14 DAY TRIAL // For her third directorial effort, Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie knew that she needed something really big, really important, a project in which she could believe with all her might because, otherwise, it would not have made any sense to spend so much time apart from her family. This is why she came to meet Louis Zamperini.
Zamperini is what you would call a living legend: he is a former Olympic distance runner who met Hitler and a World War II hero and former war prisoner. He is also Angelina’s new “boyfriend,” and together they form the hottest couple in town right now.
Jolie sat down for an interview with The Today Show to promote the film “Unbroken,” which comes out in December this year. With Zamperini (aka “Louie”) by her side, she explains how she came across the book “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand, which made her realize that this was the project she’d been looking for all along.
Video of the interview is embedded below.
Ironically, Angelina explains, while she was at her LA home near-despairing because she didn’t know what to do “with her life,” Zamperini was actually living next door. You can see her house from his patio, she explains.
Louie calls her “honey” and his “gal,” and Angelina gets teary-eyed when she tells him that she loves him, as well as at those times when she speaks of the movie and why it was extremely important for her to tell his story – and to do it right.
“[I feel] such a huge responsibility to get it right, because I love [Zamperini] so much, and because he's helped me so much in my life. [The world] can seem hopeless and it can seem very overwhelming,” she says of the message of the film. “But the resilience and the strength of the human spirit is an extraordinary thing.”
You would think that someone as high-profile as Angelina would have no trouble getting financing and proper approval for a film with as touching a story as this. Still, she smiles, it was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
In Hollywood, no one gets to make their own rules, not if there is no promise of money. From Angelina’s words, she showed the top honchos at Universal that “Unbroken” held such promise.
Angelina Jolie’s directing credits include, so far, “A Place in Time,” a 2007 documentary, and “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” a drama that came out in 2011. Both were received with lots of critical acclaim, which probably made her even more determined to relocate permanently behind the camera.