Would you like a giant closeup of Angelina Jolie’s head? Why not?!? Jolie covers the October issue of Vanity Fair, and I’ll admit to squealing a little when I saw that she had gotten a VF cover again. I believe this is her fourth Vanity Fair cover in six years. She deserves it, although historically, I find her interviews with the magazine a little hit-or-miss. I usually enjoy her Vogue interviews a lot more. Anyway, Angelina did the cover because she’s promoting her feature film directorial debut with In the Land of Blood and Honey. The photos were done by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. VF has already released some highlights from the piece:

Despite recent reports, Angelina Jolie assures Vanity Fair contributing editor Rich Cohen that there is “no secret wedding” in the works for her and Pitt. “I’m not pregnant. I’m not adopting at the moment,” the star tells Cohen.

“Brad thinks I’m going to be a nightmare,” Jolie jokes, telling how directing her new movie, In the Land of Blood and Honey, has changed the way she will approach her acting career. “I had such a good experience he thinks I’m going to be impatient with directors, which I already am. I get impatient with people working on a film that have their head in their hands like it’s the most complicated thing in the world.”

“I’ve never felt more exposed. My whole career, I’ve hidden behind other people’s words,” Jolie tells Cohen of her screenwriting and feature directorial debut. “Now it’s me talking. You feel ridiculous when you get something wrong.”

“I had the flu,” Jolie says of how she came to write the script. “I had to be quarantined from the children for two days. I was in the attic of a house in France. I was isolated, pacing. I don’t watch TV and I wasn’t reading anything. So I started writing. I went from the beginning to the end. I didn’t know any other way.” She says she then let Brad take the script to read on a trip: “He called and said, ‘You know, honey, it’s not that bad.’”

Jolie admits she did not initially intend to direct the film. “It was something I didn’t trust out of my hands,” she explains. “So by default I ended up putting myself in as director.”

Of her decision to use all unknown actors from the region, she says, “It couldn’t be anybody else. It’s their story. It was important that they were willing to do it. If none of them were willing, I wouldn’t have made it.”

Jolie does elaborate on Brad’s supportive role throughout the project. “He’d come in and say what he liked or what he didn’t understand. Like any woman, I would listen to most of it and fight a few things. He’s been so supportive. But it’s hard to separate the person that loves you from the critic, so I don’t think he’s a fair judge.” But she goes on to say that “people will judge for themselves. I think if you make a good movie people walk away arguing.”

Before shooting, Jolie says, she sent the script to “reporters and writers, people of Serbian and Bosnian nationality who’d been through the war. I was gauging the accuracy…. If they said no, I wouldn’t have done it.”

[From Vanity Fair]

As I’ve said before, I’m worried about this movie. A lot. I don’t know how “You know, honey, it’s not that bad” becomes “Let’s give Angelina $15 million to direct her own script.” Now, I’m glad that Angelina is challenging herself as an artist, and I think it’s cool that she wrote a script and followed through and all of that. I will also defend Angelina against the accusations that the storyline she wrote is somehow offensive to women in general or Bosnian women specifically. My concerns about the film are more superficial than that – I just wonder if the film is going to be any good. Like, will it be watchable? Or will it just be a movie star’s ego up there on the screen?

Photos courtesy of Vanity Fair.