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“I never thought I could make a movie or
direct," Jolie told an audience at the Toronto Film Festival on
Sunday, which is screening her Cambodian genocide film "First
They Killed My Father" and Afghan film "The Breadwinner."
Jolie said her first major film as a director, the 2011 Bosnian
war drama "In the Land of Blood and Honey," was prompted by her
humanitarian work as a special envoy for the United Nations
refugee agency.
"I wanted to learn more about the war of Yugoslavia. I had been
in the region and traveling in the UN. It was a war I really
couldn’t get my head around. ... It was not a goal to become a
director," she said.
"The Breadwinner," an animated film that she produced, is about
a young Afghan girl who cuts her hair and poses as a boy in
order to feed her family.
It "tells the sad reality of many girls having to work and not
go to school," said Jolie, who has made several trips to
Afghanistan.
"The people I have met over the years are truly my heroes. The
nice thing about being a director is to champion other people,”
Jolie added.
Jolie said "First They Killed My Father," was inspired by
wanting to learn more about the history of Cambodia, the
birthplace of her son Maddox, one of her six children.
She said she wanted "Maddox to learn about himself as a
Cambodian in a different light."
The film, which was screened in Cambodia earlier this year,
tells the story of a young girl during the country's 1970s
genocide who is forced into the countryside to toil in rice
paddies and then take up arms as a child soldier.
Jolie, 42, who won a supporting actress Oscar for "Girl,
Interrupted" in 2000, shrugged off her status as a role model
for women.
"I have a lot to learn and need role models myself," she said.
(Reporting by Chris Arsenault; editing by Jill Serjeant and
Jonathan Oatis)
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