Angelina Jolie on Why She’s ‘Drawn’ to Making Movies About War: ‘These Extremes of the Human Condition Are What We’re Trying to Understand’
variety.comTatiana Siegel Of the five films Angelina Jolie has directed, four have depicted war. But her latest, “Without Blood,” delves most directly into the haunting aftermath of the carnage. “I think conflict tends to bring out absolutely the worst in our behavior toward each other and often the best, when those who fight against or rise above,” Jolie said during an interview at the Variety Toronto Film Festival Studio. “As artists, a lot of our work is this study of what it is to be human.
So these extremes of the human condition are what we’re trying to understand sometimes and are drawn to. Certainly I’m somebody who, as I’ve traveled and done other [humanitarian] work in the field, I’ve always questioned why and how.” Jolie was joined by the film’s stars Salma Hayek Pinault and Demián Bichir, who play Nina and Tito, respectively, two people who stood on opposite sides of an unspecified war years earlier.
Hayek Pinault, for one, admitted that she was reluctant to sign on for her second collaboration with Jolie. (They previously starred together in the 2021 Marvel tentpole “Eternals.”) “I was afraid to play this part.
I was not immediately jumping in it because she suffers so much, my character, and I had to go there and suffer for the entire time of the shooting,” she said. “You cannot expel the pain.
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