Military Movies - Military Times

Angelina and Clint see eye to eye

NEW YORK — Angelina Jolie is the brash young rebel. Clint Eastwood is the wise, grizzled veteran.

The mix sounds like the foundation of a buddy-cop movie, but it basically summarizes the creative chemistry behind Eastwood’s “Changeling.” It stars Jolie in the true story of a single mother searching for her kidnapped son in Depression-era Los Angeles after the wrong boy is returned to her.

It’s fitting that motherhood is central to Jolie’s role in the film, which opens in select cities Oct. 24. The actress and her brood of six with actor Brad Pitt have become a global sensation.

Fitting, too, what happened to her on the set. “I got pregnant during filming, yeah,” she says, then hesitates, suppressing a smile.

Eastwood, sitting beside her on a couch in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, looks stunned and says, “Don’t tell me on my watch!”

Jolie curls forward, crosses her legs (in high-heeled black boots) and covers one eye with her hand. “I won’t tell you which scene,” she half-whispers to him.

Though “Changeling” is a dark drama, Eastwood and Jolie together bring out each other’s playful sides. Eastwood jokingly calls their friendship “Clintalina.”

The director, 78, is famously mellow behind the camera, but working with Jolie, 33, his tough-guy bluntness was something she preferred.

Jolie recalls shooting one pivotal scene: At a train station, the mother, Christine Collins, meets the boy who is pretending to be her son and is bullied by police into smiling for the cameras. “It was very frustrating,” Jolie says. “I couldn’t figure out how to do that scene. I kept thinking, “How do you respond to something like this? It’s not your kid, and somebody is telling you it’s your kid.’ ”

Eastwood recalled the scene, with a touch of sarcasm, “I was a big help. I just said, “Do it! Just do it.’”

Jolie tells him, “You don’t give yourself enough credit. You said to me something like, “She must be thinking, ‘This is a (expletive) joke.’ It was a great piece of directing! That little bit of help. I thought, ‘It is that way! It must be some kind of cruel joke.’ ”

Eastwood laughs and says, “I’ll remember that the next time I do a French cinema class. “Oh, yes, I told her ... .’ ”

Every parent’s ‘nightmare’

Apart from being a mystery about a missing boy, the undercurrent of “Changeling” is the tragedy of a lone truth-teller — dismissed by a society that then tries to destroy her. Police eventually claim she fails to recognize her child because she’s mentally unbalanced and threaten her with detention in an asylum. Meanwhile, her real son remains lost, and grisly crimes against children are going undiscovered.

“It’s a horror film,” says Eastwood, who has seven kids of his own, the oldest 44 and the youngest 11. “It’s the worst nightmare an adult could have, especially a woman by herself at a time in the world where there was not a lot of recourse for her.”

Eastwood and Jolie say “Changeling” celebrates the virtue of disobedience.

“I think that’s just part of growing up,” Jolie says. “You learn to question your parents, you learn to question your teachers. It’s the evolution of trying to find your way and not just let any one person or one entity tell you exactly how you should think or feel about anything.”

The movie also reveals some of Eastwood and Jolie’s shared intensity.

One scene starkly depicts a state prison execution. Eastwood says: “Somebody was saying they thought the execution scene was vivid, and ‘Does that mean you approve of capital punishment?’ I said, ‘When it comes to children, hell, yes!’ ”

“Yeah,” Jolie says, nodding. “If somebody did that to my child, I would go after them.”

A momentary silence hangs in the air, and they both look at each other as if they mean it.

‘It was so easy to get upset’

Jolie, who, in addition to infant twins Knox and Vivienne, has Maddox, 7, Pax, 4, Zahara, 3, and Shiloh, 2, says it wasn’t necessary to draw on her own maternal instincts for “Changeling.” Quite the opposite: She tried not to think of her own children.

“It was so personal that I spent a lot of time trying not to think about it,” she says. “It was so easy to get upset. It was easier to understand the emotion, but it was so hard to want to allow that to come out. You don’t even want to sit and think about something happening to your kid, let alone really let it absorb you and get emotional about it and scream things like, “I want my son back!’ It just makes you want to take a shower and wash it off and get it as far away from you as possible.”

To play Collins, who begins as a meek woman, pleading with police instead of accusing or attacking them, Jolie instead drew on another part of her life: her own mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died of cancer in January 2007.

“Christine is very much like my mother, who was very soft and soft-spoken, and it was hard for her to get angry and fight for something. But she would do anything for her children and could possibly fight that hard, even though she was quite shy. I thought a lot about that and the appreciation of that love.” (Her father is the actor Jon Voight, from whom she has been estranged for years.)

‘A new kind of family’

Jolie’s new family has come to define her. The world watched as she, and later Pitt, created a family through adoption (three of their children are from Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam) and biological reproduction (three more). She has said they’d like at least one more.

“They are a new kind of family,” says Suzanne Riss, editor in chief of Working Mother magazine. “Families have welcomed adopted children long before Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, but they brought a new level of visibility and acceptability. They symbolize a generosity of spirit that is irresistible.”

And, she says, “She and Brad Pitt seem to be very involved. People love to see him walking around with a kid on his shoulders and taking them bike racing. They consider themselves parents first.”

Jolie describes the latest additions to her brood in terms familiar to any parent: “When you have more than three kids, it’s just chaos anyway, no matter how many you add.”

Eastwood nods, smiling like an affectionate uncle who has been there before: “Once you get beyond two, that’s it,” he says, slicing the air with his hand.

“It’s even more beautiful chaos in the house,” she says of the 2-month-old twins. “They’re lovely. And all I wished for was that they’d be healthy, because I was nervous since they were twins. They are, and they’re great.”

Not only healthy, but voracious. “I was late (to the interview) because I was feeding them,” says Jolie, whose family photos of her breast-feeding appear in November’s W magazine.

But there is a possible drawback to her high-profile family life. Tom O’Neil, Oscar analyst for TheEnvelope.com, has been writing that Jolie’s “passionate” performance has the potential to land her a second Academy Award, this time for best actress. (She won the supporting actress Oscar for 1999’s “Girl, Interrupted.”)

“She’s the victim of injustice who finally battles back. She’s vulnerable but strong, and she admirably does not play it on the ceiling,” O’Neil says. But he cautions the parallel between her real-life mothering image and the woman in the film could backfire. “It’s so close to home and who she really is that it could seem less like a performance.”

Eastwood, of course, believes in her talent, but even he was wary of her presence at first. They didn’t know each other before “Changeling,” but when Eastwood got the script, she already had expressed interest, and he said he’d heard she was “a really great gal and a real pro. A real pro is what I like to hear.”

But, he says, “When we were going to start this film, I thought, ‘Here is somebody who is on the cover of every magazine, and she gets a tremendous amount of attention, she and Brad together, but by herself as well.’ I thought, ‘This person could be a real jaded creature.’ But she isn’t. She’s very normal. I joke with her. I called her Angie Dickinson all the time, and she never got upset.’

Their work habits meshed well, too.

“She seemed to like the style I like to shoot in, which is not exactly dawdling,” Eastwood says. “I like to find things in people before they have the chance to overthink it. I like to hear it the first time it has been spoken out loud. And she came extremely prepared. As prepared as any actress I’ve ever ... worked with.”

Jolie says she was a bit more exuberant when she learned he signed on. “I got all excited, like a little girl, and jumped around. Then I was very shy on my first day.”

She joins in pumping Eastwood for information about “Gran Torino,” his drama scheduled to arrive in December, in which he stars as a racist Korean War veteran who bonds with an immigrant neighbor over his classic car. And she teases, “You still haven’t found a role for me in the next movie, though, have you?”

Eastwood pauses momentarily, surmises her figure in a tight black dress, and jokes: “You could play an automobile in ‘Gran Torino.’ ”

While talking about the dowdy Depression-era costumes and makeup, Eastwood casually refers to Jolie as “the world’s most beautiful woman.”

That makes her slide over and sink down into the cradle of his arm, cooing, “That’s why he’s him. That’s why the girls just go, ‘ooohhhh.’ ”

When Jolie is about to describe her impressions of Eastwood, he gets up and pretends he’s going to leave the room. “This is really hard in front of him,” she says. “That’s it, Clint. Go outside! I’m going to really embarrass you. I’ve never seen you embarrassed, actually.”

After feigning toward the door, Eastwood instead grabs a bottle of water and returns to his spot beside her on the couch, prepared to squirm.

Jolie lets him have it with both barrels. “He is, to me, very much the ideal man. Maybe it’s generational, but I think we could use more of it. People look up to him. He is absolutely who he is. He doesn’t apologize to anybody. He has very, very strong, decisive opinions and is very gracious as a man, as a friend and somebody on set as a director, too.”

Eastwood looks as if he’s ready to head for the door again. And the way she’s talking, maybe Pitt will kick it down first.

Jolie laughs. Eastwood may be “the” ideal man, she says, “but Brad knows that he’s ‘my’ ideal man.”

Eastwood jokingly suggests that if they work together again, it should be “The ‘Tomb Raider’ and ‘Dirty Harry.’ ”

Who would win in a showdown?

Eastwood whistles at this question — the hollow, mournful tune from his old Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns.

“I wouldn’t want to face him,” Jolie says. “I want to be on the same side.”