Angelina Jolie‘s “First They Killed My Father” is gearing up to hit the fall festival circuit, and it can’t seem to shake an uncomfortable narrative around the casting of the film’s young lead, Sareum Srey Moch. Vanity Fair recently detailed the audition process which saw the child actors vying for the role given money, and then having it taken away, as part of an acting exercise. Many saw this as a particularly cruel process, and it didn’t take long for Jolie to deny the magazine’s account of what happened. So, it’s time to go to the tape.
Vanity Fair has responded by releasing the full transcript of the conversation that took place between reporter Evgenia Peretz and Jolie, and it speaks for itself:
AJ: But it was very hard to find a little Loung. And so it was what they call a slum school. I don’t think that’s a very nice word for it, but a school for kids in very poor areas.
And I think, I mean they didn’t know. We just went in and—you just go in and do some auditions with the kids. And it’s not really an audition with children. We had this game where it would be—and I wasn’t there and they didn’t know what they were really doing. They kind of said, “Oh, a camera’s coming up and we want to play a game with you.” And the game for that character was “We’re going to put some money on the table. Think of something that you need that money for.” Sometimes it was money, sometimes it was a cookie. [Laughter] “And then take it.” And then we would catch them. “We’re going to catch you, and we’d like you to try to lie that you didn’t have it.”
So it was very interesting seeing the kids and how they would—some were very conscious of the camera. They were actually—there are so many talented kids in this country. But Srey Moch was the only child that stared at that money for a very, very long time before she picked it up, and then bravely, brazenly lying, like was trying to hide, but then she also kind of—
EP: Wait. This is the girl, Loung.
AJ: This is the girl. And then when she was forced to give it back became very kind of like strong, emotional, she became overwhelmed with emotion that she was—and she just—all of these different things flooded out. And I don’t think she or her family would mind me saying when she was later asked what that money was for, she said her grandfather died and they didn’t have enough money for a nice funeral.
The magazine made the exchange available after Jolie’s lawyer requested that Vanity Fair retract the offending paragraph from the online version of the article, and post a statement which reads, in part:
… The children were not tricked as some have suggested. … All of the children auditioning were made aware of the fictional aspect of the exercise and were tended to at all times by relatives or guardians from NGOs. … We apologize for any misunderstanding.
There’s certainly two very different versions of what happened in those auditions being presented. How it will impact the reception to the film, we’ll soon find out. “First They Killed My Father” hits Netflix on September 15th.