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A Chat With Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the D.C. Premiere of In the Land of Blood and Honey

 

Team Jolie

YEAS & NAYS

People, Politics, and Power

Jolie moved by Holocaust Museum's genocide exhibit

By: Nikki Schwab and Katy Adams | 01/11/12 2:52 PM
Examiner Staff Writer | Follow on Twitter @NikkiSchwab

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt at Tuesday's D.C. screening of her film "In the Land of Blood and Honey" (Photo courtesy Kris Connor).

Angelina Jolie acted perfectly poised talking to reporters Tuesday night before the screening of her feature directorial and screenwriting debut "In the Land of Blood and Honey." But having just come from one of the Holocaust Museum's haunting exhibits, she confessed to Yeas & Nays that it was a little hard to keep it together.

She and partner Brad Pitt has just visited "From Memory to Action," the museum's exhibition on genocide, which includes Srebrenica, the 1995 massacre that is included in her film. "I'm having trouble even speaking about it because I spent half an hour in this room where I did my best not to look at the walls and read everything because it was reminding me so much of everything I learned in the process of this film and all the beautiful people that I met that survived," Jolie said. "It's quite heavy."

The film is indeed heavy. It takes place during the Bosnian War, depicting the changing relationship between lovers Ajla, a Bosnian Muslim painter, and Danijel, who becomes an officer in the Bosnian Serb Army. Along with genocide, there are scenes of rape and severe brutality, including Ajla's infant nephew being thrown out a window and killed.

Besides teaching a Washington audience (which included D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) more about the conflict, Jolie also talked about what her kids learned from the making of "In the Land of Blood and Honey."

"They are friends with a lot of the children of the cast so they are friends with friends with people from all over former Yugoslavia," she said. "They know a little bit about their country, they know a little bit about their food, and they know that they are friends."

Angelina Jolie: ‘I’m kind of a closet geek’

By Judy Kurtz - 01/11/12 06:49 PM ET 

 

 She may be considered by many to be the essence of elegance and the queen of Hollywood glam, but Angelina Jolie has an admission: She’s really just a “closet geek.”

The Academy Award-winning actress brought her A-list status to Washington on Tuesday, for the D.C. premiere of her film directorial debut, “In the Land of Blood and Honey.”

The big-screen drama follows a romance during the Bosnian War.

Appearing in a long, fitted gray jacket alongside Brad Pitt at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jolie, 36, while choosing not to discuss her political leanings, revealed that politics makes for a frequent topic of conversation in her household: “I travel to a lot of places and I come home quite chatty about something I’ve witnessed, or something I’ve experienced, or something I’m angry about. I’ve gone a few times to the [International Criminal Court], to The Hague, to just sit and witness the trials. I’m kind of a closet geek, so I talk about a lot of different things.”

Pitt, the über-chic “geek’s” partner, said the couple gabs about government “all the time” and debates “how to get things done.” Although he hasn’t publicly supported a candidate in the 2012 presidential race, the actor met with President Obama shortly after he took office in 2009.

Jolie and Pitt visited the White House the day after the movie screening and met with President Obama. Deputy White House press secretary Jamie Smith confirmed to The Hill that the president spoke with the actress about “her work to raise the profile of preventing mass atrocities and combating sexual violence against women.”

While at the premiere, a seemingly relaxed Pitt strolled down the line of reporters with the help of a cane. He injured his leg in a recent fall while holding his daughter. The “Moneyball” star, 48, is hoping to ditch the walking stick rather than make it a new fashion accessory, telling ITK he’ll have the cane “Not for long, I hope.”

But sounds as if local fans of the superstar duo shouldn’t hold out hope that the globetrotting celebs, who are parents to six children, will make the District their new home anytime soon.
When we asked Jolie if she’d ever consider making the move to Washington, the entertainer replied, “I don’t know. I don’t know how well I’d fit in!”

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

On the Red Carpet with Angelina Jolie.......a teaser..

by Janet Donovan

It's not often that people in D.C. don't complain about waiting in the cold for a celebrity to arrive for a premiere, but no one seemed to mind waiting for Angelina Jolie.

In town for the premiere of "In the Land of Blood and Honey" at The Holocaust Museum, the media went through three high security checks including the friendly dog sniffers and could have cared less.

Take a look below and you will understand why and come back tomorrow for our one on one.

The Red Carpet Video: Yes, we know there are duplicate photos and we so don't care. 

DC 3

 

 

D.C. Premiere of "In the Land of Blood and Honey"

Jolie's partner, actor Brad Pitt

Angelina Jolie

Jolie stopped to speak to as many on the red carpet.

Actor Goran Kostic

Actress Vanesa Glodjo

Actress Zana Marjanovic

The movie poster shows a unique view of a man and woman about to kiss.

D.C. had a taste of Hollywood glamour Tuesday evening at the Holocaust museum when A-list actors and real-iife couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt made an appearance.
The event the two appeared at was the D.C. premiere of Jolie's brand-new film she wrote and directed, In the Land of Blood and Honey. The movie is a love story set during the Bosnian War.
Jolie got the idea to write a script of a war-time love story after becoming a UN goodwill ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Jolie, who has six children, three adopted from Cambodia, Vietnam and Ethiopia, mentioned that she enjoys taking them to museums when they visit D.C., and once they are of age, she'd take them to the Holocaust museum to examine its more serious subject matter.
"My children became friends with many of the cast member's children," Jolie said. "They learned about their food, Yugoslavia and saw another part of the world. It's all about exposing them to different cultures and promoting a sense of unity."
Jolie has been a humanitarian for many years. She arrived at the screening with her hair in cascading curls and kept her gray wool coat tied tightly around her waist the whole time. Pitt, who recently injured his ACL carrying his three-year-old Vivienne down a ski slope, hobbled by the red carpet with the use of a cane and immediately went to sit in the theater after posing for some pictures.
— Report and photographs by Kate Oczypok (Pitt photograph by Kristopher Connor)

Angelina Jolie: Candidates can’t be know-it-alls

By PATRICK GAVIN | 1/11/12 6:10 AM EST 

From virtually every corner, we’ve heard plenty of critiques of the numerous Republican debates in this presidential cycle.

Angelina Jolie has her own suggestion: Don’t expect every candidate to know everything about everything.

“There’s so much focus on the rhetoric in a debate and who says what to who,” Jolie told POLITICO in an interview Tuesday.

“It would be very refreshing to hear somebody say, ‘There are so many different issues that our politicians have to tackle. There are so many stories you all have to cover and nobody can be an expert on every single thing.’ And, so, to me, I’m always kind of wondering, well, who will you be listening to on these different issues, not necessarily this strange thing we have where we just expect one man is going to step forward — or woman — who is going to have the absolute answer to every single thing. That doesn’t actually make sense that that’s possible. That doesn’t seem rounded. I’d like to know who they will be leaning on for a very full, group discussion to get a very thorough debate going to be able to come to a final result.”

(Oddly enough, it’s a sentiment that was shared by former candidate Herman Cain who frequently talked about surrounding himself with advisers as president who would help fill in his own knowledge gap).
Jolie was in town Tuesday to promote “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” her directorial debut that features a love story during the Bosnian War - a conflict that Jolie believes too many have either forgotten or never bothered to learn.

“In Washington, this is your daily life. You are all aware of what’s going on in Bosnia. But there are lots of parts of the world that still don’t. A lot of people that I’ve spoken to about this film, the questions are very strange to me and clearly so completely unaware of where Bosnia is, what the people are like from Bosnia that it’s jarring that it seems so, so foreign and so far away for some people and how little people know about this war is also quite surprising to me.”

As far as the average American’s interest in international affairs, Jolie says that “there are clearly a lot of Americans who do care and who have proven to be driven. When they’re educated, they tend to be driven to really be very full of support and aid for people in need. There’s a really strong spirit in America to do that. But they do need to be able to be given the truth and it’s hard to define it sometimes. It’s hard to find it.”

But there is one thing about America that she’d like to see change: Support for U.S. troops returning home.

Saying that “this should not be a Democratic or Republican issue” Jolie added, “I’ve spent a lot of time visiting soldiers in hospitals and I feel that it is a sad day when citzens of a country can feel so distant from our young men and women [who] are at war across the world and dying and in hospitals and they’re coming home and they should be able to, whether you’re for or against the war, be able to hold their head high in service that they did and they risked their lives. And, instead, people have other high emotions and they themselves will be emotionally conflicted and it’s not fair to do that for these young men and women.”

Given her own connections to the international community (she’s both a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador and member of the Council on Foreign Relations), it’s no surprise that Jolie views Washington as a natural audience for her film.

“I’ve never seen reporters, especially from Washington and New York, who really cover these issues, be more emotional about a time in their lives where they felt, as reporters, so frustrated and so connected to a situation where they felt like that they just couldn’t do enough. And they still hold so tightly to that memory that it seems to haunt quite a few people.”

Still, she insists the film isn’t a political movie, per se.

“It’s not a political statement for me. It is very nuanced, intentionally nuanced. It’s not black and white and I’m not choosing sides. The message is that there are these horrible things that happened in our history and we cannot forget them.” In fact, Jolie did her best to stay out of political waters during her press junkets. Catching herself before she leaped into punditry, Jolie joked, “I just don’t want to get political and it’s just impossible in Washington!”