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" There is a piece of behind-the-scenes footage, probably locked deep in the Disney vault, that the tabloids would pay millions to get their hands on. In it, a then four-year-old Vivienne Marcheline Jolie-Pitt makes her big-screen debut, as a somewhat reluctant participant in Maleficent, the forthcoming prequel to Sleeping Beauty.   &amp;quot;Her first day, she doesn&amp;#039;t want to put the dress on. Then she wants to have food and she wants to get the dress off. Then she doesn&amp;#039;t want to do her hair. Then she wants to go play in the mud. Then she loses her other shoe,&amp;quot; says the young actress&amp;#039;s mother. &amp;quot;All she had to do that day was chase this little ball on the end of a stick, which would be turned into a butterfly. But we realized on that day that anything you tell her to do, she will not do.&amp;quot; So Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt spent the day acting like rodeo clowns. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got the stick, and he&amp;#039;s on the edge of the [fake] cliff so that when she jumps, she jumps into his arms. We&amp;#039;re making these faces and singing these songs, anything we can do,&amp;quot; she says, shaking her head with bewildered affection familiar to all parents. &amp;quot;Disney did tell me those were some of the funniest outtakes they&amp;#039;d ever seen.&amp;quot;  Related: Angelina Jolie Is a Super Embarrassing Mom Angelina Jolie tells this story in the commissary on the Universal Studios lot in Los Angeles, a spot that is remarkable only for being one of the few places in the developed world where Angelina Jolie can unself-consciously eat lunch in plain view. As she stirs honey into her mint tea\u2014they bring it without asking\u2014and talks with openness about her band of six children, clearly her favorite subject, there&amp;#039;s a moment to take in her face, which is a process, in that it is somehow unlike all other faces. Jolie simply has been given more than her fair share: the cheekbones, the pillowy lips, the almond eyes in a placid shade of blue that you can&amp;#039;t quite make out on film. What&amp;#039;s surprising about seeing all that well-documented bounty from just a foot away is the canvas on which it&amp;#039;s composed, which is so very delicate. Jolie is almost wraithlike in her slenderness. The action figure who kicks and claws and shoots and punches her way through Salt and Mr. and Mrs. Smith and all three Tomb Raiders clearly radiates from the mind, not the limbs. Indeed, cloaked in her usual utilitarian black pants and loose black shirt\u2014the tattoos snaking around her arms almost like cave drawings at this point, shadowy reminders of the rebel that once was\u2014there is something nearly uncorporeal about this woman. This probably has everything to do with the project that she has reluctantly left upstairs for a few hours\u2014editing her second directorial effort, the WWII epic Unbroken, which will come out at the end of the year. All morning Jolie has been studying the flight patterns of America&amp;#039;s lumbering B-24 bomber versus that of the smaller, zippier Japanese Zero. It&amp;#039;s the kind of work that appeals to her dudeish daredevil side (let&amp;#039;s not forget that both she and Pitt are pilots, and they both have airplanes). And it&amp;#039;s one detail in a million crucial to accurately telling the true story of Louis Zamperini, a 1930s delinquent turned Olympic runner turned Army airman who survived an airplane crash at sea, 47 days marooned in a rubber raft, and more than two years of torment in Japan&amp;#039;s notoriously brutal POW camps\u2014only to return to America a national hero. His story is the subject of Seabiscuit writer Laura Hillenbrand&amp;#039;s 2010 book, Unbroken; it&amp;#039;s also a project that has been in turnaround for the 55-odd years since Zamperini sold the film rights.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m happy that I can do something that has nothing to do with my physical presence or anything but my mind. That makes me very happy. I&amp;#039;m very much more comfortable like this,&amp;quot; she says, gesturing toward herself as if to say, &amp;quot;This is me, the real me, in director mode.&amp;quot; These days she is appropriately grateful for the opportunity to star in movies but freely admits she enjoys that part of her job only &amp;quot;to a point.&amp;quot; Related: Video: See Vivienne Jolie-Pitt&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;Maleficent&amp;#039; Film Debut It should come as no surprise that a woman who created a family of six children across multiple continents in six years, who involves herself in the struggles of refugee communities worldwide, who built her own definition of domesticity with the most famous sex symbol in Hollywood, would, upon discovering a new career passion, dive in at the deep end. Her directorial debut, 2011&amp;#039;s In the Land of Blood and Honey, incited political controversy even before it was released, by exposing the brutality of the early &amp;#039;90s civil war in the former Yugoslavia through the fraught love story of a Bosnian woman and her captor, a Serbian officer. The result was a film told with deep humanity and an evident determination to faithfully represent the truths of the era. It was also gritty, muscular, and uncompromising\u2014instantly gaining Jolie entr\u00E9e to a rarefied club of female directors.  But Blood and Honey was an indie, made for a relatively modest $10 million. Unbroken, on the other hand, will be a Holly\u00ADwood epic, with all the advantages, expectations, and logistics that go along with that: &amp;quot;Sharks and shark attacks, two plane crashes, two different stages at sea, cages in the jungle, and two giant prison camps, a rock quarry, 200 extras in each camp,&amp;quot; Jolie says, all of it set in a period that spans from the 1920s through the war years and that includes Hitler&amp;#039;s 1936 Olympics. Brought in to revise the script, veteran filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen called the undertaking &amp;quot;a motherfucker,&amp;quot; joking that they were glad to be able to write the thing and not have to figure out how to make it. Add to that the fact that Universal scheduled the film&amp;#039;s release for Christmas Day 2014 and dropped a prominent trailer for it during the opening ceremonies of the Sochi Olympics, and you get a sense of the stakes. Unbroken will be the test of Jolie&amp;#039;s career. A-list actress turns serious director is unusual\u2014who, besides Jodie Foster, comes to mind? A-list actress turns big-budget war-movie director? It has never been done.   Jolie hasn&amp;#039;t acted in a film since 2010, when she starred in both The Tourist with Johnny Depp and the ass-kicking spy blitz Salt. She knew that for a film to pull her back in front of the camera &amp;quot;it would have to be something slightly extreme that would push me to do something out of my comfort zone,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And so completely bizarre that it wasn&amp;#039;t just returning to do regular scenes.&amp;quot; Maleficent certainly delivers. When I tell her she is deeply terrifying in the film, she seems touched, as if I&amp;#039;d paid her the highest compliment. &amp;quot;Aw, thank you,&amp;quot; she replies with genuine gratitude. A quick refresher: In the 1959 Disney classic Sleeping Beauty, the horned, black-cloaked, towering Maleficent curses angelic Princess Aurora to mortally prick her finger on a spinning wheel\u2014a fate avoided by the intercession of a good fairy who amends the spell: Aurora will sleep until kissed by her true love. Most little girls adore (and identify with) the flaxen-haired Aurora; is it any surprise that young Angelina preferred Maleficent? &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know why,&amp;quot; she says, pondering. &amp;quot;I think I loved to hate her. She just terrified me, and yet I was extremely drawn to her.&amp;quot; She wasn&amp;#039;t the only one; before sinking an estimated $200 million into the movie, Disney did some market research and found that Maleficent actually beat out Ursula, Cruella De Vil, and Captain Hook as the Magic Kingdom&amp;#039;s best-loved villain. (Of course, there&amp;#039;s that small sticking point. &amp;quot;We actually talked about that,&amp;quot; Jolie says: &amp;quot;How do you make a [kids&amp;#039;] movie about someone who curses a baby?&amp;quot;) So she became the movie&amp;#039;s star, not its director\u2014a job filled by Robert Stromberg, an Oscar-winning visual-effects genius (Avatar, Alice in Wonderland) directing his first film\u2014though from the get-go she had her own ideas about the picture. She wanted to make sure Disney didn&amp;#039;t go soft on it; that, as long as we understand why Maleficent is evil, she really be evil. &amp;quot;She was very pointed in her direction,&amp;quot; says producer Joe Roth, king of the big-budget fairy-tale remake (he made a mammoth splash in 2010 with the $1-billion-grossing, Tim Burton\u2013directed Alice in Wonderland). &amp;quot;Here&amp;#039;s the determination you have to make as a producer: Is it going to make a great movie, or is it going to get in the way? In her thing, she&amp;#039;s only interested in making a great movie. She&amp;#039;s a perfectionist. She has no interest in people who are not willing to go the distance to make things great, and she requires people to have the same level of commitment she has. So it&amp;#039;s a hard working process, but it ends up being a great result.&amp;quot; Jolie, he says, is &amp;quot;involved in every aspect, from the way the costumes look to the way the marketing looks, and she has a very clear idea about who she is as a person, and also who she is as people perceive her. I&amp;#039;ve never worked with anybody, in all my years, who has such a complete picture of what it is to be a movie actor and a movie star.&amp;quot; Related: Angelina Jolie Delivers Powerful, Emotional Speech About Motherhood at the 2013 Governors Awards Disney&amp;#039;s original Maleficent, being a pre-CGI kind of gal, concentrated her fear-striking powers in that voice, the goose-bump-inducing snarl that has haunted children&amp;#039;s nightmares for generations. Learning to really roar\u2014even for Jolie, with her affinity for firearms and hand-to-hand combat\u2014took training. &amp;quot;Very rarely do women play at their full voice, full power, full strength,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I realized in my life there was never really an opportunity to use my full voice. I don&amp;#039;t use it in my house, certainly, and I don&amp;#039;t use it in my life.&amp;quot; Finding the locus of that sound, &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s almost like if someone punched you in the stomach,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;The first time I really did it, it didn&amp;#039;t feel like it was coming from me. I recommend it to anyone, to just go to the ocean or wherever and try it.&amp;quot; Then came the eerie amber contact lenses, the sweeping robes, &amp;quot;and the staff,&amp;quot; says her costar, Elle Fanning, who, in a brilliant casting move, plays Aurora, the light to Maleficent&amp;#039;s darkness. &amp;quot;That was really part of her character, so she just wanted to walk around with it on set. She comes in with the staff, and she commands the room. It&amp;#039;s like, You are Maleficent.&amp;quot; But the real pi\u00E8ces de r\u00E9sistance were the prosthetics: chiseled, finlike cheekbone extensions, and just enough around the nose to harden even that innocuous feature\u2014all of it done under Jolie&amp;#039;s explicit instruction. (Roth says the only time he intervened was when the cheekbones got too extreme: &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s the point of having Angelina Jolie if she looks like the Elephant Man?&amp;quot;) The transformation is surreal\u2014Maleficent is Jolie and yet not her at all, a larger-than-life apparition that took even the actress by surprise. &amp;quot;You get into those horns and those heels,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;and you&amp;#039;re a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall creature, wondering why little kids don&amp;#039;t want to talk to you.&amp;quot; For the cherubic infant playing Aurora as a baby, just the sight of Jolie&amp;#039;s horned shape coming toward her would bring on a meltdown. &amp;quot;This poor little kid\u2014that silhouette is going to haunt her for life,&amp;quot; Jolie says. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;ll be afraid of goats and not know why.&amp;quot; Even Jolie&amp;#039;s own 10-year-old, Pax (more of a Dumbo man himself), would not come near her until he and his siblings had visited the hair-and-makeup trailer, where they could &amp;quot;literally see my teeth come out, my eyes come out, my prosthetics come off, and understand what it was.&amp;quot;  Thus the casting of Vivienne (twin to brother Knox) was something of a necessity. For young Aurora, they needed a child who wouldn&amp;#039;t be fazed by the Mistress of All Evil hissing &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t like children&amp;quot; in her face.   &amp;quot;And my little Vivienne\u2014we call her my shadow, because there&amp;#039;s nothing I can do to shake her. I can be tired, I can be grumpy, I can be in a terrible mood, and she just doesn&amp;#039;t care. It&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;Mommy, Mommy,&amp;#039; and she&amp;#039;ll cling to me,&amp;quot; Jolie says. &amp;quot;We knew that she would still do that thing, she&amp;#039;d still smile at me and insist that I pick her up. So we couldn&amp;#039;t really cast anybody else.&amp;quot; Pax and nine-year-old Zahara (or ZZ, as Jolie calls her) also appear in the film, in cameos in the christening/cussing scene. (No Shiloh, however. &amp;quot;I asked Shiloh about being Aurora, and she laughed in my face,&amp;quot; Jolie says, with evident pride. &amp;quot;She said she&amp;#039;d be a horned creature.&amp;quot;) But don&amp;#039;t expect a repeat engagement. &amp;quot;Brad and I made the decision that we wouldn&amp;#039;t keep them from sets and the fun of making movies, but we wouldn&amp;#039;t [glorify it either]\u2014we wouldn&amp;#039;t make it a good thing or a bad thing. But I would really prefer they do something else,&amp;quot; she says. Anyway, &amp;quot;after two days of it, Brad and I were so stressed we never wanted to do it again.&amp;quot; If Jolie takes a certain pride in seven-year-old Shiloh&amp;#039;s burgeoning riot-grrrl attitude\u2014&amp;quot;We do laugh that she&amp;#039;s got our combination of some kind of crazy bravery. We talk a lot about, &amp;#039;Mommy gets mad if Daddy builds a [skate] ramp too high&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot;\u2014it&amp;#039;s probably because, like her daughter, she grew up more interested in daggers than dresses. Rubbing shoulders with the rich kids at Beverly Hills High School but coming home to a household with a tight budget\u2014her mother, former actress Marcheline Bertrand, gave up her career to raise two kids without the support of their famous and famously derelict father, Jon Voight\u2014Angelina was hardly the prom-queen type. &amp;quot;In high school, all my friends were always boys. [I was] a lot like Shi,&amp;quot; she says. Girlish distractions held no allure. &amp;quot;I wasn&amp;#039;t very social, I didn&amp;#039;t go to the mall, I didn&amp;#039;t have sleepovers. I was very private.&amp;quot; She had a few friends and by age 14 had a live-in boyfriend. Related: Angelina Jolie Is Probably Not Going to Be President Jolie adored her mother, who died at 56 in 2007 of ovarian cancer; she has spoken of her admiringly as &amp;quot;a very soft woman,&amp;quot; the kind who never raised her voice at her children. But there were repercussions from watching what could happen to a woman like that, struggling to raise a family alone. &amp;quot;I never thought I&amp;#039;d have children, I never thought I&amp;#039;d be in love, I never thought I&amp;#039;d meet the right person,&amp;quot; Jolie says. &amp;quot;Having come from a broken home\u2014you kind of accept that certain things feel like a fairy tale, and you just don&amp;#039;t look for them.&amp;quot; So when in her early twenties journalists would interview her, she says she thought, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have anything to share, I don&amp;#039;t have anything to contribute, I don&amp;#039;t know yet what that is. You start asking those questions\u2014you want to know that you&amp;#039;re a person of substance.&amp;quot; Her path to self-discovery provided the viewing public with some gems: There was the girlfriend, the early marriage to Jonny Lee Miller, the other early marriage to Billy Bob Thornton, the infamous vials of blood, the frequent assertions (in interviews and occasionally on red carpets) of sexual daring. After all that, the revelation that Angelina Jolie was suddenly jetting off on United Nations missions around the world was perhaps the most puzzling of all. The tumult was &amp;quot;misinterpreted as [me] wanting to be rebellious,&amp;quot; Jolie says. &amp;quot;And in fact it wasn&amp;#039;t a need to be destructive or rebellious\u2014it&amp;#039;s that need to find a full voice, to push open the walls around you. You want to be free. And as you start to feel that you are being corralled into a certain life, you kind of push against it. It may come out very strange, it may be interpreted wrong, but you&amp;#039;re trying to find out who you are.&amp;quot; What she hit upon was a deep and abiding fear &amp;quot;of a life half-lived,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I realized that very young\u2014that a life where you don&amp;#039;t live to your full potential, or you don&amp;#039;t experiment, or you&amp;#039;re afraid, or you hesitate, or there are things you know you should do but you just don&amp;#039;t get around to them, is a life that I&amp;#039;d be miserable living, and the only way to feel that I&amp;#039;m on the right path is just to be true to myself, whatever that may be, and that tends to come with stepping out of something that&amp;#039;s maybe safe or traditional.&amp;quot; Related: Why We Shouldn&amp;#039;t Get Angelina Jolie&amp;#039;s Double Mastectomy, According to Doctors On the basis that she doesn&amp;#039;t want to use her health issues to promote Maleficent, Jolie declines to elaborate on the much-parsed subject of her double mastectomy, a doubtlessly painful multiphase procedure that she underwent last year after discovering that she, like her mother, carries the BRCA1 cancer gene mutation. It is actually hard to imagine her being more candid about what she went through than she was in her May 2013 New York Times op-ed, &amp;quot;My Medical Choice,&amp;quot; which both cemented her standing as Hollywood&amp;#039;s living embodiment of conscience and ignited a public debate about cancer screening and treatment. It was a courageous act for any woman, and all the more so for one whose living in part depends on how the public perceives her sex appeal. In the midst of this, Unbroken served as both a metaphor for and a welcome diversion from the ordeal. &amp;quot;I was very happy I had a project I love to center me and focus me, and to get right back to work,&amp;quot; she says.  Jolie has said that in 2009, after &amp;quot;being in a nightgown for months&amp;quot; following the birth of her twins, she signed on for Salt\u2014a part initially intended for Tom Cruise\u2014because she was looking forward to the most physically challenging role of her career. After turning herself over to the softer side of womanhood, she wanted to fight, throw punches, kick bad guys. To remind herself (and the rest of us) of the flip side of her coin. Unbroken similarly feeds those parts of Jolie. The role of Louis Zamperini &amp;quot;is a real man&amp;#039;s man,&amp;quot; she says, with obvious relish. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like the Rockys, the Cool Hand Lukes, The Bridge on the River Kwai\u2014the guys who get back up. It&amp;#039;s nice to have a character like that. It&amp;#039;s good for all of us, but it&amp;#039;s also good for boys.&amp;quot; Jolie, as always, has her children, particularly her three sons, in mind. &amp;quot;I think Unbroken will be the one that will teach them something about life that I can try to tell them, but better just to show them an example of someone who I think is a great human being.&amp;quot; If she had any lingering doubts as to whether this was the right story for her to tell, those were quelled when she decided to try to find Zamperini, now 97, and discovered that he lives &amp;quot;three minutes up the road&amp;quot; from her home in the Los Angeles hills\u2014close enough for Angelina Jolie to drop by for breakfast, which is apparently now a regular date. She compares the feeling to a moment in Cambodia when she was newly divorced, and about as far from motherhood and settling down as a woman could be. &amp;quot;I was sitting there with this group of children, on a UN mission, and I was suddenly absolutely sure that my son was in that country,&amp;quot; she says, the sense of wonder at how she found Maddox, now 12, still fresh. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t know where it came from, don&amp;#039;t know what brought me there.&amp;quot; She shrugs. &amp;quot;There are certain things in your life where you feel you&amp;#039;re on the right path, and [if] you&amp;#039;re open to it, there is something that can guide you,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I was being true to myself and I was doing something for others\u2014I was in the right moment, I was on the right path. Sometimes things can become very clear.&amp;quot; Zamperini, still an indomitable force all these decades later, lit something in her. &amp;quot;There couldn&amp;#039;t be a film that means more to me, a subject matter that means more to me,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I needed him myself, he&amp;#039;s gotten me through some things recently, his fight and his fire and his positive attitude, and his willingness to just go face in to things and tackle them.&amp;quot; Last fall, while Jolie was shooting Unbroken in Australia, Pitt was working on his own WWII drama, Fury, in England. It was the first time they&amp;#039;d broken their parenting pact\u2014while one shoots a film, the other runs the family full-time\u2014and she says they won&amp;#039;t do it again. Asked what has changed about her relationship with Pitt now that they&amp;#039;re eight years in, she pauses. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s funny, it&amp;#039;s one of those questions I haven&amp;#039;t asked myself\u2014I&amp;#039;m discovering that as I sit here,&amp;quot; she says, laughing. &amp;quot;How do I feel? Brad would probably be very curious to hear this.&amp;quot; Related: 25 Most Iconic Red Lips in Film She pauses for a second. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re\u2026family,&amp;quot; she says. For a woman who thought she&amp;#039;d never have a family of her own, then blew up with the kind of fame that can become an isolation chamber, that&amp;#039;s saying a lot. &amp;quot;You get together and you&amp;#039;re two individuals and you feel inspired by each other, you challenge each other, you complement each other, drive each other beautifully crazy. After all these years, we have history\u2014and when you have history with somebody, you&amp;#039;re friends in such a very real, deep way that there&amp;#039;s such a comfort, and an ease, and a deep love that comes from having been through quite a lot together.&amp;quot; Which wends our way to the next question\u2014the one that&amp;#039;s been selling gossip rags for eight years. &amp;quot;You know what&amp;#039;s funny?&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;We even forget that we&amp;#039;re engaged. I don&amp;#039;t even know how long we&amp;#039;ve been engaged for\u2014&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Two years,&amp;quot; I interrupt, perhaps a little too quickly\u2014wondering how anyone could forget something like that while wearing such a blinding reminder on her left ring finger every day. &amp;quot;Thank you.&amp;quot; She laughs. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s funny.&amp;quot; Of course she&amp;#039;s not going to give us an answer. But if it makes you feel better, the Jolie-Pitt children are in the same boat as the rest of us. &amp;quot;I tell you, the kids are so excited about the wedding,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;We can&amp;#039;t tell them when it is, and they don&amp;#039;t know when it is. They thought it was last year, and then it wasn&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot; But they won&amp;#039;t make them wait forever. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s an unusual situation, where all eight of us are kind of getting married,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I think the kids may feel much more at peace\u2026maybe it feels more permanent. They understand what marriage is and the concept of it. And they like the idea of Mommy and Daddy getting married.&amp;quot; Shiloh may not care for princesses, but she is studying the art of being a flower girl. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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