Brangelina (14 page)

Cathy Konrad, Ryder’s fellow producer, was equally impressed. “We knew from her energy that she very much understood Lisa, and that she was inside Lisa’s skin,” she recalled. “She was fully realized in the audition, which is a rare thing to find. She was the perfect level of octane.”

Mangold still had a few readings scheduled that day, but he had already made up his mind. “I just wanted to go to Starbucks and make a deal,” he recalled. He sent Jolie’s audition tape to the studio masters, who quickly seconded his choice. “She’s a female James Dean for our time,” said Columbia Pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal, who gave the project the green light. “I’d make any movie with her in it.”

For her part, Jolie remembers what was going through her head when she finished reading for Mangold that day. “I had been shooting
The Bone Collector
, and I was so deep into that part that I really needed to do Lisa,” she recalls. “She completes the other side of my personality. She’s the person who stands up and screams, the one who isn’t in her head so much. I remember going into the audition thinking, ‘This is so much deeper than just a part. I need to be in this movie because I am in pain.’ And when I finished the audition, it was like: ‘I’m done. Bye.’ I just had to get out of there.”

Jolie never informed Mangold or Ryder that she, like Lisa, had been diagnosed as a sociopath at a young age, though she acknowledged on a number of occasions that she identified with Kaysen’s long-time affliction with self-injury. Despite her first-hand experience and teenage diagnosis, Jolie prepared for the role of Lisa by reading everything she could about her character’s condition. “Since childhood I [also] was called sociopath [so] I tried to get to know what that meant,” she recalled. “I came to a bookshop and asked, ‘Where do you keep literature about sociopaths?’ The seller answered, “Look under the heading ‘serial maniac.’ Well, what a good company I’ve got, my thought was.”

She soon began to understand a little bit about the girl who her character was based on. “I realized it wasn’t that people like her are haunted by dark forces; they just have certain instincts,” she explained afterwards. “What it comes down to is that Lisa doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with her. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, but I can get angry at things and feel that it’s OK to just want to live. I thought Lisa was emotional and unhappy, but she’s considered psychotic and a tough woman. For me, it wasn’t about studying mental patients, but studying and enjoying life.”

As to whether she identified with Lisa, Jolie was inconsistent. In the middle of the movie’s press tour, she declared emphatically to a group of reporters, “I am not the girl, interrupted!” And yet she offered a more coy response to an
L.A. Times
reporter. “All of my characters are me,” she said. “I have to be careful about the characters I play because they’re going to be me.” She was quick to add, “I’ve never created a character who I wouldn’t want to sit down [with and] have a cup of coffee.” She later dropped her guard again with reporters, confessing, “I’m Lisa. I identify with her. She was completely honest, trying to break through to people. She got involved, and she would invest in other people. She was looking for someone to talk to, to drop the bullshit and be real … I know where Lisa is coming from. I can scare people off pretty easily, and I know how to push people’s buttons. Like Lisa, I feel that people aren’t really honest with me and that makes me pull away.”

Jolie later said she was especially nervous about working with
Girl, Interrupted
’s mostly female cast; she recalled her experience on the mostly female
Foxfire
as a nightmare, despite her hookup with Jenny Shimizu. “I thought it would be bad. I’m usually with men. I tried to work with a group of women once, and it didn’t [work]. But I’m working with amazing actresses. And we really bonded.”

That wasn’t the same recollection of a technician on the film, who said the cast didn’t seem to get along at all. “They were very, very icy with each other,” he recalled. “I wouldn’t say that Jolie was worse than the others or that she was a bitch, but she and Winona didn’t seem to get on at all. Mostly they ignored each other, but they didn’t seem to like each other when they did interact.”

Brittany Murphy, who plays the troubled Daisy, had a similar impression of tension on the set, although she attributed it to the nature of the characters. She recalls that Jolie and Ryder, in particular, immersed themselves in their roles. “It was rare to see either of them out of character for the entire twelve-week shoot,” she said afterward. “Angelina’s character Lisa really hated Daisy, so she shunned me. One day, she began talking to me and then stopped cold. She stared hard at me and Angelina was replaced by Lisa, and she walked away.”

Murphy did acknowledge a kind gesture by her co-star after the weeks of being ignored. “She was always teasing me about the wig I had to wear for Daisy. At the end of the shoot, [Angelina] gave me a backpack with a dog [on it] that had exactly the same hair style,” she recalled. “I think it was her way of telling me there were no hard feelings. It was just part of her acting process.”

Murphy had similar memories of Ryder’s on-set behavior. “Winona never actually acknowledged the other actors on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “She started being Susanna the moment she arrived on the set for makeup. It’s not the way I’m used to working, but I think it really worked for this movie because it is so intense.”

Jolie attributed the tension between herself and her producer/co-star to more than just method-acting. She acknowleged that she and Ryder just didn’t get along. “Ask Winona about the night we slept together,” Jolie joked afterwards about the tension between the two. “I was very sociable on the set, just not with her. That’s how it ended up. And when she wasn’t working, she was with Matt [Damon] a lot.”

Asked whether she thought Ryder may have been intimidated by her, she was cagey. “I don’t think she was intimidated by me. I don’t think anybody should be intimidated by anyone … but maybe she thought I was going to try and kiss her.” It was not the first time Jolie implied that her own lesbian tendencies may have caused some friction. “I got very close to some of the other girls,” she recalled. “Quite a few of the women on the film were with girlfriends or had female lovers or were bisexual. Probably one of the few straight women on the set was Winona.”

According to the technician, the real tension was between Jolie and Mangold, who, he says, clashed on more than one occasion. “When she’d yell at him, you’d never know if she was being Lisa or Angelina,” he remembered, “but they definitely butted heads. It was mostly about how she would play a certain scene, with him saying she needed to be more believable, that sort of thing. He had to keep her from going too over the top with the character, and she didn’t always appreciate it. But I wouldn’t say she was difficult. I’ve seen much, much worse from actors. She really cared about her role. If there was a diva on that set, I’d have to say it was Whoopi [Goldberg, who played a kindly nurse]. I think she wanted us all to know that she was a movie star. Angelina treated everybody on the crew nicely.”

As for his own impressions of their on-set tensions, Mangold said, “Angie is rebellious, volatile, and really smart. Playing this role put her in the mode of questioning authority. But if someone delivers the goods like she did, then I’m happy to struggle with the personality.” He noted that she had hung pornographic pictures all over her trailer during filming, but as with their tensions, dismissed it as part of her craft. “Angie was just playing at living in Lisa’s skin and pushing buttons anytime there was a button to push,” he explained. “Angie is that way. She’s a provocative person. She’s very challenging. She’s incredibly smart. She can be two or three steps ahead of you.”

Jolie found the experience of playing a volatile young woman very liberating. “It was actually what I needed: to break out. Because I have been so still, and I’ve cared so much, and my heart’s bled so much, I thought it was going to be very, very hard. Many parts of it were, especially the end. The thing is, her impulses are completely free. So I found
my
impulses completely free, more than a little weird, and I was completely open. Then you realize how much we are restricted. This character could sit at a table, could kiss somebody, throw something, spit on somebody, and just say whatever the fuck she wants. To me she was heartbreaking, and the essence of her was that she wanted somebody to talk to and be a friend. She wanted somebody to drop their fucking guard and stop with the bullshit and just admit whatever it is and be whatever you are and just stop pretending.”

Watching the filming, co-producer Doug Wick was struck by Jolie’s power: “She does that thing that Jack Nicholson can do. Jack can do the most dastardly things, and it’s fun to watch. Angie has that kind of charisma. When Angie does dark things, rather than being repelled, you’re fascinated. She has no boundaries.”

Mangold later compared her passionate performance to a howitzer weapon. The description is fitting as Angelina-Lisa lets loose in one scene:

You don’t know what freedom is! I’m free! I can breathe! And you … you’ll go choke on your average fucking mediocre life! There are too many buttons in the world. Too many buttons, and they’re just … There’s way too many, begging to be pressed. They’re just begging to be pressed! You know, they’re just begging to be pressed. And it makes me wonder. It makes me fucking wonder. Why doesn’t anybody ever press mine? Why am I so neglected?

“There’s incredible control and lyricism and pain, but also rhythms and speed—the way she jumps from here to there is just a different kind of acting,” Mangold said about her performance.

By the time the film finally wrapped, Jolie was relieved to leave the role of Lisa behind her. The part seemed to have consumed her every waking moment and some of her body as well; she had lost a considerable amount of weight, and people were starting to speculate whether she had an eating disorder. “This has been a really tough time in my life. I get nervous, and I don’t eat as much, even though I remind myself. I’m trying to put some weight on,” she said, explaining her skeletal physique. She even told one reporter that she was so thin that her father tried to force-feed her whenever he saw her. “I’m hoping to get on a program soon. When I was in the hospital with a friend who had a drip in her arm, I was like, ‘Maybe if you stick that in me, just actually inject pure protein, you know?’ I would love to have my figure back. I always felt like I didn’t have one.”

Jolie explained that she found the adjustment from the character of Lisa back to herself very difficult. “At the end of the film there’s a certain sense of them saying to Lisa, ‘Nobody wants you to live, nobody likes the way you are. You’d be better off if you were sedated and tied down and shut up.’” Jolie told
Rolling Stone
that she took that personally. “If you feel that you’re the kind of person she is, then it’s really hard, because you’re struggling with, ‘Fuck, am I just damaging to people everywhere? Am I just too loud and too wild, and do I just need to let everybody live their lives and shut up and calm down?’”

Despite her difficulty with the transition, when she was offered a big-budget action film, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, she had no hesitation. The film,
Gone in 60 Seconds
, called for her to portray a “sexy car girl” and Nicolas Cage’s love interest in a story about a ring of car thieves. “There were so many women on
Girl, Interrupted
that when I got this script and saw it was going to be twenty men and me, and so many cars, I was like, ‘Thank God! Testosterone! All right!’”

She was amazed that she was suddenly big enough in Hollywood to be offered such a role. On
The Bone Collector
, just a few months earlier, the studio at first had vetoed Jolie for the role of Amelia and had only offered her a contract after some intense lobbying by the producer and director. This time, the studios were coming to her. She was the actress of the moment. Her face was plastered on countless magazine covers, and the public was fascinated by her unconventional persona. But she was uncomfortable with the new media attention.

She revealed her feelings in an interview around this time with the
Today Show
’s Jill Rappaport, who showed Jolie copies of all the magazines whose covers she had recently graced. “I think there’s a curse to that,” Jolie explained. “That’s my own personal thing—there’s a curse. If it becomes too much about your personality, it’s very hard for people to watch you.” When asked if the new fame was “overwhelming,” Jolie replied, “Yeah. But the best thing is the people I’ve been getting to work with, and the films I’ve been getting to work on. That’s kind of the amazing thing.”

Jolie clearly relished the work, but not the attention. Being the daughter of an actor like Jon Voight had taught her a number of important things about dealing with fame. “I learned a great lesson in having my dad being an actor,” she said. “I always knew he wasn’t this person everyone would say is great or bad. He was just a very regular man. When things would be successful and wonderful, it didn’t make his life better. He was only happy when he was doing his work. So, I’m pretty grounded from that.

“I’m pretty scared of celebrity. As much as I’m kind of out there, I like to watch people. When I see magazine covers [of myself], I don’t know who that is … If I wasn’t working very hard and wasn’t doing things that I wanted to be in, then it would kill me, because I would feel not worthy of it at all. But I’m proud of the films I’ve been a part of and feel that I’m doing the work as best I can. I just want to continue to work. You get to a certain [level of] celebrity where you can get pretty lazy if you’re offered things that you don’t need to work very hard in. I’m very focused on just doing my work.”

In another interview, however, she lamented that her newfound status as a Hollywood celebrity might intimidate the people who worked with her or who met her on the sidewalk. “I want people to know that I’m so scared of people not coming up to me and saying, ‘Hi.’ In this business, they turn you into something that you’re not. I’m not looking to shock anybody or hurt anybody. I may have tattoos and seem dark, it’s just simply …” At this point in the interview, she trailed off and rolled up the sleeve of her black sweatshirt to reveal a tattoo she had recently gotten with her mother, a Tennessee Williams quote: “A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.” She became introspective. “Everybody has something that cages them. This is a prayer for everybody to just be themselves,” she offered.