Angelina Jolie Pitt is calling the shots as actress, mother, philanthropist, and auteur. Next month, she and her husband, Brad Pitt, will appear as a married couple in By the Sea, which she wrote and directed and is their first on-screen outing since Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
“The director was very focused. The actress was unstable. And the writer was deeply confused,” says Angelina Jolie Pitt. Then she laughs. She’s talking about what it was like to direct herself and her husband as a married couple in her own script for By the Sea, an elegiac exploration of grief and love. Ten years after her last collaboration with Brad Pitt, Mr. & Mrs. Smith—the movie that sparked their relationship—it’s about as far from that marriage-as-war-of-assassins comedy as you can get.
“This is the only film I’ve done that is completely based on my own crazy mind,” she says, speaking with humor and intensity, bringing to life a soulless room at the Sunset Tower Hotel. Outside is glittering, heat-wave sun, umbrellas packing the Los Angeles beaches. Inside, Angelina’s in black—skinny pants, short-sleeved silk blouse—which makes her printer paper–white skin even whiter. She wears no makeup. Why bother? Her beauty has only deepened with time.
For years, she says, she and Brad called the script for By the Sea “the crazy one. We even called it ‘the worst idea.’ ” She laughs again, and covers her face with her hands. “As artists we wanted something that took us out of our comfort zones,” she explains. “Just being raw actors. It’s not the safest idea. But life is short.” Angelina, of course, has never played it safe. And at this point in her mythic life, perhaps the only risk left is to pare down the myth, expose her self.
And so, after getting married the summer of last year at her house in France, she moved with her tribe (Brad, six children now aged seven to fourteen, and assorted staff) to the Maltese island of Gozo, a stand-in for the southern French coast with its dazzling Mediterranean light, and shot the film. “It was our honeymoon,” she says, with a wide-open smile that expresses all that’s left unsaid about the highly privileged carnival that is her life. “They travel like gypsies,” observes Angelina’s friend, the screenwriter Eric Roth, describing the family’s peripatetic lifestyle. A band of galactically famous multimillionaire gypsies.
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The kids are homeschooled by teachers from different backgrounds and religions, speaking different languages. “We travel often to Asia, Africa, Europe, where they were born,” says Angelina. “The boys know they’re from Southeast Asia, and they have their food and their music and their friends, and they have a pride particular to them. But I want them to be just as interested in the history of their sisters’ countries and Mommy’s country so we don’t start dividing. Instead of taking Z on a special trip”—ten-year-old Zahara was adopted from Ethiopia in 2005—“we all go to Africa and we have a great time.”
When we meet, Jolie Pitt has just returned from Cambodia, the location for her next film, and Myanmar. She took along Pax, her eleven-year-old Vietnamese-born son, who wanted to work on the film and meet Aung San Suu Kyi. Pax had read about the liberated Burmese opposition leader and Nobel laureate and was curious. “Seeing Pax get extra-nervous about which shirt he is going to wear when he meets Aung San Suu Kyi, I get very moved,” she says. “He rightfully doesn’t get nervous going to a movie premiere; he gets nervous going to meet her.”
Since Jolie Pitt got back to their home in Santa Barbara—almost like any mother—she has had to attend to doctors’ appointments, vaccines for the kids, play dates, and meetings, before the whole troupe decamps again to their house in London. For now, it will make the best base for their projects. Angelina can travel to the Middle East on UN trips and to Cambodia to prep her film, and be back for the kids, and Brad can fly to and from Abu Dhabi to shoot David Michôd’s War Machine, adapted from journalist Michael Hastings’s account of America’s recent conflict in Afghanistan.
If her daily life is a large, sociable whirl, Angelina’s new film is an intimate, claustrophobic tale. She wrote By the Sea after her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of cancer eight years ago, and never thought it would see the light of day. She wanted to explore bereavement—how different people respond to it. She set the action in the seventies, when her mother was in her vibrant 20s, and began simply with a husband and wife. She gave them a history of grief, put them in a car, and drove them to a seaside hotel to see how the pair—Roland, a novelist with a red typewriter; Vanessa, a former dancer with boxes of clothes and hats—attend to their pain. Vanessa is frail, tortured, hemmed in. She feeds her mourning a diet of pills and suicidal fantasies. Roland is defeated by the seclusion of her anguish, and drinks. And so it goes on until innocent newlyweds move in next door. . . .
“It’s not autobiographical,” says Angelina, smiling. She shrugs off the fact that celebrity-watchers will have a field day trying to read into this movie. “Brad and I have our issues,” she offers, “but if the characters’ were even remotely close to our problems we couldn’t have made the film.” Yet the film is a deeply personal project, drawn loosely from her mother’s life. Jolie Pitt often talks about the sacrifice her mother made in giving up acting to raise her and her brother, James, after their father, Jon Voight, left. Later Bertrand’s work was cut short as a producer and activist for Native Americans and for the Give Love Give Life cancer organization she founded with her partner, John Trudell. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at 49; she died seven years later. “My mother was an Earth Mother and the nicest person in the world,” says Jolie Pitt (pointing out that Vanessa in the movie is not). “But the specific grief came from the woman I was closest to, seeing her art slip away, her body fail her.”
She and Brad may have chosen to shoot this movie to challenge themselves, but it was during the editing that Angelina got the real scare. Her doctor called, saying she had elevated inflammatory markers. She consulted Eastern and Western physicians, including her mother’s former doctor. She had her ovaries and Fallopian tubes removed. She detailed her experience in a New York Times Op-Ed, fulfilling a promise to keep readers informed after relating two years earlier her decision—having learned she had the BRCA1 gene—to have a preventative double mastectomy.
“It really connected me to other women,” she says of her decision to go public. “I wish my mom had been able to make those choices.” The procedures themselves were, she says, “brutal. It’s hard. They are not easy surgeries. The ovaries are an easy surgery, but the hormone changes”—she laughs, nods her head—“interesting. We did joke that I had my Monday edit. Tuesday surgery. Wednesday go into menopause. Thursday come back to edit, a little funky with my steps.”
Jolie Pitt has famously said that she has a ticking clock in her head, and that she is surprised to still be here; that she lives every day like it might be her last. Now, having gone through menopause, she says, “I feel grounded as a woman. I know others do too. Both of the women in my family, my mother and my grandmother”—who also succumbed to ovarian cancer—“started dying in their 40s. I’m 40. I can’t wait to hit 50 and know I made it.”
All through our conversation on this cloudless L.A. afternoon, I’m aware of the vast landscape inside the easygoing person who sits before me, her tattoos visible, her jewelry minimal, with her aviator sunglasses, her pen and folder on the couch. Besides the actress, director, and outspoken cancer warrior, there are the other Angelinas—the most glamorous woman in the world who has to meet in an anonymous hotel room because she can’t go anywhere in public without being mobbed. “You cannot take AJ undercover,” laughs Zainab Bangura, a Sierra Leonean political activist and former government minister who is now the UN secretary-general’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. “She says, ‘When can we travel together? Anything more I can do?’ I can run around in Somalia undercover, but you cannot hide AJ.”
There’s Florence Nightingale Angelina, Special Envoy of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who travels constantly to countries in crisis, supports, negotiates, and interacts one-on-one. “The hug,” says Bangura, “is powerful for people in pain. They know she’s genuine.” She can use her star power to make demands—to see a president, speaker of Parliament, and defense secretary, as she did recently in Myanmar to convince them to let her travel by helicopter to visit the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group facing ethnic cleansing. (A cyclone hit, and her trip was canceled; but she will go back.) And there’s the CEO Angelina, a Hollywood powerhouse who, like a martial artist, tries to wield the system to her advantage: outwits the gossip magazines by selling the first pictures of baby Shiloh in 2006 for a reported $7.5 million, and of her twins, Knox and Vivienne, born in 2008, for double that, donating the money to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation; earns a fortune playing assassins and superheroes, then making more mission-driven films, like A Mighty Heart, Beyond Borders, and In the Land of Blood and Honey; satisfies her fans with her poise and beauty while acting out her ambitions for a committed life on a global stage.
I’m also thinking of the other Angelina, the younger one, the awkward kid who wore glasses and boxed, the dark, wild punk who used to say anything, talked openly about cutting herself, collected weapons, flipped a butterfly knife on Conan O’Brien after she made Gia, sported a vial of her second husband, Billy Bob Thornton’s, blood.
That power of the raw was the first thing director James Mangold saw before her audition for Girl, Interrupted, her 1999 breakout movie, after Gia. “I met her at the Sofitel, where she was staying. I remember the first thing she said: ‘This place is so dumb and French country, and I hate French country.’ ” Mangold is still in awe of that audition. “I felt like I was looking at a ravishing female Jack Nicholson.”
What really set her apart? “Attitude. As directors we are starved for it in men and women,” he says. “We’ve all gotten so correct and polite and understanding of one another and the multiple points of view. And that is a good thing, but on another level it’s just a little harder to elbow your way out in front. It takes aggression, and attitude.” Clint Eastwood had it, he says. John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck. And Angelina.
“I needed someone who questions the rules,” he says of Girl, Interrupted, “who ****s who she wants to, pushes aside who she wishes to, and speaks the truth as she sees it . . . to be such an outlier they are deemed sociopathic but to us, the audience, they are brilliant.” That was Angelina’s character. And, as Jolie Pitt has said, it was also a part of her. “She was trying at that time to navigate, with far greater success than the character, what is unique about her,” says Mangold, “while finding a way to integrate herself with all the pedestrian things we live with—like French country.”
Jolie Pitt used to have a window: a tiny box, tattooed on her lower back. As a kid, she says, and even on movie shoots or with her former husbands (Jonny Lee Miller and Thornton), she used to stare out windows, longing for a life elsewhere, thinking, There has to be something else.
That turbulent and restless 25-year-old was the one who traveled to Cambodia to make Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the video-game heroine saving the world’s light from the forces of darkness, and had her eyes opened by the devastation wrought by the Khmer Rouge. She was confronted by genocide, refugees, people with prosthetic limbs, land mines still ripping apart children at play, the whole constellation of war’s consequences and injustices.
Cambodia reshaped the contours of Jolie Pitt’s life. As she’s said, if someone had dropped her at fourteen in the middle of Asia or Africa she’d have realized how self-centered she was, that there was real pain, real death, real things to fight for. She came home, made phone calls, read everything she could get her hands on, and began traveling with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on her own dime to figure out how she could be of use, bringing along her notebook and a willingness to sleep anywhere and take physical risks. Returning to Cambodia soon after she finished the movie, she kept a journal, later published as Notes from My Travels, in which you can witness her transformation taking place:
Friday, July 20, 2001, in Cambodia: “On my way to my room I couldn’t help but notice all the bomb casings. . . . These weapons and explosives were originally made by manufacturing plants run by governments like mine.” She goes out with the deminers to find out how they work. “Two land mines were discovered. I was allowed to detonate one of them with TNT. I must say it was a great feeling to destroy something that would have otherwise hurt or possibly killed another person.” In a former Khmer Rouge prison she writes, “In each one of the cells there is a picture of the person who was tortured. . . . As I continue to write this I think, What am I doing? How can I be standing here?”
In her travels with UNHCR she finally flew through the window. She even had a former Buddhist monk in Thailand tattoo a tiger over it. And she took the fight against herself and turned it on injustice. As she writes about the refugees she meets, “I wanted to help them, and I realize more and more every day how they have helped me.” She also realized fairly quickly that she could take the Hollywood insanity, the fairy dust, the massive power and money she was accruing with blockbuster franchises like Lara Croft and, later, Maleficent, and use them, her way. She wasn’t just going to play Lara Croft, she wanted to be a kind of Lara Croft and change the world.
