Angelina Jolie Talks About Being Back in the Director’s Chair for ‘Without Blood’
variety.comNick Vivarelli International Correspondent When Angelina Jolie read Alessandro Baricco’s short novel “Without Blood” — the basis for her next directorial effort — the Italian fable about the brutality of war and healing in its aftermath had an immediate therapeutic effect. “I read it right as I was going through the beginning of a very dark time in my life.
I read it in the month that followed my divorce [from Brad Pitt in 2016],” recalls Jolie, who shot the adaptation at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. “It had the effect on me that it’s had on so many people,” Jolie says, noting that the blurb on the cover says that the book is about the complexity of the human condition. “I didn’t understand that when I first read it.
I just knew the book had a profound effect on me,” she says. “I think it’s one of those pieces of art, of somebody’s intuition and mind, that puts something forward that has so much truth in it about who we are as people.” She talks to Variety in the midst of shooting on a bustling soundstage where a key scene following a shootout at an isolated farmhouse is being set up.
Ironically for a movie titled “Without Blood,” the wood farmhouse floor built on the Cinecittà soundstage is strewn with blood and bullets, and final touches are being put on a bullet-ridden dummy lying on the ground. “A Western?” says Jolie, about the tone of the film. “We’ve embraced that.” “We love dead bodies; we definitely have dead bodies,” says Emmy-winning production designer Jon Hutman, who recalls meeting Jolie in 2010 on the Venice set of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “The Tourist.” He has worked on four of the actor’s five films since then. “Having a lot of shootouts means you have to have multiples of the same
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