ike most things involving Angelina Jolie, stepping foot into her house is an experience so heightened one wonders if it's for real or the product of careful orchestration. The large gates to her recently purchased Los Feliz house—an 11,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts mansion once owned by the epic filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille—slowly swing open, revealing rolling lawns, lush trees at the perimeter.
There were rumors he was having an affair with Marion Cotillard . Jolie got the early jump P.R.-wise. But Pitt won hearts and minds with theAs for Jolie, a life already bursting at the seams—with acting, directing, humanitarian work, parenting six kids, and guest-lecturing on women's rights at the London School of Economics—just got exponentially bigger and more complicated, because she's now doing it alone.
Jolie immediately set the adoption process in motion. A couple of months later, she visited an orphanage in the provincial town of Battambang, having promised herself that she'd go only to one, that she wasn't going to shop around. But Jolie felt uneasy as she wandered the rooms, meeting the children."I didn't feel a connection with any of them," she recalls."They then said, 'There's one more baby.
Cambodia went all in—closing off Battambang for days, giving the filmmakers permits to land in remote zones, providing them with 500 officials from their actual army to play the Khmer Rouge army."It's not a poetic thing to say [that this film] was made by the country," says Jolie. Between cast and crew, some 3,500 Cambodians participated.
In February, the film premiered for an audience of 1,000 at the outdoor amphitheater near the temple complex of Angkor Wat. According to numerous reports, it was a screening filled with tears of recognition, remembrance, and catharsis. What moved Jolie perhaps more than anything was that"the Cambodian people had a big movie premiere. They saw a movie for which they made the sets. [It was] their actors doing a great job, their country looking beautiful even through all the horrors.
She's a wonderful, beautiful, genuine, brave woman! ❤ 💯