Angelina Jolie

Spotlight by: Andrea Tuccillo
AndreaTuccillo@TheCinemaSource.com

Angelina Jolie is one half of Hollywood’s hottest couple (The other half being Brad Pitt, of course). She makes news every time her relationship takes a new turn, she stars in a new film, or adopts a new child. But Angelina knows her place in the world, and it’s not on the cover of a gossip magazine. She’s a big star, but she’s refreshingly aware of how that pales in comparison to pressing world issues and is not afraid to address these issues with her activism.

Her latest film, A Mighty Heart, contains a story of international relevance. The film is based on the true story of Mariane Pearl, the wife of slain American journalist Daniel Pearl, and focuses on her courageous search to find her missing husband in Pakistan. Pearl was ultimately killed by terrorists, a horrific event that made headlines world-wide.

To research her role, Jolie spent time with the real Mariane Pearl (the events in the film are taken straight from Mariane’s memoirs). “When I first met her I was struck by her ability to go to a place of love and tolerance so quickly after something so brutal happened and I think it is a very common reaction of people, and my own, to immediately just be so angry and so lost in self-pity for a loss and furious for something so horrific to have happened to somebody that I cared about,” Jolie says.

It was Mariane’s ability to see the bigger picture and work towards a bigger solution which truly inspired Jolie. “I learned to be even more tolerant,” she says. “I think of myself as quite an open, tolerant person but I am quick to anger and with situations like this I don’t think I would have had the strength to do what she did.”

In order to portray the realism of the events that took place, British director

Michael Winterbottom shot the film in a documentary style. Jolie also credits her director with creating an intimate setting in which all of the actors could bond and really focus on their characters. It’s a connected approach to filmmaking which Jolie prefers.

“He leads a really great, open environment,” she says of her director. “He does a load of research, he takes it very seriously, especially a film like this. He makes sure everyone involved has done their research and in this case met with the people that they were playing and then he brings everybody together in this very organic way. Like the house [on location] for example, we had no lights, we had no trailers, we had no place to go; we were all just in this house. So somehow that made us all feel like we were a team and we became a family. We were thrust together and never had space. And especially because of the subject matter of this film and the way they were it made a lot of sense.”

That sense of closeness and connectedness was apparent in the powerful, emotionally charged scene when Mariane receives the news that her husband has been killed.

“We were all very involved in the situation and we all had met all the people involved; it’s a real situation,” Jolie explains. “A real little boy lost his dad and a wife was confronted with this on a night like that and the reality of that just made us all very, very emotional that night.”

After shooting the draining scene, Jolie felt she had to alleviate the heaviness everyone was feeling on set. “I was trying to make jokes, to be honest,” she says. “I think we all cried so much that day, we’d been crying for hours by the time we finished. And in the end when we were wiping our make up off and going home I think everyone was trying to lighten

the mood to try to breathe again. We were prepared for that day to come and none of us planned, Michael the director didn’t plan, we never talked about it. We never had an idea about how I was going to react.”

Getting into character required more than emotional preparation. In addition to donning a wig and dark contact lens in order to resemble Mariane Pearl, Jolie was also precise when it came to speaking like her real-life character.

“I had a dialect coach because it was a really hard accent because she’s French/Cuban so there was no rule book on exactly how to do it,” Jolie says. “I took it very technically and I had many different audio tapes and I even had all her interviews and I’d close my eyes and try to figure out…which emotional place was she very direct and which question asked made her hesitate a lot. I’d try to understand her through that and try to technically approach the different sounds in her voice.”

While Jolie worked hard to perfect the details of her character, her co-star signed on to the movie with more than a few things in common with the character he was to portray. Dan Futterman plays Daniel Pearl in the film with great believability.

“The interesting thing about Dan Futterman is that he is a really good guy, he is of Jewish decent as well, he is a writer, and these are aspects of Danny [Pearl] that were important to his family and made him more organic,” she says. “And he [Futterman] had a great respect for Danny Pearl as many people do, but he really took the time to try to get to know this man and people’s perceptions of him, and understand all aspects of him. He spent a lot of time with his parents and took it very seriously and I think he gave it his all and he was wonderful.”

The

performances in the film have been garnering early awards buzz, but for Jolie that’s just icing on the cake. Neither awards nor money are her main concern with A Mighty Heart. Her real goal is getting people to see the movie and hear its message. She credits Mariane and Daniel Pearl with teaching her about overcoming fear and hate and she hopes their story will do the same for others.

“I think if there’s one message in the film it’s to find the common ground, not just the things that divide us,” she says.