Jolie-Pitt Love

A FRAUGHT conversation is taking place around a large, circular dining table in this town in western India. Angry voices overlap. The talk ricochets among jihadis, kidnapping, sensationalist press reports and the somewhat sinister role played by a secret government agency in all of this. A child’s voice breaks the tension. He is 5, has spiky hair artfully arranged to defy gravity and conveys the nonchalance of someone not easily impressed. “Where’s my mom?” he asks.

Mom in this case is Angelina Jolie, Academy Award-winning actress, good will ambassador for the United Nations Refugee Agency and co-founder of the celebrity entity known as Brangelina. Ms. Jolie’s relationship with Brad Pitt occupies so much global media space that their first child together, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, was immortalized at the Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in New York when she was only eight weeks old.

But here Ms. Jolie seems shorn of every title. She is wearing a shapeless blue-gray tunic with gray track pants. Her hair is pulled back with a few curling ringlets falling around her face. She wears little makeup. Shattering her on-screen sex-goddess-with-a-gun image, she is trussed up to look 6 months pregnant. Ms. Jolie turns to her son Maddox and gently says, “I’m working, O.K.?”

The job at hand involves portraying Mariane Pearl in “A Mighty Heart,” a movie tentatively scheduled for release next June by Paramount Vantage. The film is based on Ms. Pearl’s book about her husband, Daniel Pearl, the South Asia bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal who in January 2002 was kidnapped by jihadis in Pakistan and eventually beheaded on camera. The book, written with Sarah Crichton, focuses on the four weeks of investigation, negotiations and leads that preceded a horrific end.



It is a harrowing but inspiring account of one woman’s struggle with overwhelming tragedy and her refusal to give in to prejudice. “Mariane has all the reasons in the world to be blinded by hate, but she has chosen not to be,” Ms. Jolie said in an interview. “We are living in a time when there is a lot of anger and misunderstanding. She is really a beautiful example to all of us of what we should stay focused on.”



Events described in the book take place mostly in a house in Karachi where an unlikely investigative team huddled together. This included Ms. Pearl; Asra Q. Nomani, Daniel Pearl’s friend and colleague from The Journal; a Pakistani police officer identified only as Captain; and Randall Bennett, a tough-talking American regional security officer.



The film was originally meant to be shot in Pakistan, but security concerns and visa delays relocated the main shoot to India. So a sprawling bungalow in a tree-lined gated colony called Sindh Society (locals have since renamed it Brangelina Society) in Pune, a growing information technology town, substituted for Zamzama Street in Karachi. Despite the presence of Ms. Jolie, Mr. Pitt (whose company, Plan B, is co-producing) and an international crew led by the director Michael Winterbottom, there were no trailers, no crowds, no glamour — very little sense that a picture with a big Hollywood star was under way.



That’s typical of Mr. Winterbottom. He has a distinctive film grammar, which blurs traditional boundaries between documentary and fiction, natural textures and stylistic experiments. He often works with people who aren’t professional actors, and many of his films —“The Road to Guantánamo,” “Welcome to Sarajevo,” “In this World” — address geopolitical concerns with an urgent authenticity.



Dede Gardner, the president of Plan B, sent Mr. Winterbottom the book two years ago. He was just coming off of a shoot in Pakistan and had, he said here, decided that he “was never going back there again.” But he couldn’t resist the story. “Mariane is refusing to be destroyed by experiences that could destroy a lot of people,” he said. Referring to Ms. Pearl and her compatriots, he added, “The fact that Danny was killed but they refused to be defeated by terrorists, there’s something very powerful about that.”



“A Mighty Heart” is Mr. Winterbottom’s first studio movie after more than a dozen independent productions. When the deal was announced, Variety commented that the “quintessentially independent and serious-minded Winterbottom has become an incongruous supporting player in the Brangelina circus.”



But as Ms. Jolie describes it, he is still not making a studio picture; rather, the studio is making a Winterbottom film. “It was an agreement that we all had to blend into Michael’s style, not to have Michael blend into somebody else’s,” she said.



She added that he got the job over other directors precisely because he rejected Hollywood convention. “Some directors saw it as a heroic female movie,” she said. “Some of them saw it as a tragic love story, but he sees it the way it should be, which is a collection of people who came together and all the different things that means and the different questions about cultures, faith and politics in today’s world.”



The Winterbottom approach means making a film with documentary-style realism, shooting many of the scenes in chronological order, and relying on unusually long shots in which actors improvise their dialogue. Dennis O’Hare, who plays John Bussey, Daniel Pearl’s boss at The Journal, compared it to “writing free verse.” “There are no rules,’ he said, “so you have to be really disciplined.”



Irfan Khan, an Indian actor who plays Captain, also praised Mr. Winterbottom’s inclination to “let an actor explore.” “There is no pressure from Michael,” he said. “He lets you be.”



Still, the information overload in the film made improvising doubly tricky. Mr. Pearl’s death was the result of several interconnecting layers of intrigue. Ms. Pearl and Ms. Nomani had to make a wall-size chart to make sense of it all. On the set actors struggled to create powerful drama while keeping the facts straight, all while knowing that the people they were playing might see the film and take issue with the performances.



While there have been some rumblings about Ms. Jolie’s playing a part-Cuban, part-French, part-Dutch woman, she said, “I do have the peace that Mariane and Danny’s parents are comfortable with me, and that I suppose is what I need to sleep at night.” She sweated to get Ms. Pearl’s distinctive French accent and her direct manner exactly right, she said, but harder still was capturing the woman’s resilient spirit.



“I try to put myself in her place and feel that this woman didn’t collapse,” Ms. Jolie said. “She’s six months pregnant. So for 21 days your instinct is just to be hysterical, screaming at everybody and crying constantly. But she just drove on. The real challenge is the inability to fall apart.”



For Dan Futterman, who plays Daniel, the challenge was to humanize the journalist who has become a historical figure. An actor-writer, who received an Oscar nomination last January for his “Capote” screenplay, he said in an interview in Mumbai that his main aim was to “capture the real connect that Mariane and Daniel had, to create a sense of joy and love so the viewer knows what’s been lost.”



Mr. Futterman researched the part by spending time with people who knew Mr. Pearl. Other actors touched base with their real-life counterparts through the shoot.



But Mr. Khan and the Pakistani actor Adnan Siddiqui, who plays a police officer named Dost, didn’t have this luxury. Their counterparts in Pakistan, the actors said, refused to talk to them. It was simply too dangerous. Mr. Siddiqui, who is a popular television star, said that he was doubly careful of his lines, especially while improvising.



“I’m taking care of my dialogue and avoiding anything that can be controversial,” he admitted. “Being a Muslim, it’s a tough thing, but I’m avoiding words which can get me into trouble. I am a bit nervous about it. Will I be safe in my country?”



Mr. Winterbottom said that when the crew shot scenes in Karachi, sometimes at the exact locations where the original events occurred, they were shadowed by the Inter-Services Intelligence. While cast and crew were in India, newspapers in the country reported that Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie received threats attributed to Al Qaeda and hired high-level security to protect them. Ms. Jolie denied that threats were made but said that she and Mr. Pitt were warned not to let their children stand in front of windows.



Will Patton, who plays Mr. Bennett, was also on high alert. Mr. Bennett, who met the actor in Kuwait before filming started, advised him to avoid certain parts of Karachi, and to make sure his room was at the back of his hotel. Mr. Bennett had received several death threats and thought Mr. Patton looked enough like him to be at equal risk. In the end Mr. Patton wasn’t required to shoot in Karachi. But by that time, Mr. Patton said, he had made out his will.



Mr. Futterman said that “a sense of unease” hung over the shoot, especially in Pakistan. But the problem that temporarily derailed “A Mighty Heart” turned out to be more prosaic than Al Qaeda: the paparazzi. Since their arrival in India in October, Ms. Jolie and Mr. Pitt were stalked by Indian and international news media. Indian newspapers brimmed with pictures of the couple and their children taking impromptu auto rickshaw rides and walks in the park. There were front-page articles of them visiting an astrologer who predicted that the film would fail (though Ms. Jolie denied this); of Mr. Pitt buying a sex-enhancing love potion in Jaipur (the headline read: “Try with curry, for extra hurry”); and of the couple adopting an Indian child (again Ms. Jolie denied it but added that they were likely to adopt before she tried the natural route again).



The face-off came to a climax in Mumbai. On Nov. 16 the crew was shooting at the Anjuman-e-Islam school in south Mumbai. The exact sequence of events is uncertain, but sometime in the afternoon paparazzi and parents waiting to pick up their children rushed the gates and pandemonium prevailed. Ms. Jolie’s three bodyguards were arrested for manhandling people (a parent accused one of them of shouting “You bloody Indians”) and released on bail.



The following day shooting was canceled, and Mr. Pitt found himself at the Mumbai police commissioner’s office trying to make amends. Having until then studiously avoided the press, he appeared on a national television channel, explaining that he and his wife had a “multiracial family” and would “not hire anyone who is racist.” The Mumbai police are still considering whether to bring charges. The men were free to leave the country after the shoot concluded.



In an interview in Mumbai Ms. Gardner called the incident “bewildering and disappointing,” but said she hoped that the film itself would nullify these various controversies. Ms. Jolie said her dream was for the movie to be screened in Pakistan, despite the continuing security risks and sensitivities.



“We’ve come with a lot of good intentions,” she said. “We are all terrified to get it wrong, because if you do, you could send a message that causes more anger and hatred. But if we get it right, maybe there’s a little better understanding in people, and then we’ve accomplished a great deal.”