing from the events that led to the filing . . . They’re not healing from divorce. They’re healing from some . . . from life, from things in life.”
"My whole family… we’ve all been through a difficult time. "
“I’m not suicidal or something. There’s still much beauty in the world and a lot of love. And a lot of love to be given."
”
"I know the people who love me know me. And that's enough for me."”
(Ad Astra)"I'm unsure of the future, but I'm not concerned. I will rely on those closest to me. And will share their burdens, as they share mine. I will live, and love."
That the real truth is that they are and have always remained a couple but were forced to live apart and accept conditions imposed under the pretext of helping the children recover. The lie and being forced to stay separated magnified the immediate pain caused by the traumatic incident and made it horrific.
They've used statements like that of Peter Harvey to give more clarity on what is going on behind the scenes of the filings: "Ms. Jolie has been working privately for four and a half years to both heal her family an to fight for improvements to the system to ensure that other families do not experience what hers has endured."
- "And did she fear for the safety of her children? This time she answers. “Yes, for myfamily. My whole family.
It isn't difficult to figure out that Brad is part of "my whole family" esp. when she explicitly said so in the same interview: "my family... all of us, including their dad." But since it was not spelled out for him in TMZ, it was beyond the writer's obviously limited ability to comprehend. She feared for and was protecting the children and Brad -- her whole family, which goes back to what she said when she filed, that it was "for the health of the family." Her silence also primarily protects Brad, as did her quick action to take down the advance article and its false headline.
- “I mean, in some ways it’s been the last decade" in her 2019 Harpers Bazaar interview she refers to this also.
My body has been through a lot over the past decade, particularly the past four years, and I have both the visible and invisible scars to show for it. The invisible ones are harder to wrestle with. Life takes many turns. Sometimes you get hurt, you see those you love in pain, and you can’t be as free and open as your spirit desires. It’s not new or old, but I do feel the blood returning to my body.
- "I just want my family to heal. And I want everyone to move forward – all of us, including their dad. I want us to heal and be peaceful. We’ll always be a family.”
"We'll always be a family" is exactly what she said in her very first interviews in 2017 in Cambodia with Yalda Hakim and George Stephanopoulos. Brad has always been part of her "family." That she can now say he is part of "us" is an indication that he is with them, they are together, hence they were ready to have the therapists testify in the hearings.
Angelina Jolie sits at a desk, back straight as a rule and rather regal. Her features are cartoonishly beautiful – straight black hair, vertiginous cheekbones, huge blue eyes and lips like a plumped red sofa. She is talking on Zoom to four young activists. It is a horribly apt day to be discussing human rights – the Taliban has just captured Ghazni city on its approach to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
If this were a movie, you might suspect Jolie was playing a divine leader addressing the fortunate few. Yet it soon becomes apparent that things aren’t quite as they seem. The actor and film director is the one in awe, not the activists. The young people talk about the work they have done raising awareness of the carnage in Syria, the environmental crisis, trans rights and food poverty. Jolie hangs on their every word. She tells them they have inspired her children who follow their work, warns them against burnout, apologises for the failings of her generation and says how honoured she is to meet them.
The next evening it is just Jolie and I Zooming. In the background I can hear kids playing. Our conversation is frequently interrupted by the ferocious roar of her rottweiler Dusty, who appears to believe he is a lion. It’s been an even more depressing day for human rights – the Taliban has entered Kabul and toppled the Afghanistan government. Jolie says the only thing giving her hope is the young people we met last night. “They speak about these issues with more urgency and awareness of what is morally right and decent than any politician, any diplomat, any NGOs I’ve worked with.”
She says she can’t stop thinking about Muhammad Najem, a 19-year-old who literally shouted from the rooftops about the Syrian regime’s siege of his home village, Eastern Ghouta. After his father was killed four years ago in an airstrike on the mosque where he was praying, Muhammad and his brother would wait for the daily bombing to stop, film the carnage from their roof and document the suffering of survivors. He and his family soon became government targets, and fled to Turkey from where he spoke to us. It wasn’t just his bravery that was notable; it was the warmth of his smile, his zest for life, despite all he has seen. Since we last spoke, Jolie has Zoomed again with Muhammad and a girl who is campaigning against period poverty. “His relationship to that teenage girl and her activism was more in tune than almost any man I’ve met,” Jolie says. We agree that cloning Muhammad may be the answer to world peace. “He is that evolved man!” Jolie says.
“Grrrrrrrrr!” Dusty roars, apparently in agreement
Jolie has spent 20 years campaigning for human rights, first as a goodwill ambassador and then special envoy for the UN high commissioner for refugees. She has carried out more than 60 field missions, invariably with notepad and pen in hand, bearing witness to people displaced by war and persecution in countries such as Syria, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now Jolie, 46, has written a book with child rights lawyer Geraldine Van Bueren QC and Amnesty International, called Know Your Rights, a guide for young people named after the Clash song whose title is also tattooed on Jolie’s back. The book lays out all the rights children have under the UN convention on the rights of the child, ratified by 196 countries, explains how to claim them and offers advice from young people who have done. Know Your Rights tackles all the big issues in a chatty, accessible way – from the rights to life, dignity, health, equality and non-discrimination, criminal justice, a safe place, freedom of thought and expression, privacy, peaceful protest, play and education, to the right to protections from harm and armed violence.
I ask Jolie why she has written the book. “I’ve met too many children who live with the effect of their rights being violated – displaced people, young rape victims. I couldn’t understand why they were still fighting for basic things that were their rights to begin with. It made me very angry. How are we going to solve anything if we’re not addressing that, right?” Her explanation is fluent and authoritative – and not surprising.
But the next bit is. “Then I had an experience in the States with my own children and I thought... well, human rights, children’s rights.” Suddenly the fluency is gone. Her language becomes disjointed and elliptical. “I remembered the rights of the child, and I took them out and looked at them and thought: well, these are for when you’re in a situation and you want to make sure there is support for the children in your life.”
She apologises, and says she can’t be more direct. “Then I found out the US hadn’t ratified the rights of the child. One of the ways it affects children is their voice in court – a child in Europe would have a better chance of having a voice in court than a child in California. That said a lot to me about this country.”
What happened that made her fear for her children’s rights. “I... I’m still in my own legal situation,” she stammers. “I can’t speak about that.” Look, I say, there has been so much nonsense written about you over the years, it’s impossible to distinguish between truth and fiction – you have to help me understand what you are alluding to. Are you talking about your divorce from Brad Pitt and the allegations you have made against him of domestic abuse? She tells me she is sworn to silence. Well, nod if you’re talking about the divorce and allegations. She nods. And did she fear for the safety of her children? This time she answers. “Yes, for my family. My whole family.”
It would be amazing, I say, to spend your life on the world stage, highlighting the abuse of children’s rights, and then discover that these same rights may have been compromised so close to home. “Often you cannot recognise something in a personal way, especially if your focus is on the greatest global injustices, because everything else seems smaller. It’s so hard. I’d like to be able to have this discussion and it’s so important...” She makes a couple of efforts to complete her sentence, gives up and starts again. And now the fluency returns. “I’m not the kind of person who makes decisions like the decisions I had to make lightly. It took a lot for me to be in a position where I felt I had to separate from the father of my children.”
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were Hollywood’s golden couple; so famous that they had a portmanteau moniker, Brangelina. And Brangelina was, aptly, the ultimate celebrity brand. Both are Oscar winners, among the highest paid stars in the film business (Pitt is said to be worth $300m, Jolie $150m), mainstream draws and indie icons, and of course utterly gorgeous (Pitt was twice voted the sexiest man alive by People magazine, while Jolie was named sexiest woman alive by Esquire magazine in 2004). But Brangelina also became a byword for celebrity altrusim and consciousness-raising. Pitt accompanied Jolie on many of her UNHCR trips, they opened schools in war-torn countries, and three of their six children were adopted from countries brutalised by conflict and poverty – 20-year-old Maddox is Cambodian, 17-year-old Pax is Vietnamese and 16-year-old Zahara is Ethiopian. They even managed to manipulate the media to their own ends. Faced with the inevitability of being papped when their son Shiloh was born in 2006, Jolie and Pitt auctioned off the photoshoot to People magazine in the US and Hello! in Britain for $7.6m. Two years later, when twins Knox and Vivienne arrived, they sold the shoot to the same magazines for an estimated $14m, making them the most expensive celebrity photos in history. On both occasions, the proceeds went to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation to fund humanitarian projects. As a couple, they seemed too good (or at least too successful) to be true.
And so it proved. In September 2016, Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt, which was finalised in 2019. But they are still locked in a bitter custody battle, after she alleged domestic violence against him. In November 2016, the FBI announced no charges would be brought against Pitt, and cleared him of any wrongdoing, following an incident a couple of months earlier on their private plane in which it was alleged that a drunk Pitt got “verbally abusive and physical” with Maddox, then 15. Five days after the incident, Jolie filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences and stating that her decision to end the marriage “was made for the health of the family”. Pitt admitted he had an alcohol problem (he attended Alcoholics Anonymous after their separation) and that he had yelled at one of his children, but has always denied being physically abusive to them. Jolie refuses to say anything about the incident due to court proceedings. Pitt’s lawyers declined to comment when invited to do so by the Guardian.
Today Jolie is at home in Los Feliz, a residential neighbourhood near the Hollywood Hills. She bought the mansion, which cost a reputed $25m and used to be home to the film-maker Cecil B DeMille, to make it easier for the children to visit Pitt after the separation. For most of the past five years she has had custody, while he has had visitation rights. Although it has frequently been reported that the issues leading to the current court proceedings were about Jolie fighting for sole custody, in fact they were about how a healthy joint custody relationship could be achieved.
I can hear a couple of the children playing in the background, while Dusty continues to make regular contributions to the conversation. “What I know is when a child has been harmed, physically, emotionally, or witnessed the harm of somebody they love or care for, it can cause damage to that child. One of the reasons children need to have these rights is because without them they are vulnerable to living unsafe, unhealthy lives.” She may be talking about children in general, but it sounds personal. In the custody battle, much of the world appears to have taken sides. Some family law attorneys have criticised Jolie for wanting her children to testify against their father, while Jolie suggests it would be a betrayal of their rights for her to let it rest. Meanwhile, Jolie’s lawyers have said three of the children have asked to give their testimony. In March, Maddox did testify against Pitt. It is thought that he wants to legally change his name from Jolie-Pitt to Jolie.
I ask Jolie when she first became aware of human rights and she starts to talk about her mother’s values. “She didn’t come at them as if it was a job or a calling, she was just kind. She was a decent human being who was bothered when she saw people mistreated. It was really that simple.”
Jolie’s mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died of ovarian cancer in 2007, aged 56, trained as an actor, hung out with Jim Morrison when she was young, and by the end of her life was the partner of Native American activist and poet John Trudell. Jolie’s father, the actor Jon Voight, was Oscar-nominated for Midnight Cowboy (1969) and won best actor for Coming Home in 1979, but was a less impressive parent in Jolie’s eyes. She says her mother sacrificed her career to bring up her two children (Jolie has an older brother, James Haven), largely as a single parent. “My mom married at 21, and by the time she was 25 she was divorced with two little kids. She couldn’t be the artist she wanted to be, but she raised her children with art and creativity. Even if it was a birthday party, she found a way to put those talents to use.”
She says what she loved about her mother is that she embraced difference and was open to all experiences. “She didn’t try to make me a mould of her. We were very different as women.”
In what way? “She would always want me to sit next to the stranger on the plane because she was shy, right? While I loved her softness, she loved my strength. She was very still, and I’m constantly in motion. I was very sexual, and she was much more of a lady. But she saw my true self and encouraged it fully, and she taught me to do that for my own children. My children are all very different from each other.”
Her mother always told Jolie to be useful in life, but as a teenager, she says, she didn’t know what she meant. She experimented with drugs, including heroin, drank excessively and cut herself in an attempt to overcome an overwhelming sense of emptiness. She had her first live-in lover at 14. Her mother suggested her boyfriend move in to stop her leaving home and going further off the rails. Jolie was anti-establishment, and outspoken, but she was also a mess. “It took me a good while to feel I could be of use to anyone because I felt for a long time that I was a little crazy, that I was a little unhinged, and not settled. If you would have asked me as a teenager if I could have been anybody’s mom, or of any use to the UN or write a book, I would have said absolutely not.”
With the benefit of hindsight, does she still feel she was unhinged? “Maybe that’s what’s so helpful about meeting with all these young people. They are reminding me that back at the time I felt I was a bit crazy for challenging a system, or being angry about certain things I was witnessing, I wasn’t wrong. To be around all these young people who have, for good reason, a sense of fight and rebellion and willingness to get in there and bleed if necessary for something they know is wrong – it reminds me of who I was when I was younger. And it reminds me that it isn’t something bad.”
Back then, Jolie would also bleed for a cause, even if she wasn’t sure what the cause was. When she married the actor Jonny Lee Miller at the age of 20, she wore a T-shirt with his name inscribed on it in her blood. When she was with her second husband, Billy Bob Thornton, they wore vials of each other’s blood around their necks. She appeared on TV shows, doing outrageous tricks with butterfly knives. It was hard to work out if she was a raging self-publicist, dangerous, or both.
Looking at Jolie today, it’s hard to connect the urbane woman in the Saint Laurent suits with the punk in the leather jacket. But Jolie says they are very much the same person; she just didn’t know how to focus her energy. “I was rudderless. I was seeking freedom, truth, feeling. I wanted to feel deeply and experience deeply.” She laughs. “Listen, I grew up in Hollywood. This town is disturbing. I was hurt from a lot of different things in life.”
What hurt so much when she was young? Again, she returns to her mother. “My mom was in a lot of pain. My father had an affair, and then there were a lot of challenges with child support and alimony. Then she lost her parents, and was quite broken, so I was determined to help her when I was young.”She was told she could be an actor or a model “as if it’s this great thing”, but now she’s not so sure. She suggests that had she been a boy, other choices would have been offered. “Nobody tells you you can be a director or a lawyer. So I was pushed down a path, and I wanted to be successful to financially help her, and to be able to make more choices in her life and my life.”
She says her mother was not only denied a career, but also a voice. “I realised when I was young, the person who had a public voice had more power than the very kind, decent woman at home doing all the right things and making all the sacrifices.” She is referring to her father, an outspoken Trump supporter who said that the campaign to get the US election result overturned was “the greatest fight since the civil war – the battle of righteousness versus Satan”, and from whom she has often been estranged. Jolie says she was determined that she would not be silenced as her mother had been. “I don’t think I came into this business because I wanted to be an actor. I came into it because that’s where you could have a voice. When you have somebody who controls the finances and controls the family narrative because they are public, you’re all under that person.”
At the age of seven, Jolie made her film debut in Hal Ashby’s Lookin’ To Get Out, playing the daughter of Voight’s character. By 16, she was modelling swimwear, and at 20 she was starring in Hackers alongside future husband Jonny Lee Miller. In 2000, at the age of 24, she won the best supporting actress Oscar for her visceral portrait of a psychiatric patient in Girl, Interrupted. In 2013, she earned an estimated $33m, mainly from her contract with Louis Vuitton and her appearance as the eponymous witch in Maleficent. Her choice of acting roles suggests she acts primarily for the money – alongside the odd quality film (she was great as Mariane Pearl, the wife of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in A Mighty Heart, despite the controversy of a white woman playing a mixed-race character), there have been any number of stinkers.
Before separating from Pitt, she was establishing herself as a film-maker. First They Killed My Father, the last film she made as a director (released in 2017), is a haunting portrait of life under the Khmer Rouge, in which she coaxed exceptional, understated performances from her actors – particularly the children. Since then, her career has taken a back seat as she has dedicated herself to being pretty much a full-time mother.
Does she feel her rights have always been respected? “Hmm. A good therapy question.” She pauses. “I think my mother did a lot to ensure my rights and empower me. But you know, I started working really young to help her pay bills and stuff. And I wasn’t aware of how I deserved to be treated as a young girl and a human being. I didn’t feel I was born with these rights and protections. I felt that these were things you had to demand or fight for, and sometimes be seen as difficult when you do.” Is she seen as difficult? “I will certainly challenge whoever’s in my way to get to whatever it is I think needs to be done.”
When was the first time she felt sufficiently disrespected in the industry to tell somebody to fuck off? “Erm… well, no surprise, Harvey Weinstein. I worked with him when I was young.” She was 21 when she made the Miramax film Playing By Heart, executive produced by the infamous sexual predator and convicted rapist. She says women often play down an assault if they manage to escape – as she did at the time. “If you get yourself out of the room, you think he attempted but didn’t, right? The truth is that the attempt and the experience of the attempt is an assault.”
What happened? “I really don’t want to derail the book into stories about Harvey.” But that was an abuse of rights? “It was. It was beyond a pass, it was something I had to escape. I stayed away and warned people about him. I remember telling Jonny, my first husband, who was great about it, to spread the word to other guys – don’t let girls go alone with him. I was asked to do The Aviator, but I said no because he was involved. I never associated or worked with him again. It was hard for me when Brad did.”
In 2009, Pitt starred in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, co-produced by the Weinstein Company. In 2012, she says Pitt approached Weinstein to work as a producer for the noir thriller Killing Them Softly, which the Weinstein Company later distributed. In doing so, Jolie felt he was minimising the sexual assault she had endured. “We fought about it. Of course it hurt,” Jolie says about Pitt being happy to work with Weinstein, despite knowing he had assaulted her. She avoided attending promotional events for the film.
Jolie is drinking from a bottle as she talks. What is it? “It’s kombucha. It’s not alcohol – not yet anyway!” She giggles and takes another swig. I ask if her children are interested in activism. She tells me that they’re all very different, but it’s hard for them not to be because of the way the family came about.
“Grrrrrrrrrrrrr,” Dusty roars.
“Within the understanding that they are family comes a lot of awareness that has to be born of all the years of them growing up together, learning from each other, discussing adoption, race and family. Having people say: how could you be sisters, you’re not the same colour, when you’re a little kid. Going to each other’s countries and being the only person of their background in that country and feeling outside, yet it’s your family.”
I ask Jolie if she always wanted to adopt. No, she says: when she was growing up she didn’t want children. “I never wanted to babysit, I never had dolls, so it’s hilarious I’ve ended up with six children.” What did you have instead of dolls? “I liked to play office. Then in my late teens I became aware of what adoption is, and the idea that there were children around the world who had been orphaned, and it just made sense to me. I never have had this idea of ‘my own blood’.” Even though she gave birth to three children fathered by Pitt, genetics has never interested her. “It was just family born of being together and growing together, right?” She often concludes a sentence with right – part question, part declaration.
In 2013, Jolie wrote an op-ed in the New York Times revealing that she had had a preventive double mastectomy because she was a carrier of the BRCA1 genetic mutation that had killed her mother and put her at high risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Two years later, she wrote another article announcing she had also had surgery to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes. It was unheard of to hear a Hollywood A-lister at the peak of her career discussing these issues. But it proved a gamechanger. A year later a UK report found that her decision to go public on the mastectomy led to a doubling in NHS referrals for genetic tests of breast cancer risk.
Was going public a form of activism, I ask. Well, she says, she certainly wouldn’t use that word to describe it. In fact, she adds, she rarely uses the word full stop. Was it a way of saying to people: if preventive surgery can make sense for me, it can for you, too? “As I’ve gone through my life, I’ve never had that confidence that if I do this it will make a difference. I don’t think of myself in that way. It’s just me thinking: if my mom knew about this and had this surgery and she had read an op-ed like this, she might still be alive. Therefore I really feel I should write this, because maybe somebody’s mom will read it.”
I tell her I find it fascinating, the binary way in which she is portrayed – either as a saint or a crazy, an arch manipulator. (It has been suggested that she is fighting for custody of the children simply because she wants to move out of America – something she denies.) “I think people sometimes just need people to be what they need them to be. What matters to me is that if people think this or that about me, does it affect my ability to work for children’s rights? Does it affect my ability to work with Muhammad and help him? If you truly think I’m crazy, then that’s a problem, because you may not listen to him as much and may not value me saying how important he is or this book is.”
As she talks, I notice how tired she looks. While refusing to discuss details about her divorce, she has said that the experience has been traumatic and has left her feeling “broken”. What have the past five years taken out of her? There is a long pause. She cups her face in her hands, and looks ready to burst into tears. “I mean, in some ways it’s been the last decade. There’s a lot I can’t say,” she repeats. “I think at the end of the day, even if you and a few people you love are the only people who know the truth of your life, what you fight for, or what you sacrifice, or what you’ve suffered, you come to be at peace with that, regardless of everything going on around you.”
Has it proved hard to come out of all this at peace with herself? “I’m not out of it,” she says, quietly. I suppose what I’m asking in a clumsy way is: how are you? She looks even more upset. “It’s really hard to answer.” Another pause. “How am I? I’m realising that sometimes you can survive things, but not know how to feel and live in the same way. So it’s more about being open. I’m really trying to be open as a human being again.”
Discovering that the convention on the rights of the child has not been ratified by the US has given her a sense of purpose: rather than simply fighting for her children, she can see it as a bigger human rights cause. She is trying to put a positive spin on her situation. “It has been so horrific that I almost have to see it as a godsend to be in a position to be able to fight this system. It doesn’t start with the violation [the plane incident]. It’s so much more complicated than that.” She says the lack of ratification has had a significant impact on her battle: “My 17-year-old, for example, has been denied a voice in court.”
Jolie is complex, and at times contradictory. She tells me she wants to talk about all this; the next minute, she changes her mind. “It’s not that I want to talk about anything really, because I just want my family to heal. And I want everyone to move forward – all of us, including their dad. I want us to heal and be peaceful. We’ll always be a family.” It’s not only Jolie who’s complex; so is the situation. It’s hard to see how even she could press ahead with her allegation of domestic violence and achieve a peaceful resolution.
When I mention how upset she looks, she admits she has been emotional today, since seeing the Taliban take over Kabul. “This morning I just had a big cry about Afghanistan. That was the beginning for me, 20 years ago – those first few trips when you meet people and really connect. You meet little kids, see the promises made, the efforts made, the trust given, see everything, then you track them being put on trucks to be sent back, and you track them back in Kabul, and at school, and you get a sense of the pain and fear and death and the horror and the betrayal and the trauma. It’s disgusting. It says too much about the world we’re living in today. It says too much about where we’re at.”
But at the same time, it makes her think about Muhammad and the three other activists we met, fighting so fiercely for a better world. It makes her think of all the terrible trade-offs that politicians make that lead to outcomes such as Afghanistan. It makes her think of her young self, refusing to yield to convention, and all those people who have dismissed her as bats in the intervening years for believing that justice and humanity can win the day rather than realpolitik. “No,” she says, her self-belief restored, “I’m not crazy.”
Know Your Rights by Angelina Jolie is published by Andersen Press at £7.99. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Angelina Jolie has expressed concern about the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan. The actress told a German newspaper she doesn’t think the incoming government could simply turn back the clock so everything would be like 20 years ago. https://t.co/JkhRntXiWl
While we wait for the full interview I've lifted the quotes from an advance article that was riddled with the writers' efforts to make a tabloid-clickbait story. The headline had read she 'feared for her children' in quotes and yet she never said those words. She said, “Yes, for my family. My whole family.” She made it clear Brad is part of "us", her family, and that they are and "will always be a family." Her response obviously meant she was concerned for Brad's safety too. And yet the writers chose to write a totally false and misleading headline. The article twisted what she said, altered her meaning and put words in her mouth. The deliberate effort to promote a false negative story while ignoring the positive signs she was giving was too obvious and very few sites picked the article up. She would have been very upset with it and evidently objected strongly which is why it quickly disappeared from The Guardian site.
- She said she "had to separate from" -- not "divorce"-- repeating the distinction she had made in a previous Q&A.
- She has always avoided even using the word "trauma" but the writers picked through tabloid reports to say she "made allegations of domestic abuse against Pitt" and that she "alleged Pitt was 'verbally abusive and physical' with their adopted son Maddox while on their private plane." Both false and misleading. She never made such allegations. The whole family and probably everyone else on the plane was interviewed and asked to recount what occurred.
- “I mean, in some ways it’s been the last decade" may be a reference to her breast and ovarian cancer scares. She had her mastectomy 2013.
- Herfamily, "All of us, including their dad" means Brad is with them, they are together. "We'll always be a family" repeats what she said on her very first interviews in 2017 in Cambodia with Yalda Hakim and George Stephanopoulos. Again, they've been very consistent from the start.
When pressed about whether or not she feared for the safety of her children, she answered: “Yes, for my family. My wholefamily.”
“It took a lot for me to be in a position where I felt I had to separate from the father of my children,”
The actor said the divorce and custody battle, in which she alleged Pitt was “verbally abusive and physical” with their adopted son Maddox while on their private plane, had been “horrific”.
“It doesn’t start with the violation [the plane incident]. It’s so much more complicated than that,” she said, adding the lack of ratification of the UNCRC had had a large impact on her battle with Pitt, saying, for example, Maddox had been “denied a voice in court”.
When asked what the past five years had taken out of her, Jolie answered: “I mean, in some ways it’s been the last decade. There’s a lot I can’t say.”
Jolie said she had been traumatised and “broken” by her recent experiences and she wanted herfamily to move forward, “all of us, including their dad. I want us to heal and be peaceful. We’ll always be a family.”
“How am I? I’m realising that sometimes you can survive things, but not know how to feel and live in the same way. So it’s more about being open. I’m really trying to be open as a human being again,” she added.
Saturday, February 13, 2021
Film writers are in the best position to give informed, objective comment since it is their job to know and write about movies and movie stars.
Angelina Jolie is a rare blend of superstar: One that can be an action star, dominate an Oscar-worthy film, direct one, and give boatloads of her free time and money to people in need. #NoNeedToDisrespectJoliehttps://t.co/b6iixYHgqZ
That Guardian piece on Angelina Jolie is a lazy and kind of baffling misunderstanding of a singular celebrity's appeal as well as the entire concept of star studies. Shock horror as to who wrote it. pic.twitter.com/G53UM8JNsc
Angelina was such a huge star and box office force that SALT was originally supposed to be a Tom Cruise vehicle and they retooled it to be for her, and it drew a massive crowd in my dinky hometown that only gets one movie a week because everyone loves her
I have now seen the Extremely Bad Take™ piece floating around regarding Angelina Jolie and her movies and not for the first time am I wishing that Film Twitter would stop thinking inflammatory takes = insightful criticism.
...simply didn't apply where she was concerned. I can't imagine what that must have been like for her. (I thought she was smart and sensible and articulate when I encountered her on set and later promoting the film.)
"The world premiere of First They Killed My Father will be held in
Siem Reap on 18 February, seven months before its global release via
Netflix. “
When the film was first announced, the official press release stated:
The film will be made available to members of
the world’s leading Internet TV network in late 2016 and will be
submitted to major international festivals.
What festivals will they show the film in? They have time for all the majors: Cannes, Venice, Toronto, Telluride. In each one they will have to face the press. They would want to time their in-depth interviews with the likes of Vanity Fair to coincide with the film's global release in September. That could make Cannes in May a difficult choice. But Cannes would be ideal for a foreign language film about a difficult subject.
Thanks to Dolores Lewis for the info that Pax is now credited with the photos. As I was looking more closely at the photos before I knew he was the photographer, I wondered why some were not properly focused. This problem was especially apparent when I tried to get a better view of Angelina's rings. The image was blurred which was unusual given the original was large and I wasn't using a lot of magnification. Pax has potential, the composition is good, but he doesn't yet know how to have all his subjects in focus. Those photos would not have been used had they been taken by someone else. Brad needs to tutor him further on his choice of aperture and lens.
other photos of their rings
-- Fussy
******
Thanks to Pride&Joy for the link to the video
Among the ghosts of Cambodia’s killing fields: on the set of Angelina Jolie’s new film | Julian Borger https://t.co/D4iJITtm1m
One sweltering afternoon last February on a film set in the Cambodian countryside, a local man approached Angelina Jolie
with a large bucket of leeches. Jolie peered into the bucket and picked
out one of the writhing creatures, studying it as it found its way to
one of the prominent veins on the back of her hand and locked on. As it
started to gorge on her blood, she carried it over to her nine-year-old
lead actor, Sareum Srey Moch, who was sitting in a canvas chair in the
shade of a tree.
“This is what a real one looks like,” she said. Sareum wrinkled her
nose and stared at the leech. “Does it suck your blood?” the girl asked.
Jolie’s 13-year-old son, Pax, on crutches after breaking his foot in a
jet-ski accident, hobbled over with his camera to take a closer look.
“Yes it sucks your blood,” Jolie answered after a slight hesitation,
already resigned to the likelihood that live leeches might be a step too
far for this young actor. She ordered a return to plan A, a box full of
dozens of pretend leeches made out of black vinyl and double-pinned to a
cardboard backing like biological specimens. The crew experimented with
gluing plastic worms of different shapes to Sareum’s leg until both the
child actor and Jolie agreed that it looked right. Actor and director
high-fived each other and the girl walked back to the paddy field for
her next scene.
Sareum plays the part of Loung Ung, who was only five when the Khmer Rouge, as Cambodia’s communist party was known, swept into the capital
Phnom Penh in 1975. Over the next four years, they drove its population
out into the countryside, executing all those perceived as class
enemies. More than two million people were killed, out of a total
population of seven million. Ung’s father and mother and two of her
sisters were executed.
At nine, Ung escaped to Thailand with her older brother, and they
arrived in the US as refugees soon afterwards, with the help of a church
foundation. At 30, she wrote her autobiography, First They Killed My Father.
On set, Loung Ung, now aged 46, watched playbacks on a screen with
Jolie in a small black tent, next to a little corral where brown cattle
were being kept for farm scenes. The two women have been friends for 16
years and Ung, who co-wrote the screenplay, was working as a consultant
on the set.
Jolie dates the beginning of her involvement in humanitarian issues
to her experience making the fantasy action movie, Lara Croft: Tomb
Raider, in 2000. In that film, which was released in 2001, Cambodia was
no more than an exotic backdrop for the action, but booby-traps and
anti-personnel mines planted all over the country in the 1970s were
still going off. There was a generation of orphans, then in their
twenties, and a country still crushed by poverty, authoritarianism and
mass trauma. Soon after filming Tomb Raider was over, Jolie returned as a
volunteer for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and visiting mine clearance
projects. She started giving large amounts of money to UNHCR and became
a goodwill ambassador for the organisation.
Jolie was planning to return to Cambodia with UNHCR later in 2001
when Ung’s autobiography landed on her desk. Ung at that time was
working for a US Vietnam veterans’ organisation supporting landmine
victims in the region. Her office had sent the book to Jolie on the off
chance that she might publicise its cause. As soon as Jolie read the
book she called Ung. It turned out the two women were to be in Cambodia
at the same time. Jolie invited Ung to join her on a motorbike tour of
the rugged countryside around the Battambang province in the north-west
of the country.
“We travelled to some very remote areas – there were no roads, or
hotels or restaurants,” Ung said. “We stopped at the roadsides and ate
in people’s homes. And I was so impressed because Angie didn’t travel
with an entourage. She will eat whatever, she’ll hang her hammock
wherever and get dirty and muddy in the torrential rain.”
Ung taught Jolie the survival skills learned in the camp: how to
check for leeches and catch frogs. “We very quickly became friends,”
Jolie told me. “We got caught in a monsoon and stayed up at night
sitting in hammocks in a pagoda in the rain, which is really fun for the
first few hours and then it’s just freezing cold and relentless.”
One day, Jolie spent time playing and talking to children in a school
in Battambang. She had no children at the time and says it was at that
moment that she decided to adopt a child from the country. “I asked
Loung, as a Cambodian, as an orphan, what would she think about that.
And she was very supportive about it,” Jolie said. “And we had a talk
about what would be important, to make sure he always knew about
himself.” Jolie adopted Maddox Chivan, aged seven months, from a
Battambang orphanage a year later, in March 2002. “And Loung’s been in
his life ever since,” she said.
Angelina Jolie, her son Maddox Chivan and Loung Ung on the set of First
They Killed My Father. Photograph: Pax Thien Jolie Pitt/Netflix
Jolie and Ung began adapting the book, but then shelved the project
in part because Jolie was busy with other movies and because neither
thought the political atmosphere in Cambodia was conducive to making a
film about recent history. However, last year, Maddox, by then 14,
persuaded them to make the film. “He was the one who just called it and
said he was ready and that he wanted to work on it, which he did. He
read the script, helped with notes, and was in the production meetings,”
Jolie said.
In 2011, Jolie made a film about the Bosnian conflict, In the Land of Blood and Honey,
for which the cast was entirely made up of people from the former
Yugoslavia. The film adaptation of First They Killed My Fatheruses
only Cambodian actors, and the language spoken throughout is Khmer,
with occasional snatches of French, the imperial language of French
Indochina, of which Cambodia was a part until the 1950s.
“When I said I wanted to make this film and I want to make it in
Cambodia, everyone said: you can’t make it in Cambodia. You have to make
it in Thailand, like The Killing Fields,” Jolie said.
Roland Joffé’s 1984 film was Hollywood’s one major attempt to tackle
the Cambodian genocide. It tells the story of a Cambodian
photojournalist stranded after the evacuation of his western colleagues,
who provide the western point of view for the audience.Jolie’s
film makes no such concessions. There are no white characters to
explain events in English and she is quite clear that the primary
audience is the Cambodian public. The cast and crew are Cambodian . The film will be launched across Cambodia in the middle of next month, seven months ahead of its release in the US.
Jolie’s humanitarian work marks the third act of her career. Although
not the first actor to take this route, she has thrown herself into the
role. “I’m doing less film now,” she said. “Not walking away from it
all, but ideally doing projects like this one, where you can pull
together all that matters to you at the same time.” While filming scenesthat took place
in a Khmer Rouge camp for child labourers, Jolie – barefoot and wearing
a T-shirt and a large straw hat – strode on to the dusty set after
every few takes. It was mid-morning and the heat was still bearable. The
atmosphere was of a sprawling, busy, extended family, particularly
during the communal meals eaten under canvas. Jolie was relaxed and
happy, laughing and joking.
She was clearly in her preferred element, at work but surrounded by
close friends and family, and protected – by the remoteness of location
and light set security – from the world’s curiosity about her private
life. She said later in the day that one of the things she most liked
about being in Cambodia was that she would wander in the markets and
those people who recognised her, knew her for her philanthropy. “Maybe
they’ve seen Tomb Raider but they don’t really watch a lot of movies,”
she said. “Really, I’m that odd nice lady who likes Cambodia. If I go to
the market, they do recognise me – they just don’t bother me. They say
hi.”
The set, a cluster of open-sided wooden huts, was built around a
large dirt drill yard hung with red flags. Long lines of young Khmer
children in black pyjamas and red chequered bandanas marched up and
down, in and out of shot. Others picked rice from a paddy as a drone
camera hovered noisily above.
Most of the time, Ung’s role was as an auntie figure to the child
actors, particularly Sareum (who she called “Mini-Me”), dispensing
bottled water and advice and spending hours in the Lego tent. Lego is
largely unknown in Cambodia because of the country’s strict restrictions
on imports, but Jolie brought a large amount of the plastic building
bricks with her to keep the children in the cast amused.
For Ung, the Lego tent symbolised the ultimate defeat of the Khmer
Rouge. “Lego is brightly coloured, it’s fun and it’s laziness. In the
camp you would be beaten or worse for laziness,” Ung said. Her sister,
Chuo, witnessed a boy being beaten to death by camp guards who said he
was idle.
In solidarity with the girls in the cast, who had to wear their hair
in the severe short crop imposed by the Khmer Rouge, Ung had cut her
hair and wore black. In breaks in the filming, she and Sareum strolled
around as two versions of the same person, 40 years apart.
“When I met Mini-Me, we were both trying to suss each other out. We
would walk around each other like roosters,” she said. But she is
constantly surprised at how alike they are. “Mini-Me would do something
and I would look at Angie and say: I do that!”
In writing her autobiography, Ung sought to recapture what it felt
like to experience the upheaval, chaos and horror of life in a child
labour camp. The young Ung had only a fragmentary understanding of the
events unfolding around her. The film seeks to do the same thing – to
show conflict as seen through the eyes of a young girl. To allow the
audience to see the world through the young Ung’s eyes, much of the
footage is filmed from her point-of-view, four feet off the ground with a
Steadicam.
The pursuit of an authentic child’s-eye view had been the film’s
defining technical challenge. “When filming adults you shoot over the
shoulder and you frame each shot so that it’s interesting,” said Jolie.
“With POV it is whatever Loung is focusing on at that moment. It has
taken everyone, especially the cameramen, time to adjust and not to try
to frame the shot as they normally would.” After a last minute change,
Anthony Dod Mantle was hired as cinematographer just a few days before
filming began in earnest in November 2015.
“I felt like a Red Cross parcel thrown out of a B52 bomber,” Mantle
said. He is known as one of the most insistent innovators in the
business and won an Oscar for his work in Mumbai on Danny Boyle’s 2008
film Slumdog Millionaire. “Me and Angie are trying to egg each other on,
to be radical.” Watching her childhood experience of genocide played
out on set had a visceral effect on Ung. After arriving in the US at
the age of nine, Ung was dogged by a recurring dream of being chased by
soldiers determined to kill her. She would wake up just as her pursuers
grabbed her. She underwent the same torment night after night until
finally, three years later, in a dream, she turned on one of her
attackers.
“In my dream, which I remember very vividly, I was in America and he
was chasing me and I was running and running and running. I came into a
house and there were no weapons there, but what I found was a knife. And
I grabbed it and I was trying to cut his head off and it was a butter
knife. And I had to really hack at it,” Ung said. “This was when I was
about 12 or 13 years old.”
Ung is short and slight, and her frequent smile and inclination to
find the humour in almost any setting is at odds with the darkness of
her life story. She described being happy as an act of will. As a young
woman, she resolved that neither her parents nor her two lost sisters
would want to see her spend her life consumed in misery. “So I have
purposefully made myself not do that, and the great thing about habits
is if you do it long enough, it sticks.”
Even Ung’s choice of career has involved the pursuit of pleasure. She
and her husband, Mark Priemer, set up a microbrewery because they
couldn’t get decent beer in America. “I thought if I die tomorrow I
don’t want to die drinking fizzy water,” Ung said. The couple now run
two breweries and three restaurants in Cleveland, Ohio.
“It’s one of those things your girlfriend tells you, and you think:
Oh what is she doing?” Jolie recalled. “And then I didn’t even ask about
it for a few years because I was worried. We talked about other things
like books, and I turn around and she has a crazy number of employees
and she’s really successful. It’s Brad’s favourite beer so I have it in
my house all the time.”(During the filming, Brad Pitt
stayed much of the time in Siem Reap, the resort town close to the ruins
of Angkor Wat, helping look after the couple’s children in what turned
out to be the final months of their marriage.)
But now that Ung was back in Cambodia for a long period, her hair cut
short and dressed in black again after years of wearing the brightest
colours she could find, her bad dreams were returning.
Over the course of making the film, she had broken down many times on set.“People
are always asking me about war as a survivor,” she said. “They always
ask about the bombing, the deaths, the soldiers. And I’ve always wanted
to say that yes, those were horrible difficult moments, but having my
hand separated from the clasp of my sister’s, and seeing my parents
being pulled away from each other, and having to walk away from my
brothers and sisters – that was brutal.
“I hope people see not just the horror of war but the love it takes to survive.” The Khmer Rouge grew out of the communist ferment in
south-east Asia that followed the second world war. The Cambodian
communist party was taken over in the 1960s by a group of hardline
ideologues who had studied in Paris, led by a radio engineer named
Saloth Sar – a man who would later take the nom-de-guerre Pol Pot. The
communist rebellion was seized upon by Lieutenant General Lon Nol, who
ousted the country’s post-independence leader, Prince Sihanouk, in 1970,
and countered the communist insurgency with heavy support from the US,
which was conducting a secret and devastating bombing campaign along the
country’s eastern border aimed at Viet Cong bases.
In its opening sequence, Jolie’s film uses news reports from the time
to suggest that the US bombing campaign boosted support for the Khmer
Rouge and contributed to the eventual collapse of Lon Nol’s forces in
1975. Loung Ung’s father was a conscripted military police officer in
Lon Nol’s army and high on the Khmer Rouge hit list. Those marked for
death included anyone educated and therefore corrupted by western ways.
Through mass murder, the Khmer Rouge intended to restart civilisation
and turn back the clock to “Year Zero”.
Last year, while Jolie was filming, I visited the grave of Pol Pot –
the man who had presided over the killing fields. The forlorn and
derelict site is in Anlong Veng, on Cambodia’s western border with
Thailand, the location of the Khmer Rouge’s prolonged last stand against
Vietnamese forces. He died in April 1998, aged 73, waiting
for a car that was supposed to be taking him out of the country to
appear before an international tribunal. According to the official
account, the cause of death was heart failure, though other versions
point to suicide or murder.
A makeshift memorial stands over the spot where his body was
cremated, amounting to no more than a strip of corrugated metal held up
by two posts. A faded blue sign appeals to visitors to “preserve this
historic site”, and it has been neither vandalised nor maintained. Dry
grass has grown up around it.
The only signs of recent human presence were a small wilted bunch of
lotuses, a couple of red candles and a small, locked red tin box.
According to a watchman, the only regular visitor is a Thai businessman
and gambler, to whom Pol Pot appeared in a dream 10 years ago and
provided the winning lottery numbers. The watchman said the gambler
comes once a month, taking a break from a new casino built on the border
nearby, to leave flowers and fruit. More Thai gamblers have followed
his example, hoping to emulate his luck, and recently visitor figures
have risen to about 50 a month. With traffic on the rise, a new concrete
booth is planned for the watchman.
Anlong Veng was a Khmer Rouge stronghold for more than a decade. Most
of the residents are either former regime officials or their
descendants, but the vestiges of Kampuchea – as the Khmer Rouge renamed
Cambodia – seem to excite no local interest today. A few miles from the
neglected grave is the house of Ta Mok, Pol Pot’s military enforcer, and
later his rival, jailer and possibly his killer. The squat concrete
shell of the house looks out on to an artificial lake that Ta Mok had
built, and he decorated the walls with murals of the Angkor Wat temples.
The murals are now covered with graffiti scrawled by lovers inspired by
the romantic views.
Angelina Jolie with Loung Ung on the set of First They Killed My Father. Photograph: Pax Thien Jolie Pitt/Netflix
The local government half-heartedly advertises the place to
sightseers and a handful pass by each day. Kearn Sarin, a stocky man in a
military jacket and a chequered Khmer scarf around an olive green cap,
works there as a guide. Kearn was a bodyguard for Ta Mok until he was
arrested in 1999. Ta Mok died in 2006 awaiting trial for genocide and
crimes against humanity.
Kearn remains a staunch defender of the Khmer Rouge, which he first
joined as a teenager. He had heard about Ung’s book and the film, but
dismissed it as “one person’s propaganda”. “It doesn’t tell the good
actions done by the Khmer Rouge,” he said. “In Kampuchea, there was no
rich or poor. Everyone was on the same simple level. Now the gap between
rich and poor is big again.”
There are various small-scale shrines and memorials to the genocide around Cambodia, but there is only one war museum, in Siem Reap,
where the hulks of ruined Soviet-era armoured cars, tanks and
helicopters sit under a grove of mango trees. On either side, there are
old guns stacked on wooden stands and a rather patchy account of the
country’s long nightmare. Behind a pane of glass, a one-page summary of
the Khmer Rouge regime makes no mention of the killing fields and the
two million dead, just “a radical attempt at social engineering”. Other
pictures on display are Khmer Rouge propaganda shots, most of them
labelled: “Khmer Rouge troops go from place to place.”
Very few Cambodians come to the museum. “People don’t talk about the war. They don’t want to,” said MounSinath,
who works as a guide at the museum. “It is difficult to talk about
because there are some of the Khmer Rouge people still running the
government.” A foreigner coming to Cambodia to make a film about
such an excruciatingly painful episode in the country’s history faces a
delicate task. Every step along the way, from securing permission to
film, to arranging movie screenings, has required patient negotiation.
Not only are many former Khmer Rouge members still in positions of
influence, Jolie had to navigate deep scepticism about foreigners in
general. As Youk Chhang, the executive director of the Documentation
Centre of Cambodia (an NGO dedicated to researching the history of
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge), points out, between occupation by the
French, the later invasion by the Vietnamese and repeated bombing raids
by the US, there is a lot for Cambodians to be wary about.
Chhang is a supporter of Jolie’s film, but he said there were some,
including the country’s young film-makers, who felt they were better
placed to tell the defining story of their parents’ lives. “It has to be
understood that Cambodians’ mistrust of foreigners has deep roots,” he
said.
However, Jolie is a Cambodian citizen – she was awarded the honour in
2005 in recognition of her conservation work – and she has a Cambodian
son. Furthermore she undertook the project as part of a team with Ung,
her co-producer Rithy Panh, who is an internationally celebrated
film-maker in his own right, and an all-Cambodian cast.
“Because I did it in partnership with Luong and Rithy, it really
wasn’t me leading it. It never was. And every day on set, it really
wasn’t. I had to always defer to the Cambodian people who were there,”
Jolie told me. “It’s not my story.”
These partnerships, and Jolie’s own diplomatic skills, also helped smooth the way with the government in Phnom Penh.
Cambodia’s quiet ambivalence about its own genocide goes to the heart
of the establishment. Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister since 1985,
was a battalion commander in the Khmer Rouge but fled with his unit to
Vietnam to escape a party purge in 1977. He was subsequently a commander
of Cambodian rebels that formed part of the Vietnamese invasion force
two years later, and was originally part of the government set up under
the Vietnamese occupation. Since then he has presided over a managed
semi-democracy, in which elections are held, but with a carefully
controlled media and widespread allegations of vote rigging.
A joint UN-Cambodian court was set up in 2006 to try surviving Khmer
Rouge leaders, but Hun Sen’s government limited its scope. Just five
former leaders have been indicted – three were convicted and two died
during their trials. Wider public debate on the genocide has been
discouraged by the government until recently. The basic facts of what
happened under Khmer Rouge rule only began to be taught in Cambodian
schools four years ago. Jolie’s film is being made at a moment of
transformation.
“A decade ago to talk about certain things [felt] very different than
it does today. I don’t know what that is attributed to. It could be
because it’s a certain generation change,” Jolie said.
“But I wondered if there were would be restrictions over making the
film. I wondered if they’d say: You can’t do this here or here, because
the country is too sensitive and we don’t want to see this in the
streets. Or maybe someone would say, “Oh it wasn’t as bad as this – it’s
blown out of proportion”; or some kind of advice to tone it down. But
quite the opposite – we’ve had encouragement to be as accurate as
possible.” The world premiere of First They Killed My Father will be held in
Siem Reap on 18 February, seven months before its global release via
Netflix. “I went to [Netflix] directly,” Jolie said, “because I want to
make the kind of film where I don’t have to compromise and put a famous
Chinese actress in as the mother, or make it in a different language in
order to get people in the theatres on the first weekend.” After all the labour camp scenes had been filmed, the
crew had to set fire to the wooden huts for one of the climactic
moments of Ung’s story, an attack on the camp during the Vietnamese
offensive of 1979. Pyrotechnic specialists spent an afternoon rigging up
burners and priming the straw roofs of the huts with fuel.
There would be just a narrow window for filming a long tracking shot
following the young Ung into the blaze, and Jolie was in her black tent
planning it. She had been violently sick the night before and looked
frail but insisted she had “stabilised”. The shoot only had a few
“insurance days” to cover the cost of over-runs, so nobody, least of all
the director, could afford to be sick for long. Other crew members had
collapsed or succumbed to hallucinations while trying to work through
sickness.
Jolie was trying to determine whether it would have been a mortar or
rocket that set the camp alight, and how each would make it burn. An
added complication was the fact that the local farmer did not want any
damage done to his wooden hut. A fire truck would be parked nearby in
case it was ignited by stray sparks.
As the evening darkened on the set, the wooden huts were set alight,
and Sareum, playing the young Ung, was filmed running across the parade
ground surrounded by flames, calling for her sister. In a nearby field,
children were running away from the flames, followed noisily by a pig.
Actors playing Khmer Rouge soldiers ran the other way across the open
field carrying AK-47s. A row of latex corpses of dead fighters had been
lined up under a tree ready for dispersal around the battlefield.
Huts are set alight for the climactic scene of First They Killed My Father. Photograph: Pax Thien Jolie Pitt/Netflix
Off to the side of the field, most of the crew had turned up to watch
the set go up in flames. Brad Pitt, in a flat cap and T-shirt, had come
with four of the couple’s children.
It is hard to predict what the emotional response of Cambodians to
the film will be, but for those of the cast and crew old enough to
remember the Khmer Rouge, the effect of making it has been devastating.
“Here everyone has been through it. Everybody is standing 10 feet
away from someone else who has been through it. They’ve been helping
each other as they always have,” Jolie told me. Before shooting started,
she had made sure there was a Cambodian nurse with on set with
experience of working with post traumatic stress.
“People were so badly treated and so dehumanised,” said co-producer
Rithy Panh, “they had no great desire to recall what happened, to talk
about when they had to eat roots and insects to survive. And what could
they say? I am alone, I survived but I couldn’t save my parents? I find
this long silence normal.”
Panh was 11 in 1975. He too lost his parents and siblings and ended
up in a Thai refugee camp in 1979. Out of a dozen-strong household in
Phnom Penh when the city fell, only he and one older sister survived.
Now aged 52, Panh is a softly spoken man with round head and a goatee
shielded by a wide-brimmed hat. He was seated at a desk in a recreation
of a Khmer Rouge classroom with a straw roof and no walls.
Panh’s documentaries were the first to break the Cambodian silence.
In his 2003 film about Tuol Sleng, the most murderous of Khmer Rouge
prisons, known as S-21, the handful of survivors from the jail
confronted their former prison guards. His films won prizes abroad, but
were barely seen in Cambodia. “People were saying I should make films
about how beautiful the country is,” he said. “It’s only the young who
watch my films.”
“The film that Angelina is making is important because it perhaps
permits a new generation of young people to find out what happened to
their grandparents. It’s not the sole solution. It’s just images, but it
makes them able to face up to their history and understand.”
Finally, Panh added, the film demonstrates his country’s resilience.
“They couldn’t destroy us. This creative act shows that we are able to
express our history. There are those who say that after all that
happened here, poetry is not possible any more. But I say we need more
poetry. We need poetry, for creation, for imagination, to allow people
to come through all this, turn their back on it and move forward.” With a month to go before the film is shown in
Cambodia, Jolie was at home in California, fretting about the
complication of what “general release” might mean in a country largely
without cinemas and a population that has not confronted the realities
of its genocide.
“There are many smaller screenings we are going to be doing, which I
am most excited by. It may just be a sheet and a projector out in a
pagoda in the more remote areas,” she told me in a recent telephone
interview.
Whether it will be possible to show such a film in the Cambodian
countryside will depend on the availability of monks or therapists to
help organise the screening and deal with the fallout. There will be
time set aside for discussions after the screenings, and in some places
Jolie plans to set up town hall meetings the morning after so that she
and the cast can answer questions.
Judging from the experience of making the film, the reaction among
ordinary Cambodians will be highly charged and emotional. In the best
cases, it will also be hopeful.
“I tried very hard to make a film that is not just about policies or
politics or war,” Jolie said. “It is a film at its core about the
Cambodian people and family, and love, and survival. I hope that there
will be a sense of pride for the Cambodian people when they see it,
about what they survived, and who they are.”
The
Maleficent star is dropping hints that she will retire from acting
after her next big project, a biopic of Cleopatra. Departing the screen
to concentrate on directing is a big shame for cinema lovers
Angelina Jolie... retiring? This cannot be happening! Photograph: David Gadd/Allstar/Sportsphoto
She is the Sophia Loren of our age, a Hollywood star of
hyperreal beauty, statuesque presence and queenly hauteur. She had been
away from the screen for a few years, facing down a bit of snarkery for
her UN ambassador work and the alleged trouser-wearing prerogative in
her relationship with Brad Pitt. But she stunned everyone with her courage and candour in announcing pre-emptive surgery to combat a genetic predisposition to breast cancer. Then this month Angelina Jolie made that sensational return with the new Disney fantasy Maleficent – smacking those uppity X-Men down to second place at the US box office,
and showing beguiling new touches of humour and self-awareness that
made her more of an icon than ever. Yet now, at very the moment of her
comeback triumph, she hints that after one more film, a Cleopatra
biopic, her acting career might be all over,
and she's concentrating on being a director and UN ambassador. It's the
Queen of the Nile – and then that's it.
Oh Ange! Oh no! Say it ain't
so!
Jolie has been an A-list movie star for a good 15 years,
although it's true to say her last couple of movie credits haven't met
with great acclaim. In 2010, in The Tourist,
she played a woman of mystery in a supposedly glamorous caper set in
Venice, co-starring Johnny Depp; it looked in danger of sinking into the
lagoon. Another movie was Wanted
in 2008 – an aggressive boys-own action picture with unlovely touches
of misogyny. But I very much enjoyed her spy thriller Salt in which she
played secret agent Evelyn Salt – a role originally conceived for Tom
Cruise. I see that Salt 2 is scheduled for production. It won't be the
same without Jolie.
Link to video: Angelina Jolie on Maleficent: 'I was drawn to the evil'
Angelina Jolie made her big breakthrough in 1999 with two terrific
performances in pretty good movies. She won a Golden Globe and a best
supporting actress Oscar for her turn as the super-cool bad girl Lisa in
James Mangold's Girl, Interrupted,
the inmate of a psychiatric care facility – whose exuberant defiance
inspires her fellow patient Susanna, played by Winona Ryder. That same
year she was excellent in Mike Newell's comedy drama Pushing Tin,
as the beautiful young wife of an air-traffic controller (Billy Bob
Thornton); she has an affair with her husband's colleague, Nick (John
Cusack). There is a lovely, relaxed spark between feline-sexy Jolie and
goofy-unthreatening Cusack.
As her career began, the resulting
movies were a mixed bag. She was inspired casting as Lara Croft, the
action heroine whose screen career pre-dated the modern predominance of
superheroes and Marvel studios. If Angelina Jolie were starting out now,
she would almost certainly have to don the lycra in some way – and
probably find herself playing second fiddle to some superhero male.
In Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) she played the imperious and Oedipally sexy mother to the great warrior himself, Alexander
the Great, played by Colin Farrell. Farrell looked a little out of his
depth next to Jolie, like she might at any moment order him up to his
room with no supper.
Link to video: Angelina Jolie speaks to UN security council over rape in conflict zones
Then the second breakthrough: Doug Liman's comedy thriller Mr and Mrs Smith in
2005, with Jolie and Brad Pitt each playing professional assassins who
learn that their next assignment is to kill each other. It's a movie I
didn't like much on first release – but every time I see it on
television, its energy and knockabout humour keeps me watching. That
much-yearned-for quality of "chemistry" is there. It looked very much as
if Jolie and Pitt really did fancy the bejeepers out of each other.
They got together in real life; their mutual celebrity went supernova,
and the cheeky title "Brangelina" was applied to them, like "Bennifer"
to Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. (Some incidentally claim the
couple-combo handle was invented by celeb journalists in the noughties.
Not true. It was invented by F Scott Fitzgerald in his 1934 novel Tender
Is the Night: the golden couple Dick and Nicole are at one stage called
"Dicole".) Mr and Mrs Smith was a key Jolie role: tough, dynamic, sexy,
with a tenderness that did not compromise the heroine's muscular
heroism.
Jolie won some respect for her performance in Michael Winterbottom's true-life movie A Mighty Heart
in 2007, playing Mariane Pearl, wife of the kidnapped journalist Daniel
Pearl. She did a terrific job as Grendel's gigantic mother in Robert
Zemeckis's Beowulf and won a best actress Oscar nod as the doughty mom in Clint Eastwood's drama Changeling in 2008.
Link to video: Angelina Jolie 'grateful and moved' by reaction to mastectomy
It could be that Jolie herself regarded that as the natural break,
and from that point she has been foreseeing a post-acting career.
Certainly, her feature-film directing debut in 2011, a Bosnian war drama
called In the Land of Blood and Honey,
was respectfully received. Jolie wrote the screenplay too and defied
the doubters with a film that my colleague Andrew Pulver found "sombre,
powerful, and undeniably gripping".
So how about that Cleopatra
movie? Jolie is the only possible star for this role. And as for who
gets to play Mark Antony, my hunch is that our very own Dominic West
will climb into the Roman tunic and Ralph Fiennes will play Cleo's
former lover Julius Caesar. I'm already looking forward to seeing Jolie
making that triumphal entry into Rome. But will Jolie really leave it
there? Surely she can intersperse her directing projects with juicy
acting roles. A whole new vista of drama and comedy, not to mention
romance, is opening up for her in her 40s. This is her time!
Angelina Jolie Suggests She’ll Quit Acting After Portraying Cleopatra – LISTEN HERE! http://t.co/cQtkCnVOky
— Gossip Cop (@GossipCop) June 2, 2014
