Why Angelina Jolie Gave Up On Directing
Angelina Jolie reveals why she abandoned directing.
This article is more than 2 years old
Seeing successful actors turn into accomplished movie directors is nothing new in Hollywood. Mel Gibson did it, and he’s excellent at it; just look at Braveheart or Hacksaw Ridge. If you’ve even watched Unbroken, a 2014 American war film, you know Angelina Jolie did it too. However, directors are rarely in front of the camera, and seeing how many movies Jolie recently featured in, we have to ask: why did Angelina Jolie gave up on directing?
According to CinemaBlend, Angelina Jolie admits that her having to stop directing is more out of necessity than desire and that the reasons are related to her home life. Her return to acting gigs is simply because of her family situation, which possibly relates to her ongoing divorce with Brad Pitt and other legal woes that implies. Unfortunately, directing takes much more of your life’s time than acting does and usually involves a full year of intense work to direct a full-budget feature film. Compared to that, acting is more akin to a holiday.
“I love directing, but I had a change in my family situation that’s not made it possible for me to direct for a few years. I needed to just do shorter jobs and be home more, so I kind of went back to doing a few acting jobs. That’s really the truth of it “, said Angelina Jolie.
Angelina Jolie split from Brad Pitt in 2016, after two years of marriage, and twelve years as a couple, over irreconcilable differences. The divorce proceedings still aren’t finalized, as the couple battles over child custody and division of assets. Additionally, the Tomb Raider actress filed court documents accusing her ex-husband of domestic violence during their marriage, possibly hoping to obtain a Family Code 3044 presumption. This could make Pitt a presumed perpetrator of domestic violence in the past, which would give Jolie an advantage in their custody battles. Unfortunately, nothing is confirmed at the time of writing since Mr. and Mrs. Smith are due to appear in court in the spring of 2021.
With so much on her plate, the all-encompassing position of a movie director simply isn’t an option for Angelina Jolie. So, instead of supervising the pre-production, production, and post-production processes involved in movie making, Jolie settled for the less time-consuming work – acting. We’ve recently seen the actress in the Disney sequel Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and in Come Away, a fantasy drama homage to Peter Pan and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Her next appearance will be in Those Who Wish Me Dead, an upcoming neo-Western survival thriller film, in which she plays the role of a veteran fire warden protecting a teenager threatened by assassins. We’ll also see Angelina Jolie as Thena in Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Eternals (in post-production), which follows up on the tragic events of Avengers: Endgame.
With everything said, Angelina Jolie is far from doing something she doesn’t want or enjoy. But her attention is mainly required elsewhere, which is why we won’t see her behind a camera for a while, despite her wanting to go back to directing.
