Since Miraval has been in the news a lot lately, it's interesting to revisit the first, and to my knowledge the only, interview that she granted within the estate's grounds.
Every family has its unique rites of passage, those generational
milestones that mark a child’s growth and remind parents of their
own similar experiences, years earlier. In the Jolie-Pitt household, one
such event is the day a kid begins collecting daggers. Angelina Jolie
and Brad Pitt’s seven-year-old son, Maddox, like many boys his
age, has lately developed a fondness for guns and knives, and Jolie
proudly notes that the predilection runs in the family.
“My mom took me to buy my first daggers when I was 11 or
12,” she recalls. “And I’ve already bought Maddox some
things. We take him to a special shop.” She emphasizes that the
knife blades are dulled so they’re not dangerous, and that the
purchases are accompanied by discussions about violence. But, she says,
“we also talk about samurais and about the idea of defending
someone as good. We talk about everything.”
Any concerns that Angelina Jolie—the onetime badass babe
who’s now better known as a tireless human-rights crusader and
contented mother of six—has gone completely soft are quickly
dispelled during a visit to her family’s rented château in
the South of France. Shortly after I’m escorted onto the 988-acre
property where the family has been living since June, Jolie, who moments
before was breastfeeding her seven-week-old twins, zooms up the dirt
driveway in a Yamaha all-terrain vehicle, wearing a long black dress and
dark sunglasses, her hair whipping in the wind. A bit later, as Jolie
maneuvers the ATV over a series of potholed trails while giving a tour
of the compound’s Provence-perfect vineyards, forests and olive
groves, she inadvertently steers us into an area where local hunters are
tracking wild boar. “Bonjour!” she shouts to one bemused man
who’s armed with a rifle, before driving us back toward a cross
fire–free zone.
As she sits down for the interview in a stone cottage, Jolie
apologizes for perhaps seeming a little drained. Pitt has been away at
the Toronto Film Festival, so she’s had the six kids to herself.
(There are nannies, of course, including the couple’s first
part-time live-in helper; Jolie says she and Pitt were starting to get
“loopy” while attending to the twins and trying to find
enough time for the others, so for now someone stays over a few nights a
week.) But if the actress is overwhelmed, or if she’s savoring
this rare break from round-the-clock feedings and diaper changes, she
doesn’t show it. She brightly mentions that she and Pitt intend to
add at least one more child to the mix.
Fierce maternal instincts also lie at the heart of Jolie’s
latest film, Changeling, which debuted at Cannes this past spring and
opens in the U.S. in October. The movie, directed by Clint Eastwood, is
based on the bizarre true story of Christine Collins, a demure Los
Angeles telephone-company supervisor whose son disappeared one afternoon
in 1928. When the boy wasn’t found and no leads turned up, the
corrupt LAPD, in an attempt to cover up its own negligence, tried to
pressure Collins into accepting another child as her own.
As intrigued as Jolie was by the story, she initially balked at
signing on for a project whose plot revolved around child abduction.
“I was concerned to just even put that in my head,” she
says. “I didn’t want the idea of a kidnapping around
me.” She adds that for both Pitt and her, losing a child would be
intolerable—worse than losing each other. “I love Brad, and
he loves me,” she says, “but something happening to the
kids…”
For Jolie, who’s become a sort of postfeminist icon, thanks in
part to her knack for playing tough chicks who can transcend gender when
necessary (next year she will play the lead in the espionage thriller
Edwin A. Salt, a role originally slated for Tom Cruise), Changeling was
also a strange trip back to an era when a woman who challenged the
system risked persecution or, in Collins’s case, confinement in an
asylum. In one scene, a state-appointed psychiatrist, while making a
house call to Collins, tells her that her feminine emotions are clouding
her judgment. “Today, in 2008, my reaction would be to laugh in
his face and kick him out of my house,” Jolie says
matter-of-factly. “But that’s how it was and still is in
many parts of the world.”
For Eastwood, one challenge was making sure that the irrepressibly
telegenic Jolie (who possesses, as the director says, “one of the
more striking faces on the planet”) could be convincing as a
mild-mannered telephone operator. But he says the actress’s
interior work took care of the transformation. “Naturally Angelina
is more beautiful than Christine Collins was, but that’s
showbiz,” he says. On the set, Eastwood found that Jolie’s
ability “to just jump right in without too much anxiety and nail
it,” put her in a league with a few other actors he’s worked
with—namely Meryl Streep, Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman.
Jolie’s performance, one of her most nuanced and restrained to
date, was partly inspired by her mother, who died of cancer last year.
“Her name was Marcheline, and she would joke that she was a
marshmallow—just mushy and soft,” Jolie says. “When I
was a teenager and she tried to yell at me to clean my room, she just
couldn’t. But if someone crossed her children, she was fierce. She
would never speak to that person again.”
The
last time W interviewed Jolie, just before the release of
Mr.
and Mrs. Smith in the summer of 2005, it was very early in her
relationship with Pitt: Much like Christine Collins, Jolie was still a
single mom, living with one son. With characteristic frankness she told
the magazine that she wasn’t so great at being part of a couple.
“I’m better alone,” she said. If there were a
long-term mate for her out there, she theorized, he’d be someone
with similar goals and a fervent desire to “accomplish and
change” things in the world.
In the three years since, Jolie has added five children and two dogs
to her household, in addition to one Brad Pitt. “I do think that
I’m good in a partnership now,” she says. “I think it
just needed to be the right man.” And she believes she was correct
about needing to find a shared purpose with someone. “It’s
not just that I love being in Brad’s company, which obviously I
do, but it’s that we both roll up our sleeves and take on what we
care about in the same way,” she says. “I have a lot of
respect for him, and he helps me to be better and fight hard for things
that I love.”
It’s often been observed, rightly or wrongly, that Jolie has
completely changed Pitt, transforming the Sexiest Man Alive into a
tireless international do-gooder in her own image. She says Pitt has
profoundly changed her. When asked for specifics, she lets out a rare
bashful laugh and, before answering, points out that she hasn’t
necessarily discussed them with Pitt himself. (“I’ll try to
convince him not to read this,” she jokes.)
“Well,” she says, “I think one of the
life-changing things that he did, one of many, is that I was absolutely
never going to get pregnant. I never felt that it was the right thing to
do. Now I wouldn’t trade that
experience for the world. It taught
me a lot about life, just the process of it, and now we have three other
beautiful children that wouldn’t otherwise be here.”
How did Pitt help change her mind? “When we first met, he
talked about having children in that way. I talked about only adopting
children,” she says. After they had agreed that Pitt would adopt
Maddox and Zahara, she recalls, “he stopped talking about having
other kids in the other way. So I suppose in my heart I realized that he
was happy with them as his children, completely. I knew he would never
see them as different, and that gave me a certain peace. Then I suppose
I just looked at him and loved him and just felt open to [getting
pregnant]. I suddenly wanted to. It’s one of those things you
can’t explain.”
The more multinational the Jolie-Pitt clan becomes as it expands,
the more the family can appear to exist in some exotic parallel
universe—an impossibly idyllic place where they eat every meal
together and never seem to tire of one another’s company. Jolie
has left the property only once or twice in the weeks since she gave
birth and claims not to pine for the stability of a permanent address or
for longtime neighbors to invite over for dinner. “We have such a
big family, such a close family, that we like being with each other a
lot,” she says. “We’re happy to spend a lot of time
alone and meet new people wherever we go.”
And go they do: Like some unusually well-equipped and glamorous
gypsy tribe, the Jolie-Pitts constantly roam from place to place,
settling for a few months and then moving on to a new job or cause.
Maddox has been to school in Prague and New York, had a French tutor and
this fall will go to school in Germany, where Pitt is filming.
“It’s part of how I want to raise them,” Jolie says,
adding that they’ve shown no resistance to being uprooted.
“If you tell them we’re getting on a plane tomorrow,
they’re all excited to pack their bags, and if you say we’re
not coming back for months, they won’t bat an eye,” she
says. “I think they see the world as a home. I’ve seen Madd
run through the markets of Addis Ababa [in Ethiopia] and not notice that
it’s very poor, or that everyone is African or that he’s
Asian. It wouldn’t matter to him.” If Jolie has a favorite
possession, she says, it’s the overstuffed Tumi case that holds
the family’s travel documents: Vietnamese, Namibian, Ethiopian,
French and American passports, plus her own UN credentials.
Whenever the Jolie-Pitts do decide to retreat into a bubble for a
while, as they did this summer, one apparent perk is the ability to
ignore the fact that they’re the most-watched family in the world.
Although skepticism is always warranted when a movie star claims not to
read tabloid stories about herself, in Jolie’s case, it’s
not difficult to believe: She’s one of the rare A-listers who
doesn’t have a publicist to manage her press coverage. Asked what
she thought this summer of Roseanne Barr’s much circulated
Internet screed about Pitt and her—an incendiary rant that mocked,
among other things, the couple’s habit of earning tens of millions
of dollars from violent action movies and then giving away a portion of
it to convince the world that they care about humanity—Jolie
appears to have no idea what I’m talking about. Told the details,
she responds with a direct gaze, a calm smile and silence. Doesn’t
it make her angry?
“No,” she says. “I mean, how should someone
respond to something like that? She doesn’t know me. I have
nothing to defend in my life. I’m sure she’s one of many
people that have opinions.”
Of course, the Jolie-Pitts have proven adept at slyly commandeering
the celebrity gossip mill to further their own philanthropic goals.
Regarding the $14 million fee paid this summer by
People and
Hello! for
rights to the first pictures of the newborn twins (the couple donated
the entire sum to their foundation), Jolie acknowledges that the figure
is astounding: “There’s nothing to say other than it’s
bizarre. But we’re happy that we have our hands on it to
distribute it to people we think are worthy, rather than some
paparazzi.”
Today, when Jolie talks about the twins and their siblings, she does
so freely and openly; her stories are a lot like any young
mother’s, despite that each one could potentially launch an
Associated Press news bulletin. (If you must know: Zahara and Pax like
to slow dance together, imitating Princess Aurora and Prince Phillip
from Disney’s
Sleeping Beauty; newborn Vivienne is
“sturdier” and “more demanding” than her brother
Knox, who is “very chill” and “loves music,”
taking after his father.) But for insights into life chez Jolie-Pitt,
the photographs accompanying this story are perhaps more revealing than
anything Jolie might discuss in an interview.
Jolie says she prefers to let the photo series speak for itself,
though it’s clear she’s an avid enabler of Pitt’s
burgeoning photography habit. (For Christmas she surprised him with a
Littman 45 Single camera.) “I love his photography,” she
says. “Some people have a hobby, and they find the quickest way to
it and are very pleased with the outcome right away. But he’s
someone who will really study the camera—he’ll get the most
complicated one and really understand the science behind it. And
he’s very critical of his own work. I’ll see a photograph
and think it’s amazing, but he’ll see all the different
reasons why it can be better, and he’ll work very, very hard to
improve it.”
Pitt took these pictures a few weeks after the twins were born. Many
new mothers might have hesitated to model, half dressed, for a
30-some-page magazine portfolio, but not Jolie, who doesn’t find
that pregnancy has made her body any less attractive. “I’m
with a man who’s evolved enough to look at my body and see it as
more beautiful, because of the journey it has taken and what it has
created,” she says. “He genuinely sees it that way. So I
genuinely feel even sexier.”
During the next few months, Jolie plans to ease herself back into
the workforce. In
Edwin A. Salt (which will likely be retitled), she
will play a CIA officer accused of being a double agent. Meanwhile, one
pet project, the long-delayed screen adaptation of Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged, is coming closer to fruition: Jolie says a script is
ready and discussions are in progress with various directors, including
Eastwood. On the humanitarian front, the Jolie-Pitt Foundation is now
building a children’s tuberculosis/AIDS clinic in Addis Ababa,
similar to one it already established in Cambodia; Jolie is also eager
to return to the Burmese border, where she last traveled in 2004 to
visit with refugees. And this fall, when the family relocates to
Germany, Jolie will bring her plane so she can start flying again.
As we wind up the interview, Jolie asks suddenly, “Want to
walk around?” and adds, “You might run into a bunch of small
people.” We head back to the garden, where a cluster of
pétanque balls are scattered on the ground, and up to the empty
pool. “I seem to have lost my children,” Jolie deadpans. She
suspects they’re still where she left them, in her and
Pitt’s bedroom. It’s become their favorite hangout lately.
“Most nights, someone ends up in our bed,” Jolie says.
“They’ve just taken over in there—especially right
now, because we want them to feel that the babies aren’t special
in the room. So our door is much more like a swinging door.”
The Jolie-Pitt bedroom, of course, remains off-limits to journalists.
And sometimes even to kids, Jolie declares.
“The kids do knock before entering,”
she says. “We’ve at least got that
part down. Because Mommy and Daddy need some space.”
Brad Pitt’s project for W actually sprang from a conversation W’s
Creative Director Dennis Freedman had with another photographer, Bruce
Weber. Freedman had been mulling over how to show anything new about one
of the most photographed women in the world and Weber pointed out that,
in his opinion, the best pictures of Elizabeth Taylor were taken by her
third husband, Mike Todd.
“I was surprised that Brad accepted the challenge,” says Freedman of
Pitt’s enthusiastic response. “Last time we collaborated, I was struck
by his sensitivity to the subtleties of photography. I knew that he
possessed a highly tuned critical eye and would be very demanding of
himself. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the beauty and intimacy of the
images he made of Angelina and the children.”
For a hobbyist, Pitt certainly knew what he wanted. He was determined to
shoot Jolie with Kodak Tech Pan film, which hasn’t been manufactured for
four years. Photo Editor Nadia Vellam located 40 rolls of the stuff on
eBay, which a courier then hand-carried to Pitt in Provence, France,
where the couple have been hiding out since June. A week later Pitt
called; he needed more film. Vellam’s first source was tapped out. She
finally tracked down a guy who offered her 30 rolls—in Israel. She then
had mere hours to find someone in Tel Aviv who could get on a plane to
France with the film that very day. Pitt also wanted to try a
specialized film used in World War II–era movies. That was a no-go. One
of Vellam’s sources instead recommended Ilford to achieve the same
romantic, grainy quality. Assistant Bookings Editor Will Higdon-Sudow
hopped a flight with it and made the handoff in a hotel lobby. The
results speak for themselves.
