When asked the inevitable question, what it was like working with Angelina Jolie on the set of “Changeling,” the director Clint Eastwood joked by pausing and pretending he didn’t remember who she was, “who is that again? I forgot.”
Eastwood said that Jolie’s public persona sometimes makes us forget just how damn talented she is (and yes, her striking performance is the best part of ‘Changeling’).
“I always thought of her as a very interesting, a very good actress. In recent years of course she’s had so much publicity being on the cover of every possible publication on the world, you all of a sudden take [her talent] for granted. An awful lot of people get on [the cover] of magazines and that doesn’t mean they’re talented,” the filmmaker said at the Q&A for “Changeling” at the New York Film Festival, said alluding to the celebutantes of the world. “But in her case, she’s really talented. She’s the most prepared or at least as prepared as any actress I’ve ever worked with.”
Jolie is obviously beautiful, but Eastwood didn’t want that to distract from the story they had to tell about a mother who’s son is stolen and then returned months later by the LAPD. She insists that the child is not hers, but is manipulated and coerced into taking him home and then discredited as a nutjob when she goes to the press and tries to fight the corrupt police department’s blunder which was politically motivated from moment one (set in the late 1920s, the LAPD has faced a number of scandals and corruption charges and they attempt to look good for the press whenever possible, and in this case, forcing it too much).
“Of course she has the most striking face one could imagine, but we wanted to drop all that and get into the character of Christine Collins [the mother that loses her child].”