Angelina Jolie Discusses New Film and Humanitarian Work With Tina Brown

Angelina Jolie and Tina Brown at a breakfast event hosted by the Newsweek/Daily Beast Company, Monday, December 5, 2011., Christine Butler for The Daily Beast

By Ramin Seetoodeh
The Daily Beat
December 5, 2011

On the day she appears on the cover of Newsweek magazine, Angelina Jolie talked about her directorial debut with Newsweek/Daily Beast editor Tina Brown.

Angelina Jolie vividly remembers the moment she found her calling. It happened a decade ago, when she was in Cambodia shooting the action movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. “I was on a waterfall,” she recalls, “when they said, ‘Don’t go over there, that’s a land mine!’”

She had to ask herself, “What’s a land mine?” Jolie had an epiphany—and started out on a journey that led to her global humanitarian and philanthropic work.

“I met refugees, and I learned about their situation,” Jolie says. “Before, I had not been given a full education on [the Cambodian civil] war. And I realized— what else don’t I know? That shocked me into understanding so much about things happening worldwide that I am sheltered from. I felt I had a responsibility.”

Jolie recounted this story on Monday morning at a Women in the World breakfast event hosted by Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek/Daily Beast, at her house. During a wide-ranging discussion with Brown, Jolie went into detail about transitioning to director for her new film, In the Land of Blood and Honey, and her family of six kids. She brought her partner Brad Pitt’s parents, Jane and William, to the event. Brown noted that in Hollywood, triple threats are actors who also write and direct. “Now we have Angelina Jolie, a quadruple threat,” Brown said, alluding to Jolie’s humanitarian work. “She’s a one-woman Navy SEAL team.”

Jolie wrote and directed In the Land of Blood and Honey, but she doesn’t appear onscreen, even for a moment. “It didn’t belong to me,” she says. The film brings to light the Bosnian war of the early '90s, through the fictional story of a Serbian soldier who falls in love with a Bosnian prisoner in his camp. It’s an ambitious project for any Hollywood director, not to mention one who hadn’t gone behind the camera before. Read the rest of the article and see more pictures at The Daily Beat.