Angelina Jolie returns to the Toronto International Film Festival this year with a new film that she has directed, “Without Blood,” and the actress and filmmaker told TheWrap the film stands as a trilogy-capper of sorts to her films about war and conflict.
“Without Blood,” based on the novel of the same name by Alessandro Baricco, continues Jolie’s focus on the toll of war, which she explored in earlier films “In the Land of Blood and Honey” and “At First They Killed My Father.” In this new film Salma Hayek Pinault plays Nina, a woman who has been impacted by war, who finds Tito (Demián Bichir), a lottery seller. At first their conversation seems innocuous, but soon harsh truths emerge as to the true intent of their interaction and the film largely plays out as a conversation between the two characters.
Jolie, Hayek Pinault and Bichir spoke with TheWrap’s Joe McGovern about the tricky adaptation at TheWrap’s 2024 TIFF Studio sponsored by Moët & Chandon and Boss Design.
“Certain pieces you find you at different times in your life,” Jolie said. “Most of the films I’ve directed deal with war and conflict and in a way, this is a final chapter to that. This is post-conflict, and what I loved is that, as I was reading it, I thought I believed one thing, I thought I wanted something, and then, as it changed, I realized it was correcting my points of view. It was helping me to understand something that I hadn’t anticipated. I don’t find that often. It’s not easy. I think it’s accurate to a lot of the post-conflict situations.”
And the unusual structure of the film, with much of it being a conversation between Nina and Tito, didn’t frighten Hayek Pinault. Not that she didn’t have other concerns. “I was not afraid of the dialogue. I was more afraid of the fact that I had to do an entire movie where every day I went to set, I had to go so deep into torture, and that I had to go through the entire day of work, and this couldn’t come out,” Hayek Pinault said. “I had to visit like places where trauma lies and hides and chokes you and makes you feel the most intense pain emotionally that anyone can feel, but you cannot let it out, because that was the character. That’s what she wanted. I was afraid to go there.”
Watch the full conversation in the video above.
