Angelina Jolie - Reflective State

Ten years on from Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Angelina Jolie again stars with – and this time directs – Brad Pitt. She tells Total Film why marital-drama By The Sea is her most personal and exposing film… 

- James Mottram

What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago, Angelina Jolie was just an Oscar-winning actress, the daughter of a Hollywood star and a Lara Croft pin-up. Then she really got famous.

Taking on Doug Liman’s espionage caper Mr. & Mrs. Smith, it introduced her to a then-married Brad Pitt. After his marriage to Jennifer Aniston ended, Brangelina was born – and Jolie became arguably the most recognisable woman on the planet. But you knew all that, right?

Such is the fervent interest in the soap opera of Jolie’s life – births, adoptions, surgeries, relief work – it’s almost easy to overlook the career. In the intervening decade, among other things, she’s worked with Clint Eastwood (Changeling) and Robert De Niro (The Good Shepherd), turned in a massive Maleficent-shaped hit and carved out the beginnings of a credible directorial career – with Bosnian war drama In The Land Of Blood And Honey and 2014’s WW2-set survival tale Unbroken.

What she hasn’t done is reunite on screen with Pitt – until now. Her third film in the director’s chair, By The Sea is undoubtedly her most personal. Set in the ’70s, she and Pitt play a fractured couple – Vanessa, a former dancer, and Roland, a writer, who are travelling through France on holiday in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage. But if you think she’s trying to tell us something, shortly before shooting in Malta last August, she and Pitt tied the knot. “We didn’t have a honeymoon,” she smiles. “This was our honeymoon! Which is very strange.”