ANGELINA Jolie, Oscar-winning mega-celebrity, companion of Brad Pitt and mother of six including five-month-old twins – is crouched over a breast pump in a hotel room.
“I was just pumping,” she says, by way of introduction.
“It’s such a funny thing to do, like a dairy cow.”
Right now, her twins, Knox and Vivienne, are safely stashed somewhere in New York City, while Jolie is in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria.
Pitt has the rest of the brood – Maddox, 7, Pax, 5, Zahara, 3, and Shiloh, 2 – in Berlin, where he’s shooting Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards.
“Neither of us is allowed all the kids at once, because the other one gets lonely.”
Jolie, 33, seems so familiar from magazine covers and billboards that it’s almost disconcerting meeting her in person.
She’s often portrayed as a saint-like figure in a sweeping empire-line frock, with a clutch of adorable urchins balanced on her hip and her handsome beau careening into the scene on a dusty dirt bike. Or else, she’s clutching a gun, ready to shoot.
Today, there are no weapons and no brood. But there’s no mistaking her. There are the grey-green eyes, pillow-like lips, almost translucent complexion and inky tattoos peeking out from under her cream silk Ralph Lauren dress.
Clint Eastwood, director of her current release Changeling, describes her as having “one of the more striking faces on the planet”.
Jolie is seated, poker-straight, on a maroon couch with tatty cushions between us and a nibbled biscuit on the table.
She’s here to talk about the true story set in Prohibition-era Los Angeles. Jolie plays single mum Christine Collins, whose son, Walter, disappears.
Looking for good publicity, the police department reunites her with her ‘son’ who is, in fact, a drifter kid from Iowa looking for a free trip to California.
Collins confronts the police, insisting the child isn’t who they say he is, and ends up being slandered as an unfit mother. Her only hope comes in the form of community activist Reverend Gustav Briegleb (played by John Malkovich).
Halfway through the film, the storyline shifts to include serial killer Gordon Northcott and the infamous Wineville chicken coop murders. Northcott kidnapped and killed 20 young boys between 1928 and 1930, and it’s highly likely Christine Collins’ son was among those slain.
“I’d heard it was a wonderful script,” says Jolie, “in that Collins was an extraordinary woman. I wanted to know the story and couldn’t put it down. Then I thought, I never want to do a film like that. I didn’t sleep well that night; I couldn’t get the thought of anything happening to my kids out of my mind.”
A film about child murders might seem an odd choice for someone who’s such a devoted mother, but Jolie says it was the bond between the character and her son that attracted her to the plot.
“(There’s) the other side of it; the fight this woman had and the idea of justice and never giving up hope. Instead of being upsetting, it became this inspiring story. I thought making the film was a final piece of justice for her; I suddenly found myself wanting to tell it.”
There’s a scene towards the end where Collins’ workmates invite her to a bar to listen to a radio broadcast of the Academy Awards.
She has a bet on It Happened One Night winning best picture, which you can’t help but view as a sly nod at an Oscar. Does she think Changeling stands a chance of winning? “I never think that,” she says, “because, in the end, you just have to make a film you love.”
As a director, Eastwood is something of a king-maker – think Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby.
“For me, Clint was the big deal,” Jolie says. “Just being able to work with somebody I’ve admired so much and then to meet him – he was everything I hoped he’d be.”
It says something of Jolie’s character that she has no agent or publicist, and her manager, Geyer Kosinski, has been with her since she was 19. “He’s my friend. He kind of handles everything.” (It was Kosinski who introduced Jolie to Billy Bob Thornton.)
After so many years in the industry, Jolie (or is it Kosinski?) certainly knows how to play the fame game. “Every time you do a movie, you should do a magazine,” she says, matter-of-factly.
For Changeling, there’s a spread in the high-end US magazine W, photographed by Pitt using Kodak Tech Pan film – which hasn’t been manufactured for four years (the rolls were found on eBay and sourced from Israel).
“He’s a real artist, more so than me. He has an amazing eye and is a real student of art,” she says.
On the magazine’s cover, Jolie is pictured breastfeeding, and there’s a glimpse of a tiny hand.
“I’d just given birth to the twins and was feeling very private at home. I couldn’t imagine a stranger coming in and me putting on a bunch of outfits. So I loved these photographs so much.
” In the portfolio, there are silhouettes of Jolie’s body, and close-ups of her pulling silly faces and tottering in heels with Zahara.
“It was a great experience to work together,” she says. “It’s important for couples to find projects outside of the children.”
What else do two of the most impossibly glamorous and famous people on the planet do together?
“We both fly planes, but we haven’t done that in a long time because we’ve been busy. We talk about the motorcycle trips we want to take in the future. We both want to get back to painting. We take French class together. We used to have date nights – now we have date hours,” she laughs.
There was another set of photos taken at the family compound in the south of France – the first pictures of her twins – that sold for $22 million to People and Hello! (two years earlier, pictures of
Shiloh sold for $6.3 million).
The money raised went to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation, which supports health clinics in Ethiopia and Cambodia, rebuilds Iraqi schools and counsels children of US military killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other causes.
When asked about the staggering sum paid for images of her children, she says, “I try not to think about it too much.” In the million-dollar photos, Jolie is wearing no make-up and her nursing bra strap is showing.
“I couldn’t be bothered getting dressed. Before they took the pictures, Brad and I attempted to clean our room and we were like, ‘Argh!’” She throws her hands up in the air. “We were trying to pull ourselves together. But, at the same time, you don’t want to change yourself.”
Truth, it seems, is Jolie’s shield. She once told a Vogue journalist, “You can ask me anything.”
These days, I wonder if she still feels so free. “I answer every question honestly, or I don’t answer at all, because I have to remain open, for myself. But I’m more aware of a leading question looking for something trashy, or somebody who isn’t going to listen to what I say.”
Seven years ago, Jolie began a daily record on the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) website about her journey to Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Cambodia and Pakistan. Her postings were collected in a book, Notes from My Travels (Pocket Books). She has no plans for another book, but has been working on some newspaper editorials.
“It helps me focus my thoughts,” she says.
Of her travels, Jolie says, “I love any new place. Obviously my sons’ and daughters’ countries are special, but Sierra Leone was the first country I ever went to with the UN – there’ll always be something about West Africa. To this day, it was the most brutal (country) I’ve seen – the cutting off of limbs as a form of aggression was just so horrendous. I completely changed as a person.”
In 2005, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jolie met with Peter Gabriel, musician and co-founder of Witness, a human rights advocacy group. She was interested in his organisation’s work in Sierra Leone and joined the group in a meeting with former president Ahmad Kabbah to advocate for the implementation of Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s findings.
“She really does want to use her celebrity for good,” says Suvasini Patel, communications manager for Witness.
Take a bow, Brad Pitt, part-time objectivist, life partner and lover of the indomitable, beautiful Angelina Jolie.
Source: Fiji Times
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