Angelina Jolie is refuting an excerpt in her recent Vanity Fair tell-all that depicts a "disturbing" audition process for her upcoming Netflix Cambodian film, First They Killed My Father.
The Vanity Fair cover story explains an alleged "game" with impoverished children from "orphanages, circuses, and slum schools" set up by casting directors in order to find the lead for the film to play young Loung Ung. The excerpt reads: "They put money on the table and asked the child to think of something she needed the money for, and then to snatch it away. The director would pretend to catch the child, and the child would have to come up with a lie."
Critics immediately spoke out about the casting strategy, some calling it emotionally abusive, sickening, monstrous and cruel.
Jolie, who directed the film, released a statement on Saturday to the Huffington Post stating that the audition scene described in the article was "false and upsetting."
"Every measure was taken to ensure the safety, comfort and well-being of the children on the film starting from the auditions through production to the present," she told HuffPost.
Reportedly based on Ung's real-life experience getting caught stealing, the pretend "game" was merely an improvisation exercise, with the By the Sea actress adding that real money was not taken from children.
"I am upset that a pretend exercise in an improvisation, from an actual scene in the film, has been written about as if it was a real scenario," Jolie, 42, continued. "The suggestion that real money was taken from a child during an audition is false and upsetting. I would be outraged myself if this had happened."
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The actors in the film, which depicts the four-year reign of terror and genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, were a mix of trained actors, orphans and disadvantaged children.
"There wasn?t a person who was working on the movie who didn?t have a personal connection," Jolie explained to Vanity Fair, adding that a therapist was on set daily to help those affected deal with flashbacks and nightmares. "They weren?t coming to do a job. They were walking in the exodus for the people whom they had lost in their family, and it was out of respect for them that they were going to re-create it."
For more on the humanitarian and filmmaker's relationship with her own children, watch the video below.
30-07-2017 - Vidéo Angelina Jolie /
