Angelina Jolie Vanity Fair Cover October 2011

Angelina Jolie covers the October 2011 Vanity Fair. For some reason, Vanity Fair has stopped trying and so we’re left with a cover on which Jolie is trying to steal your soul. WTF is this cover? She’s one of the world’s most beautiful women, still, and yet this is like the Succubus Special. Her face looks distorted and off and they made her head look too big. There’s no focus on the rest of her body, yet it’s not really a proper beauty shot. You can’t even see her neck. This is somewhere between lazy composition and horrible Photoshop. Christ. Jolie uses the interview to set the record straight about the dumber rumours that persist in the tackier liar tabloids. For the record: she’s not engaged, she’s not planning a wedding, she’s not pregnant, and she’s not planning to adopt. So STOP IT.

On rumours by the likes of ITW/ L&S/ Enquirer/ Star: There’s ‘no secret wedding’ in the works for her and Pitt. ‘I’m not pregnant. I’m not adopting at the moment.’
On being a director: ‘Brad thinks I’m going to be a nightmare,’ Jolie jokes, telling how directing her new movie, In the Land of Blood and Honey, has changed the way she will approach her acting career. ‘I had such a good experience he thinks I’m going to be impatient with directors, which I already am. I get impatient with people working on a film that have their head in their hands like it’s the most complicated thing in the world.’
More on the new venture: ‘I’ve never felt more exposed. My whole career, I’ve hidden behind other people’s words,’ Jolie says of her screenwriting and feature directorial debut. ‘Now it’s me talking. You feel ridiculous when you get something wrong.’
On the script: ‘I had the flu,’ Jolie says of how she came to write the script. ‘I had to be quarantined from the children for two days. I was in the attic of a house in France. I was isolated, pacing. I don’t watch TV and I wasn’t reading anything. So I started writing. I went from the beginning to the end. I didn’t know any other way.’ She says she then let Brad take the script to read on a trip, ‘He called and said, ‘You know, honey, it’s not that bad.’’
Jolie admits she did not initially intend to direct the film: ‘It was something I didn’t trust out of my hands,’ she explains. ‘So by default I ended up putting myself in as director.’
On her decision to use all unknown actors from the region: ‘It couldn’t be anybody else. It’s their story. It was important that they were willing to do it. If none of them were willing, I wouldn’t have made it.’
On Brad’s supportive role throughout the project: ‘He’d come in and say what he liked or what he didn’t understand. Like any woman, I would listen to most of it and fight a few things. He’s been so supportive. But it’s hard to separate the person that loves you from the critic, so I don’t think he’s a fair judge.’ But she goes on to say that ‘people will judge for themselves. I think if you make a good movie people walk away arguing.’
On testing the waters: Before shooting, Jolie says, she sent the script to ‘reporters and writers, people of Serbian and Bosnian nationality who’d been through the war. I was gauging the accuracy…. If they said no, I wouldn’t have done it.’