Angelina Jolie Interview

Q: And how do your kids feel about your character in this movie?

AJ: The opinion of my children? I don’t know, they’re in the pool! I think they’re completely uninterested, but Shiloh wanted me to cut my hair short, and Pax thought somebody was trying to hurt his mom and he got mad. But I think they’re very confused to be honest. I think even the change of hair color is confusing for them. But it’s OK, because mommy is OK in the end. That’s all they need to know.

Q: Do you think more female killers are in your future?

AJ: Um, I don’t know. I’ve had the good fortune of being able to play a lot of really strong women, and those roles, I think they have been great. But there are great women in history that are yet to be played—great heroic women, and I think there are great women’s stories. But I feel there are also great simple stories about motherhood and great heroic women who are simply mothers, and as big as they are in some big action movie. So no, I won’t miss it; there can always be more, but I’m not one to complain. I think this story is a personal, human journey that has nothing to do with specific politics. It’s about a person who has a certain history and a certain life, and has certain things taken away from her. And do we make a choice to be as we’ve been raised to be? Do we become better because we take control of our lives? It’s got all those elements and I think that’s something that drew us all to the film, is that we’re all not what we seem.

Q: Now about that sex scene that disappeared, where did it go?

AJ: Um, it never really was! We had um, you know; we shot flashes of the moments in her life. We shot many flashes of moments in her life and then the ones that didn’t work, we didn’t put them in. So it’s as simple as that.

Q: You’re involved in lots of political issues. So if you could change one thing in this world, what would it be, or who would you be to do that?

AJ: I think any one of us would like to be a pope or a president for a month. But I don’t want to get into details, because it really gets into my politics and this isn’t the time, you know, to explain it properly.

Q: Is it true that you’ve been looking for your own Bond for a while, and is this one it?

AJ: I had joked about it; I made a joke that I wanted to play Bond and I got a call two years later that they found it. But in fact, it’s very different from Bond and very different from Bourne. Hopefully we took good elements of both of them, and we found something very new, which is I think what we had to do. But also in the fighting styles—we really wanted to focus not just on the girl version of the male fights, but actually finding her way of fighting that was unique in its own way.

Q: Did Brad give you any advice about playing a tough character?

AJ: I don’t think it was specific advice. He was just very supportive. I had just had Vivienne and Knox, and I was sitting on my back in bed, feeling very grateful. I remember it was soft. I said, “I think I found something that will, you know, help me get kind of fired up again, and physical again.” I hadn’t worked for over a year, because I’d been pregnant. And so he was kind of, you know, anything that I was ready to do, he was going to jump behind. He was happy for me. You know, we met doing this style of film in some way, the action of it. He knows that’s fun for me, and we have fun together doing a lot of physical things. So he knew all about my training for this, and that was great.