Photo by Pop Culture Passionistas
When Angelina Jolie decided to make
her screenwriting and directorial debut, it wasn’t surprising that she chose to
tackle a sensitive topic. But she also opted not to lean on the predictable
crutch of casting big Hollywood names to ensure box office success. Instead she
went to the land in which the film was based, Bosnia, and hired local actors to
tell her dramatic tale, In the Land of
Blood and Honey.
At a recent event at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, California, Angelina talked
about this daring decision. “I wanted to cast from the region but I ended up
just casting who happened to be the best actors. And they also happened to be
from the region. And so I always wanted that. It was always going to be that.
But there’s nobody that could have done this better. Nobody.”
As an added coup, the actors also
helped Jolie develop the story of fractured relationships in a battle worn
country as well. She recounted, “Our cast was all born Yugoslavian and shared
the same history books, shared so much, shared families. And the war divided
them among different lines — ethnic, religious lines — and labeled them
different things. And tried, and still in some ways, tried to divide and push
them into focusing on their differences.”
She continued, “But this cast,
especially, is focused on their similarities and their unity and bravely came
together to say, ‘We’re going to tell the story of our history.’ It’s very
sensitive and it’s very difficult — more for them than for me. I was there to
try to balance and listen and learn from them but they got into me through
this. They taught me every day. And they have accomplished something in what
they have done with this film and now that people in the region have started to
see it and the dialogue it’s causing is everything we’d hoped for. So for us it
was this journey.”
In addition to educating their
director, the cast also rose to the challenge or Jolie’s extraordinary request
—shooting the film in both their native tongue and in English. Her hope was to
reach a wider audience that isn’t interested in viewing a foreign language
film. Jolie explained, “We always wanted to [release the original language
version]. That was the dream. But a lot of distributors and American studio
people said, ‘There’s no way you’ll be able to ever get people to see a film on
this subject matter, without big traditional celebrities that people know
already, in a foreign language. It’s just impossible.’”
But when all was said and done,
Jolie was surprised by the open-mindedness of U.S. audiences. She acknowledged,
“To the credit of the America people, we screened it for them and they
unanimously said, ‘We want to hear it in its authentic language.’ And so it
showed me something. It showed them something — that people that tend to watch
these types of films want to see something done as authentic as possible.”
Moviegoers also, it seems, like a
good bittersweet story. Jolie described the film that tells a complex but not
unusual tale of star-crossed lovers in the war-torn country of Bosnia. She
remarked, “Unfortunately it seems very common at the time… This idea of Romeo
and Juliet. They were born. They’re on different sides. They choose to be
together. This couple they were born the same. [Ajla] and Danijel were born in
the same hospital in Sarajevo. They’re born the same. They are the same. They
fell in love at a time and a place where it was normal for there to be mixed
marriages. It was embraced. It was wonderful. They had a promising beautiful
future.”
She went on to talk about the tragic
nature of such relationships, saying, “It was the war that turned them into
enemies. It was the war that made it a bizarre or violent or… to me it’s a very
sad love story because it’s a love story that would have been. And it
represents the people of the country. They should be alive today. They should
have a family today but they don’t. What happened to them is symbolic of
happened to their country. So that is why it’s sad.”
Check local listings to see In the Land of Blood and Honey at a
theater near you.
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