The undisputed queen

Hollywood diaries

Feted recently at a luncheon in the soaring gilt and velvet-draped ballroom of the Metropolitan Club, where she was eagerly awaited by New York’s media elite, Angelina Jolie swept into the city, and the awards season, on a tsunami of anticipation.

Hopes were high that Jolie’s Unbroken, about an Olympian turned World War II prisoner of war, would ride to the fore and inject sizzle into a leaderless Oscar race. It spent months hovering at or near the top of many prognosticators’ best picture lists, never mind that no one had seen it: All the tantalising ingredients were there.

The film is based on a best-selling true story and directed by a famous Academy Award-winning woman who, as it happens, was recently named a dame — the female equivalent of being knighted — by Queen Elizabeth.

And, as the opulent lunch, with its Versailles-like setting, made clear, Universal Pictures is giving Unbroken a full-court press. All of which amounts to a lot of pressure for a second-time feature filmmaker.

“I was very, very nervous to get it right,” Jolie said. “What was strange to me is: This is a film that took 60 years and wasn’t a hot property and didn’t have a known cast,” she added. “It was kind of the little film that could, and suddenly became the film of great expectation. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t fail. I wasn’t expecting anything.”

The studio had arranged for her to have the one-on-one interview a few hours after Jolie appeared on The Daily Show, and right before she held court at the Porter House party, where she would chat with Barbara Walters, among many others. The interview also preceded, by days, the leaked Sony emails wherein producer Scott Rudin would excoriate Jolie and her film.

As delicately boned as a bird, and as extraordinary looking in person as you might imagine, she was at once easygoing and poised, and spoke passionately yet concisely about the film, and its subject, Louis Zamperini.

There is a question of how wider audiences, and Academy voters, will respond to the repeated brutal beatings endured by Zamperini, played by British actor Jack O’Connell. Award tea-leaves reading aside, the film is in its own right a career milestone for a woman whose work has routinely been eclipsed by rabid fascination with her supra-human physicality, personal life and quirky antics of yore, be it wearing one of those infamous blood vials, or bussing her brother, or, in 2012, flashing a right leg that became a meme.

“This is the first time I’ve attempted anything on this kind of scale,” Jolie said, adding that the one review that mattered most to her was that of Zamperini.

He died at 97 in July and did not see the finished film, but watched unedited footage in 20-minute increments on Jolie’s laptop in his hospital bed. “He loved it,” said Cynthia Zamperini, his daughter. “He just put all of his faith in her.”

Zamperini happened to live close to the Los Angeles home of Jolie and her husband Brad Pitt. For their first meeting, Jolie arrived at his house carrying an enormous basket laden with Italian delicacies, Pitt in tow.

“She wouldn’t let Brad carry it,” Cynthia recalled. “I see this slender, fragile-looking, beautiful woman, and I could hear her saying, ‘No honey, I’m carrying this, I’m giving this to Louis.’”

Cynthia Zamperini said Jolie and Louis Zamperini, whose wife of 55 years died in 2001, both lit up upon meeting each other. “He got to fall in love again, at the end of his life,” Cynthia said.

For Jolie, the bond felt just as strong. She knew she admired him, she said, and hoped that she would like him. “I didn’t know I would fall in love with him,” she said, “and then he would become like a father to me, but he did.”

All of which made it painful to edit the film, Jolie said, especially after Zamperini’s death (which helps explain the film’s long running time of 137 minutes). After he died, she said, she holed up in her office with the lights off, cowered under a jacket and wept, wondering, “How could I trim a moment of his life when it had become so sacred?”
She still has a hard time getting through some interviews, and teared up talking about Zamperini in our chat.

And, asked how she felt about a history-in-the-making shot at an Oscar nod, Jolie said that while she did not approach the film as a female director, she was nonetheless shocked at how few other female directors were working in Hollywood.

“I think that regardless of a nomination, it’s changing,” Jolie said. “We’re getting our work out there, and supporting each other, and it’s time.”

Cara Buckley
The New York Times