HOWZAT

A Mighty Heart tells the story of how Mariane, also a journalist, met and fell in love with Daniel Pearl and of their life on the road as he worked as a foreign correspondent. At the time of his kidnap, just a few months after 9/11, he was in Karachi, investigating a story about “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. When Pearl left to meet a shadowy contact, his wife and her best friend, Asra, were preparing for a dinner party and expected him home later that evening. When he didn’t return, Mariane instinctively feared the worst and within hours alerted both the Pakistani and American authorities.

Over the next few days, the Pearls’ temporary home in Karachi became the hub of the investigation to find out what had happened to him – with Mariane, ever the reporter, at the centre of it all. The assembled team featured several nationalities – Pakistani, American, Indian, while Mariane herself is of Cuban and French descent – and many different faiths. Jolie plays her friend with a huge curly wig and contact lenses to turn her blue eyes brown, and in passing, they look alike. But what convinces about her performance is how she captures the sheer will and determination Mariane Pearl showed; her refusal to cave in and hide in a corner, and, ultimately, her raw, terrible grief.

“I’ve never been so nervous about anything,” says Jolie. “The night before shooting I was tossing and turning, imagining everything that could go wrong. I felt bad that I was even assuming that I could play this woman that I respected so much, and I felt humbled to a point of being unable to move. But her faith in me really helped.”

Jolie is good in this – very good. There’s one vividly memorable, chilling scene where Jolie, as Mariane, is told that her husband is dead and she lets out a piercing wail which lasts almost a full minute. “It had nothing to do with acting,” she says. “It was just the thought that somebody would do that to another human being and what it must have been like for Mariane and what that moment will be like for Adam, when he finds out what happened to his father. It was a very emotional night for all of us. It was the response to Daniel being beheaded and it was very much me allowing myself to think about it all and in that moment it made me sick.”

She made the film shortly after giving birth to Shiloh. “On a practical level, I think if you’ve never been pregnant, you can over-play pregnant. It was almost unfathomable to me how she could get through it all as a pregnant woman. It’s a huge deal and in the last few months you need less stress, more sleep, all of that. But Mariane has no self-pity and I’m sure that if you ask her, she would say that she could never allow herself to think that he wasn’t coming home. And she knew she was pregnant; she is a responsible woman, and she had to remind herself to eat, to take care of herself and her baby and get through it and focus on trying to find Daniel.”

Even though the audience knows the tragic conclusion of the film, Winterbottom injects it with such urgency that it’s like watching a gripping, real-life documentary. Jolie believes that there is a message of hope in there, mostly because Mariane Pearl herself has refused to give in to blanket bitterness.

“One of the things that drew me to it, separately from her, was this idea of this mix of faiths and backgrounds. We are so quick to judge each other and be so full of fear, and here you had a house full of people who were Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist,

Muslim, together trying to help this other person from another background. And the way Mariane handled this thing was incredible. Just a few days after she heard that Daniel had been murdered, she came forward to say, ‘I love Pakistan, there are ten other people that died and they are all from Pakistan, so they are suffering as much as we are.’ I mean, who comes to that that quickly?”

Jolie herself had been to both India and Pakistan several times before and has travelled widely through her work as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, becoming involved after filming in Cambodia for the first Tomb Raider film back in 2001. It was an eye-opening experience. “I hadn’t travelled very much. I didn’t know much about Pol Pot or the extent of the devastation he’d caused. And I didn’t know much about refugees. It made me rethink everything I knew.”

It is easy to snigger at celebrities going all Albert Schweitzer on us. But Jolie has become a committed humanitarian to an extent that goes way beyond heart-warming photo-opportunies – visiting refugees, as we go to press, on the Iraq/Syria border – and has demonstrated a seriousness that has gained her the respect of major figures in the field. As her friend Trevor Neilson, who has worked with Bill Clinton, Bono and Bill Gates and is a former executive director of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/Aids, puts it, “Several years and 30 countries later, Angelina is a real expert on these issues.”

Jolie is a Davos regular, is now studying international law, and has joined Washington DC’s prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, but there have been times – she singles out visiting refugee camps in Sierra Leone, where the mutilated survivors of the civil war live in appalling conditions – when what she has seen has reduced her to tears. “It was all horrifically new to me. I did cry. Frequently. But it’s no good crying – and these people weren’t crying – you have to pull yourself together and try to do something.”

It’s nearly time to go and find Brad and the kids. We’ve strayed on to more serious matters and she lightens visibly when I mention her family again. “You know, when I’m having a really bad day, I just think, they are all healthy, they are all well and nothing else matters.” And with that she goes off to find hubby and her brood. Not quite, perhaps Mr and Mrs Smith, but a lot more real than the Brangelina soap opera, too.

A Mighty Heart is released on September 21

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