If Brad Pitt needs a valentine for Angelina Jolie, I have just the idea: a bound copy of the first draft of her screenplay for her debut film as a writer-director, In the Land of Blood and Honey (which opens in Canada on Friday). It would be a touching, romantic gesture, because the script is a mess – typographically, that is.
“I’m bad with computers,” Jolie said in a recent phone interview. “I didn’t even have [screenwriting program] Final Draft when I was writing it. So to do dialogue, I was typing space-space-space. It took me a really long time, until somebody explained to me I could get a writing program. So the first draft is all over the place.” She laughs. “It’s so unprofessional.”
Her laugh is warm, self-deprecating, and not unusual in the course of our call. And disarming, since I’d expected Jolie to be a bit aloof, and her answers canned. After all, she’s Angelina freakin’ Jolie – at 36, an Oscar-winning movie star (for Girl, Interrupted), tattooed mother of six, United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, and one of the most famous (and hounded) women on the planet. Reams have been written about her sex life, her knife play and the his-and-hers blood vials she and Billy Bob Thornton once sported. Lately, Jolie’s more regal side has emerged, all emerald drop earrings, sightseeing in Venice with her brood, and lounging in Louis Vuitton ads modelling luxury camo-mufti in Cambodia.
Instead of a she-devil or ice queen, however, Jolie sounded friendly and eager to communicate, almost as if she were still parsing out the film’s issues for herself. In the Land of Blood and Honey, a tortured love story set during the Bosnian war, and up for best foreign-language film at Sunday’s Golden Globes, is a tough sell, and Jolie has been chatting it up for months already – including to Barack Obama, during a visit to the White House with Pitt on Wednesday.
The bound script would be a good companion, Jolie agrees – “when I feel more confident and I’m not as embarrassed” – to the writing present Pitt has already given her: an antique typewriter. “Brad is the first person who read the script,” she says, “and the first person to tell me that it was good. And believe in me. He produces films, and he’s such a solid man and solid actor. He’s been so supportive.”
Still, she admits, there was a “slight adjustment” in their household as she added writer and director to her résumé. “I would sit up writing late into the night,” Jolie says. “It wasn’t a joke in our house, but it was this odd experiment I was doing that seemed so unusual for both of us. I’d written op-ed pieces and in journals, but nothing like this. But like anybody who loves you, they’re happy when you’re happy. I think Brad’s happy that there’s something that brings me some peace.”
When she started writing, Jolie wasn’t planning to make a film, or even to show anyone her work. “I wrote out of a quiet meditation with myself, about my own frustrations with violence against women, lack of intervention in crises, and trying to understand what happens to people in war,” she said.
Vuitton ads aside, Jolie does walk the walk: She uses that army of reporters who trail her to shed light on war-torn regions, where she sleeps in tents, cradles babies and advocates for women’s and children’s safety, not unlike Audrey Hepburn before her (though fewer people questioned Hepburn’s sincerity). Yes, not many first-time directors can include the White House on their promotional tour. But not many screen their films at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, either.