Not so long after the world read about Angelina Jolie‘s public split from husband Brad Pitt in Vanity Fair—not to mention, his side of the story in GQ—the A-list actress, noted humanitarian, and filmmaker finds her way into the page of The New York Times.
Giving the interview from her new $25 million estate in the hilltop enclave of Los Feliz in Los Angeles, where she and her six children have been living since the divorce, Jolie further opens up about her divorce and the upcoming film, First They Killed My Father with writer Cara Buckley.
RealClearLife has whittled the sprawling feature down to its most interesting points.
-Jolie reveals that she wouldn’t have been able to direct Father had she not previously directed In the Land of Blood and Honey and Unbroken. “It wasn’t a conscious plan of, I was going to make war films, it’s just what I was drawn to,” she tells the Times. The new movie, which is told from the point of view of a young survivor of the Cambodian genocide, hits Netflix this Friday, Sept. 15.
-The actress says she was changed forever by her first trip to Cambodia. “Once you get exposed to what’s really happening in the world, and other people’s realities, you just can’t ever not know, and you can’t ever wake up and pretend it’s not happening….Your entire life shifts.” (She adopted a Cambodian baby, whom she named Maddox, who is now 16.)
-Of her six children, Jolie says: “They really help me so much. We’re really such a unit….They’re the best friends I’ve ever had. Nobody in my life has ever stood by me more.”
-As the Times Buckley notes: “[Jolie] intimated that First They Killed My Father might have informed her decision to leave Mr. Pitt….Ms. Jolie said she thought a lot about what family meant during production, and how they should help each other and take care of one another.”
-Jolie, referring to a recent Vanity Fair mini-controversy in which the magazine reported on a particularly controversial child-casting exercise for her new film, called it “a mischaracterization.” VF has not published any sort of correction.
-Doing a little self-reflecting, Jolie said, “I never expect to be the one that everybody understands or likes….And that’s OK, because I know who I am, and the kids know who I am.”
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