At the Toronto International Film Festival, Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek talked to Variety about Without Blood, which Jolie directed from Alessandro Baricco’s novel: a film about what war leaves behind, and about whether listening can heal.
Why war, again
Four of Jolie’s five films as a director deal with war in some way. Conflict, she explains, brings out “the absolutely the worst” in our behaviour towards each other, and often the best, in those who rise above it. Much of an artist’s work, she says, is a study of what it is to be human. Having travelled and worked in conflict zones, she has always asked why and how. This film sits with the reality of what happens after the fighting, and it is deliberately not easy to watch. The cast shot at Rome’s Cinecittà studios, where they felt the presence of the great names of Italian cinema.
Salma Hayek’s fear
Hayek admits she did not want to take the role at first. Her character suffers so much that she would have to “keep it boiling” for weeks, with nowhere to hide from the camera. Then, talking with Jolie, she began to see her own traumas, and those of people close to her, in this woman who seemed so foreign. Many women, she says, even outside war, have been tossed aside, unseen or abused. What she loves about the character is that she wants to sit across from the other side of the conflict and listen, to understand. “I will never be the same actor after shooting this film.”
A scene that could not be directed
The film asks whether revenge, presented as the only drug for the pain, really frees anyone, or simply creates more ghosts. For Jolie, the hardest day was near the end: a moment of transformation that could neither be acted nor directed in the usual way, and which depended on the actors arriving open. Hayek describes Jolie’s direction as equipping her fully for climbing Everest, then letting her be free.