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