The filmmaker Angelina Jolie tried to overrule on set: “Well, I am the director”
They might have been split up since 2019, but Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt continue to be one of the go-to examples of a Hollywood power couple, with ‘Brangelina’ providing tabloids with fodder for well over a decade.
They ruled the celebrity roost until their partnership came crashing down, which only made them more appealing to the grottier side of the press.
One of the reasons why this relationship became so famous was how it started, wherein Jolie and Pitt first fell in love playing a married couple who, unbeknownst to each other, were both highly trained assassins, on the set of their 2005 film Mr and Mrs Smith.
Pitt was still married to Jennifer Aniston at the time, so reports of a romance with Jolie hit headlines hard, and to think all of this could have been avoided if Nicole Kidman had starred in the movie as originally planned. The film was directed by Doug Liman, who was fresh off the success of The Bourne Identity, so he was probably feeling pretty confident, and as he explained to The Times, this confidence put him in the crosshairs of one of his stars.
“I had one idea of how the scene should play, and Angelina Jolie had a different idea,” he recalled, “I said, ‘OK, we could sit here and argue, but we’re wasting time, so let’s just shoot it both ways’. And she said, ‘But then in the editing room you’ll just use your way’. And I said, ‘Well, I am the director. So I might’.”
It makes sense why Jolie would have been so outspoken at the time, as she was at the peak of her powers, having already won an Oscar, led the extremely successful Tomb Raider franchise, and established herself as one of the must-watch female stars of her era.
To top it all off, there’s the tiny matter of her background to consider as the daughter of Jon Voight, and though she spent more time with her mother as a child, she did spend time on her father’s film sets, most notably with a bit part in the 1982 film Lookin’ to Get Out.
Jolie was someone who had been exposed to the business from a very young age, making her own iconic way through it, so she was always going to be opinionated, and this is far from the only time the star had clashed with a higher-up. One famous producer once referred to her as a “spoiled brat” and pulled out of a project because her name was attached to it, and while Liman never went this far, it’s clear that Jolie is something of a disruptor.
Given that she and Liman never worked on another movie together following Mr and Mrs Smith, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they might have fallen out, but they seem to have patched things up, as his next project is a spy thriller called The Initiative, which will star, you guessed it, Angelina Jolie. There is currently no release date attached as of yet, but sources claim that production will begin in the first quarter of 2026.
