Angelina Jolie first read the script for Salt just after she had given birth to her much-adored twins, Vivienne and Knox. As she points out, it was rather difficult to imagine making an action-thriller which would involve high-octane stunts—most performed by Jolie herself—including gritty fight sequences, edging along a tiny ledge 12 stories high, and leaping on to moving cars, when your focus is on caring for your newborn babies.
But then, the Oscar-winning actress clearly loves a challenge. “I do like making movies like this, and I loved making this one,” she smiles. “When they first called me about Salt, I had just had the twins and I was at home in my nightgown feeling very soft and maternal.
“I remember I was with them in my bedroom, you know as you do in the early weeks when you’ve just had a baby, and I flipped through the script and it was all about getting out there and attacking and being very physical and I did feel really funny, in my nightgown in my bedroom, thinking, ‘If I can do this, it would be a nice balance.’ You know, from being soft and Mommy and then going back to work and doing this hard, physical role. It seemed like a real challenge. And I like that.”
The origins of the project date back even further. Jolie recalls a meeting with Amy Pascal, cochairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group, a few years back when among other projects they discussed the new James Bond movie Casino Royale.
“We had this lovely, playful talk about the fact that I would have preferred to have played Bond,” she laughs. “I think they were thinking that maybe I could play the girl in the movie but actually, I was pregnant at the time and I couldn’t have done it. And it wasn’t right for me—the people they cast in Casino Royale were perfect for it.
“But, I guess, the idea stuck with Amy because years later she called me and said, ‘I think I’ve found it....’” The “it” in question was Salt, a contemporary spy thriller originally written for a male actor. (That would be Tom Cruise.) Pascal reasoned—and Jolie agreed—that the script could skilfully be adapted to make the protagonist, a CIA agent accused of being a sleeper spy for the Russians, into a female lead.
Indeed, for Jolie the film was exactly what she was looking for and ticked all the boxes—strong characters played by an expert band of actors (including Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor) with dynamic action sequences that are very much a part of a compelling story directed by a filmmaker, Phillip Noyce, that she admires and had worked with successfully before on The Bone Collector.
“With Salt, the writers didn’t necessarily sit down and think, ‘What would a woman do in this situation?’ They just thought, ‘What would a CIA agent do?’ And I think that immediately made it one of the better roles I’ve read and something that was much more challenging to do.”
Often, women in spy films have been little more than beautiful adornments to the story. Not so with Salt. “Females in those films rely on being female but we wanted to ignore that. She’s just Salt. It’s not about being a female and she certainly doesn’t use her sexuality to get anything in the film,” says Jolie.
“In fact, in many ways it’s the roughest I’ve looked at a certain stage because when you fight it gets ugly, and if somebody breaks your nose it’s not pretty.”
When Evelyn Salt, a veteran CIA operative, is accused of being a sleeper spy for a foreign power, she has to fight to prove her innocence. And the first priority is to evade capture and go on the run. She’s a woman alone designated as an enemy of the state and the colleagues she has worked with for years are now out to catch her.
For Jolie, playing an ambiguous character who might not be who she claims to be was a whole lot of fun. She loved the fact that the audience will be on the edge of their seats wondering if Salt is a loyal CIA agent or, in fact, she could really be a mole, deep under cover for the enemy.
“I think you go through the film, if we have done our job right, not being sure of who she is and when you think you are sure of who she is, maybe even that is different than you thought it was.
“I like that where you don’t quite know what’s going on. And hopefully we made it smart enough and respected the audience’s intelligence and tried to make it complicated. I think they will like it.”
Jolie, along with stunt coordinator Simon Crane and her stunt double Eunice Huthart—who have both collaborated successfully with the actress on previous films including Tomb Raider and Mr. and Mrs. Smith—developed a distinctive style of fighting and developed the spectacular stunts seen in the film.
“We talked a lot about the way she fights,” she says. “And the thing that was maybe the least obvious for a woman became the thing that we relied on which is that she’s mean. Not flashy, not gymnastic, not inventive—she’s just mean when it comes down to it.”
She embraced the considerable physical challenges that presented themselves during filming and, wherever possible, did the action scenes herself—including a hair-raising sequence where she jumps from a bridge on to a moving car and climbs out on to the ledge of a building 12 stories up.
“I get a kick out of it. I love that kind of thing. And the thing is that Simon and Eunice both know me so well so when they set a stunt, they have me in mind and they know what I can do.
“There are a few things, when you look closely at the film, that involve heights or something moving fast and those are two things that I’m very comfortable with. “And the people that know you know the things that you love doing and they come up with things like climbing outside of a building on a ledge really high up, or jumping off a bridge. They know that’s where I’m comfortable and they will adjust stunts to the things that I love instead of just randomly throwing anything at me.”
Her willingness to tackle as much as possible did mean that she picked up one rather nasty injury. Filming a sequence for the end of the movie, she was required to burst into a room under fire, roll across the floor and fire her own weapon.
“It was first thing in the morning and I thought, ‘This is a piece of cake,’” she recalls. “I jumped inside shooting and somehow I went right into this ledge that was about a foot off the floor and it knocked me right between the eyes and cut me open.”
After some on-set treatment, Jolie was taken to hospital for a checkup. “It was fine. I had a cut on my head and they covered it up with a patch. And I was back shooting stunts that day. And it’s funny because in the later scenes my nose is broken and I’m pretty cut up, so we didn’t even have to cover it up—it blended right in.”
Jolie met several real women CIA operatives and it gave her invaluable insight into women who, essentially, have to live secret lives and dare not reveal the true nature of the highly dangerous work they do.
“The two women I met were sweet-looking, smallish-framed, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, and looked like they would be running the little store in the High Street or maybe teaching in Ohio,” she says. “But once you started talking to them, you could see how these women navigated themselves through this incredibly demanding world and how dangerous it was. And they are tough, tough women.
“And one of the things they told me was that as women they had such difficulty dealing with relationships; they said the hardest thing is to be in a job where you can’t talk about anything that is happening with your husband.”
The film, she says, is grounded in that kind of detailed reality. And even the premise that a deeply buried sleeper could exist within the ranks of the CIA is not so far-fetched. Evelyn Salt is forced to go on the run to prove her innocence when a defector alleges that she’s a mole who will trigger “Day X”—the day when Russian sleeper spies are activated to begin a war against the United States.
Day X is still a controversial topic inside the CIA, says Jolie. Some firmly believe that the theory is real, while others dismiss it as a myth.
“But there are CIA agents that do believe that there are sleepers. And when you think about it, there have been in the past and it is a very strong tool to use if you want to infiltrate an organization. So you do wonder.” Jolie was delighted to be reunited with director Phillip Noyce, some 10 years after they made The Bone Collector together. They picked up right where they left off, she says.
“We had an immediate communication. Phillip is somebody who understands action but he is also somebody who understands drama and emotion and real people and subtleties and nuance and character. He is one of those rare directors who instinctively knows that balance very well. I was relieved when I knew Phillip was directing the film because I knew he could do it.”
Her costars, too, were a “joy” to work with, she says. “I think the world of both of them. You know, we could all have approached this as a summer movie and kind of relaxed but nobody did that. We took it as a serious endeavor and we really worked hard.”
There was, though, time for some fun. Jolie and her partner Brad Pitt are the extremely proud parents of six young children: Maddox, 8, Pax, 5, Zahara, 4, Shiloh, 3, and twins Vivienne and Knox, who turned two in July.
“Brad and I take turns to make films,” says Jolie. “So if I’m working, he’s not and vice versa. When I made Salt it was a very happy time for all of us. The older children would come on set and see some of the rigs and they just want to get on them—so they would get hooked up to things and fly across the stage.
“They did a lot of that when they came to visit. They would play with fake blood and get pretend cuts and bruises from the makeup department and they had a lot of fun. We all did.”
The daughter of French actress Marcheline Betrand and Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight, throughout her career, Jolie, 34, has enjoyed switching genres from action—playing the popular computer-game heroine in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and its sequel Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, an assassin in Mr. and Mrs. Smith—to more serious drama including Beyond Borders and, more recently, the highly acclaimed A Mighty Heart in which she played the widow of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl.
Her work as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees started after first visiting Cambodia, where she partly filmed the first Tomb Raider. Since then, she has traveled to more than 30 countries, including many dangerous regions, highlighting the plight of refugees. She has also funded several humanitarian projects in Asia and Africa. She is also currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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