Mother's Intuition: An Interview with Angelina Jolie
By: Steven Rush |
Tuesday January 18, 2005 |
| Has motherhood taken over and changed Angelina? Oliver Stone thinks it has. It is all for the best and Angelina takes it in stride putting forth a stellar perfomance as Colin Farrell's mother in the epic "Alexander." |
| Steven Rush: You were in Darfur recently, right?
Angelina Jolie: Yes, I was just in Darfur. I was also on the border of Burma two weeks ago. I'm very concerned about the recent change in Burma. I think the aide in the government's even gotten harder and I think I don't know what that means--what that's going to mean to the country. But I think there are some serious human rights violations going on inside that country that nobody seems to have access to be able to talk about to cover properly in the press. There's this just kind of going a lot unnoticed. I spent time with refugees on the border in Thailand and it's just so horribly sad. I'd meet with 20-year-old kids that haven't been outside the walls of the camp for 20 years and have grown up in an area that's like a prison. I hope they have enough to really get in there and saturate that area because everywhere I went there was no place that was 100 percent safe. I couldn't talk to a lot of the people about rape and abuse and the things they'd gone through because I didn't want them to get beaten up or something worse happen to them because they were speaking to internationals. There's some areas where MSF and UNICEF have been able to get to and where nobody still has access, but it's a really serious situation. Is that part of your work at the U.N.? Yeah. Was it an official trip that you made and what agency was it? I work with UNACR. UNACR is usually refugees. And I went to Chad before because there are 200,000 refugees from Darfur. But UNACR has just been given the mandate to focus on the estimated 1.6 million internally displaced people inside Darfur. So the refugee agency that usually handles just refugees would be handling all the IDP's and is trying to assist inside now because it's such a serious situation. Can you put Olympias in a modern frame of reference, or is she just a classic archetype? I think she is not different than I would be if I lived at that time. She was living in a time when women had no rights. Being a mother meant you were the vessel to carry a child and that's all you were. If Alexander did not become king, they would've been exiled or killed, they'd be useless and possibly a threat. She was a survivor at a time that is a very dark time and a very brutal time. Her way of being actually makes sense to me. You have a destiny and you know this is a tough time and you must be strong if you're going to survive. In this day and age, I think there's a few things you could look at. I mean, there's the broken family where parents are trying to fight over who raises the child. You could also look at domestic violence and rape and, you know, she goes through those things. So there's quite a few. Can you talk about the experience of working with Oliver? I loved it. I can't say enough nice things about him. I think he's so smart that he's tortured by it. I think a lot of directors try to make films because they're trying to learn about life. They're writing films about war, about relationships or about men being haunted by things. They don't touch that in their real lives. His real life he understands these aspects of life very much, so he can interpret these things in a way that's different from other directors. He really does push everybody very much to be their best, but he pushes himself three times as hard and I had a very good experience. I thought he'd given me an amazing role and supported me How long does it take to cover up your tattoos? Not long. I think on this one I was lucky because I came right after Colin, so I was the easier one. And so, you know, now they have airbrushing down to a science in Hollywood so it's like we're cars and we just come in a line and they just paint us. She's a very strong character. She also expresses her emotions in very explosive ways and I think that the temptation might be there to either go over the top. Oh, absolutely, yeah. How do you work that out? That's a tough one. It being a period piece, you know what they're fighting about. I remember Val and I talking. We actually had to argue who was the son ... we actually had a domestic fight of "I am the blood of Achilles and the blood of Hercules runs through my veins!" And this is a domestic argument. It's just very interesting to try to get into it. So I think, just believing everything you're saying --like in any other role, but also really understanding and feeling that. These are serious. You should be passionate about it. It wasn't just dramatic for the sake of being dramatic. I believed 100 percent that this is my son and that he could die if he doesn't do this, or that this is a great danger. This, somehow, made it real. You talked about working with Oliver and a little about working with Val, but what about Colin? I think Colin is just amazing. I think he's amazing in this film and I think he's the only actor that could do this. To be Alexander, you have to be so free with who you are. You can look in his eyes in scenes and see that he's emotional and he's open and when he is passionate about something and on fire and wild. He's truly that and no holds barred ... but he's also very much a friend as he was to other men in this film. I think when they got out of boot camp, you could've asked them and they would've followed him into anything because he's that kind of person. What about working with him one-on-one and following each other's instincts and being open to that? Oh, it was great, it was great. I mean there are things with some of the kisses and spitting on each other that was improvised ... that came out of nothing. He's a very generous actor and he made it very easy for me. He could've made me feel awkward playing his mother. There was never a discussion about it. He entered the set as Alexander at 19 and I entered the set as Olympias and that was it. That was the end of the discussion. We took each other very seriously in those roles. And off set? And off set he was lovely, yeah. I mean he was often just so exhausted, to be honest, with this film. He was ... I kind of witnessed him in the middle of this journey that would change his life. Was there an issue about playing the mother? I mean, "Oh, Roxane, I could play Roxane because we look good together as a couple." I mean certainly there is. If you see the film, I believe it does work, which I think people will be surprised. You meet her when he's little and he grows up. Whoever played it would have to age from 20 to 50 anyway. So, wherever you fall in the middle of that spectrum or the end of that spectrum, that's what you would have to do. I worked on trying to lower my voice and have less muscle in my stomach when I spoke so it would sound a certain way. I was trying to physically change my body and my shoulder and my pace, or I would slow down a bit. But at the same time, my mother's 55 and there's nothing old about her. So, you know, there's a fine line. There's a lot of thought behind it, really. And even the aging of my face to try to make it so it's believable and it's being done right, but it doesn't like distract you. You're not staring at, uh, you know, so ... Well, it works great. Oh, thank you. I just couldn't help but wonder what was your first thought when your agent called and said, "I've got a swell idea, how would you like to play Colin Farrell's mother?" The interesting thing is I think none of us was sold on it. It was more of an idea. Oliver wasn't signed off on it, Colin wasn't signed off on it, and I wasn't signed off on it when the three of us met about it. We all kind of felt, well, let's sit together and discuss this and somehow during that meeting we felt it could be okay. I trusted Oliver and I think Oliver said something to me about seeming older. The last time I had seen Oliver, it was years before I became a mom and went through a few bad things. So, maybe he saw a few little gray hairs. He's said in previous interviews that you reminded him of his mom. And actually there's a very nurturing quality about you that comes across on screen that, I think, makes it easy to believe that you're a mom despite you're youth. Where does that come from? Thank you. Well, probably because I am a mom to a little three year old, so he's taught me. He's brought out that woman side of me. I had to nurture a little person. It's all down to him. Tell us a little bit about how it was to work with the snakes. I mean, you seemed extremely comfortable. I like the snakes. I mean, I had my moments where I did say to Oliver, "Look, the guy just said that it's night and they want to feed, so they're getting a little frisky and do you think maybe we should, you know ...?" And he'd say, "Would Olympias do that?" And that was it. Basically what happened is the snakes showed up in a truck full of a bunch of different baskets. I wore them around for a few days. Come day three, I was reading and eating with them on me and talking. They would hang out on me and we became somehow united. It was only difficult when it was having to put the snake on the little boy. I kept thinking that, 'Oh, God, what if the ... what if the light bulb over there pops and the snake gets freaked out? Or what if, you know, anything like that could happen?' What kind of snakes were they? Um, pythons and rat snakes and a few other ones. They were lots and in certain scenes, Oliver would just be like, throw them--just more snakes. When you have your own kids, do you hear the voice of your own mother in your head in terms of the good things that she told you and how she supported you? Absolutely. Well, I hear my own mother's voice. I think I start speaking like her. I have a, uh, somebody did tell me that they sound ... I have a certain way of - in a nicer - when I'm usually calming him down, telling him everything's okay or I have a ... I definitely adapt my mother's voice. You're going to be a Cambodian citizen? Yes, a dual citizenship. Why? How did that come about? I met with the prime minister about stopping a dam from being built and we spoke about the different things I'd been doing in the country for the last few years and he said that they'd ... they'd given citizenship to two people on a humanitarian basis and asked me, you know, offered me citizenship. And I was extremely honored and I love the people and, um, you know, it's my son's country, so it's, uh, it's a great honor and ... and so I'm going to, you know, it'll be a great. I wanted to spend the day with the people there and have a, you know, have a celebration. It hasn't been so long since you established yourself with "Gia" and "Girl, Interrupted." Does that make it easier or harder now that you don't have to audition and does it raise your game instead of, you know, thinking, oh, I've got to prove myself to all these people who don't know who I am? No, I still do because I tend to accept the roles and like the ... and like Alexander," I tend to go after it and want to do the roles that I'm not necessarily obviously good for. So I try to challenge myself, um, even "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," which I just did, you know, I had to be ... there's a lot of aspects of her that I felt I've done, but some things, you know, I'm still awkward and I have to learn. So it's to challenge yourself. I still do that. What's "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" about? Brad Pitt and I are a married, bored, suburban couple and, um, we are in therapy and then we both discover we both have a secret because we're both hit men. So, we spend the rest of the film pretty much trying to kill each other. What music are you listening to now? I really don't listen to a lot of music. Um, for me it's Franz Ferdinand. I thought it was cool, but that's mainly because Matt loved it. It made me dance around the room. Um, but yeah, I don't really… Not Barney? No, Barney's not allowed in my house. |
