Jolie-Pitt Love

Paparazzi showdowns, Pakistani secret police, and rumors of a fatwa -- all part of the behind-the-scenes tale of filming the Mariane Pearl story on location in south Asia

Even in Pune — one of the most ancient cities in India, settled on a remote edge of the Western Ghats mountain range in the Maharashtra state some eons ago — they gossip about Angelina Jolie. In fact, last fall, when the actress spent five weeks there shooting her latest movie, A Mighty Heart, Puneites talked of nothing else. The local papers were filled with headlines about the star's every move. There was the one about the terrorist group who purportedly declared a fatwa on Jolie (''There was never any serious threat,'' she says, although at one point she was told to keep her children's cribs ''away from windows''). There was another about Jolie supposedly getting spiritual guidance — and career advice — from one of the town's resident astrologers (''I've never been to an astrologer in my life,'' she corrects). And then there was that truly outrageous tale about one of her bodyguards trying to strangle a paparazzo who'd been harassing Jolie since she arrived in the country (okay, so maybe there's some truth to that one, but we'll get into it later).

Yet for all the media scrutiny, nobody seemed to notice the one truly newsworthy thing about Jolie's trip to Pune, the reason she was there in the first place: to tackle her most challenging role in her most serious film since winning that Oscar seven years ago for Girl, Interrupted. In A Mighty Heart, she stars as Mariane Pearl, widow of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose 2002 kidnapping in Pakistan — and subsequent beheading, videotaped and uploaded to the Internet — still ranks as one of the most horrific and tragic episodes in the short, bloody history of modern-day terrorism. Dan Futterman (who got an Oscar nom for writing Capote) has a delicate part in the film as well, playing Daniel in flashbacks; Will Patton portrays the American security officer who teaches Mariane to detangle Pakistan red tape; London actress Archie Panjabi is the Pearls' closest friend in Karachi; and Bollywood star Irrfan Khan is ''Captain,'' the soft-spoken secret policeman who ends up Mariane's ally.

But, of course, it's Mariane's story, based on her 2003 best-seller about her husband's abduction. The hellish details she lays out in her book about those first few weeks in Karachi after the kidnapping — her frantic phone calls to the American consulate, her slogs through Middle Eastern bureaucracy, the slow piecing-together of what had happened to Daniel — will constitute the bulk of what's on the screen. ''The story unfolds like a mystery,'' Jolie says. ''You've got people collecting clues and trying to solve what happened. But it's also very real and personal. We didn't want it to be too melodramatic or too polished. We didn't want it to be a typical movie.''

Which is how Michael Winterbottom — the maverick Brit who built his career by thumbing his nose at Hollywood studios and stars — ended up directing the hottest film actress on the planet in a major summer movie that was bought and paid for by a little company called Paramount. Though he seems a counterintuitive choice, the truth is Winterbottom may be perfect for the job, given his familiarity with the geographic and political terrain (his last film, The Road to Guantánamo, shot in Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, also dealt with victims in the war on terror) and experience with the vérité-style camera work needed to give the film that gritty look Jolie wanted. ''It just seemed too good an opportunity not to do it,'' the director says. ''I mean, it was Brad and Angelina asking. That's a very nice position to be in, you know?''

Unlike her director, Jolie earned her part in the film the old-fashioned way — she flirted with a producer. That would be Brad Pitt, of course, Jolie's sometime costar, all-the-time boyfriend, and the dad to her four children. Pitt read Mariane Pearl's book in manuscript form and liked it so much he snapped up the film rights before publication. Originally, he sold the idea of the adaptation to Warner Bros., in partnership with Plan B, his own production company. But Warner cooled on the concept and it languished in development for a year or two, until Pitt cut a new deal to bring the project to Paramount's revamped specialty arm, Paramount Vantage. The guy who had just been hired to head that division, as it happens, was a former agent named John Lesher. And one of Lesher's former clients, coincidentally, was a certain English director famous for his disdain for big American studios and stars.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how movies get made in Hollywood. A Mighty Heart was immediately put on a fast track at Paramount Vantage. Also, rather unsurprisingly, they ran into problems just as quickly.

For starters, there were issues with the Pakistan secret police. In the spirit of realism, Winterbottom spent 10 days in Karachi in July shooting exteriors and a few outdoor scenes — footage of some of the very places where Daniel Pearl had stopped on the day of his kidnapping. ''We were filming the real locations, the real restaurant where he ate and the real hotel he went to,'' says Winterbottom. ''At first, I was a little nervous, but when you get there you see that they're just normal places, like anywhere else. Bad things may have happened there, but that doesn't make it a bad place.''

The production had been granted permission from the Pakistan government to film in Karachi, but the ISI — the secret police — apparently never got the memo. ''The ISI guys would follow us from our hotel every day,'' recalls Andrew Eaton, Winterbottom's longtime producing partner. ''And they would videotape us filming our movie. I'd love to get ahold of their footage. It'd be great for the DVD.'' At one point, the ISI actually tried to stop the crew from filming, having four extras dressed in cop costumes arrested on charges of impersonating an officer. ''It was total harassment,'' says Eaton. ''It was a pretty creepy experience.''

When Winterbottom and the rest of the crew gathered in India in October, they got a more enthusiastic reception — too enthusiastic, actually. The secret police were out of the picture, but photographers could be just as brutal, shouting insults at Jolie in hopes of grabbing her attention for a shot. Jolie's bodyguards took the abuse especially hard; one of them was videotaped literally wringing a paparazzo's neck. But the incident that caused the biggest PR headache happened while the cast and crew were shooting a scene inside a local Mumbai school. Jolie's guards were accused of physically blocking parents from picking up their kids, though they claimed they were merely trying to keep the paparazzi from swarming in. Three guards were arrested when the cops arrived, and the ensuing media frenzy got so out of hand Pitt himself had to plead for calm on Indian TV.

''I'll say this,'' Jolie offers. ''We were in a school we were legally allowed to be in. We had permits for exactly what we were doing. And the paparazzi tried to get into the school when we were at the gate, and the parents showed up to get their kids. And the paparazzi rushed through the gates and caused chaos. It was not the film production that caused chaos. We were only guilty of bringing the paparazzi.''

To be sure, things could have been even worse for Jolie. Most of the film was shot in one location, in a house in Pune standing in for the one in Karachi where Mariane held vigil during the the kidnapping. And even when Jolie did venture outside, she wasn't always immediately recognized; to play Mariane, who was five months pregnant when Daniel disappeared, she strapped on a prosthetic belly and wore a curly wig — to say nothing of the exotic French-Cuban accent she needed to learn to sound more like Mariane. (The studio says that initial reports that she darkened her skin with makeup for the role are false.) ''It would usually take about five minutes before people would figure out that it was Angelina,'' says Futterman. ''So we ended up shooting a lot of the exterior stuff in five-minute increments.''

Jolie, though, sometimes had a harder time staying inside. Winterbottom's inimitable shooting style is a little like the taping of a reality show: He uses handheld cameras and no studio lighting, encourages as much improvisation as the story line allows, and then simply follows his actors around wherever they go. ''The crew would have to find places to hide — behind curtains or in the bathroom — to stay out of the shots,'' Jolie says of the process. ''The great thing about it is if you felt like going somewhere else while doing a scene, you could. But it could get intense. Michael and I would have disagreements over wherehe could follow me. We came up with a system. If I closed the door, he couldn't follow. If I left it open, he could. I just needed to know that if things got too heavy, there'd be a place for me to cry by myself.''

That, by the way, was not something Jolie worried about on the set of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Or on Mr. & Mrs. Smith. And it's one of the things that make A Mighty Heart so potentially interesting. Since winning her Oscar, Jolie's onscreen persona has been transformed by a series of tentpole action roles, and her offscreen footprint has grown so huge (something to do with that boyfriend of hers) it threatens to eclipse all else in her life and career. But with A Mighty Heart, the actress has the chance to show why she got that little golden guy in the first place. She can remind people of something her new supersize celebrity status almost makes them forget.

That she can actually act.(SOURCE)

Labels: movies