Actress-director will be spending time in her son’s homeland to film her new Netflix drama
Angelina Jolie is going to make sure son Maddox knows where he came from.
The A-lister made an emotional return to Cambodia, a place that holds a special place in her heart (it’s where she filmed her breakout role in 2001’s Lara Croft
Tomb Raider and where she adopted her eldest son in 2002), and the mother-son duo will be spending quite a bit of time there.
Jolie went to check in on her two charitable organizations and begin production on her next directorial project
Based on an adaptation of former child soldier Loung Ung’s book First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia.
But along with her duties on location, Angie shared in a new interview that she and Maddox will be “side by side learning” about his native country.
“Maddox will be on set every day after school and involved behind the scenes,” Jolie told reporters on Tuesday.
“As Maddox and I prepare the film we will be side by side learning about his country,” she shared. “He is turning 14 next week and this is a very important time for him to understand who he is. He is my son but he is also a son of Cambodia. This is the time for our family to understand all that means to him and to us.”
The memoir details Ung’s memories of growing up under the Khmer Rouge regime’s genocide in the 1970s, which left 1.7 million people dead. “I was deeply affected by Loung’s book. It deepened forever my understanding of how children experience war and are affected by the emotional memory of it,” Jolie said in a statement last week when announcing her involvement with the Netflix drama.
“And it helped me draw closer still to the people of Cambodia, my son’s homeland.”
“The intent of this project is not to revisit the horrors of the war but to bring to the screen characters that people around the world will identify with and empathize with, and help to teach people about this country that I love and respect, and the Cambodian culture and family life I so admire,” Jolie told local newspaper In Phnom Penh.
“The film will be shot from the child’s perspective,” she said, adding that it will be made with locals, featuring a “Cambodian cast and crew and in the Cambodian language.”
Pre-production is expected to last until November, with shooting slated to last from November to January.
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