Angelina Jolie "never wanted to have a baby" until her first visit to Cambodia
BATTAMBANG, Cambodia -- Between bites of spicy Cambodian curry and fried fish with rice, Angelina Jolie Pitt explains how this tiny country with a tumultuous past changed the course of her life.
She first visited Cambodia 16 years ago to portray "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" - the gun-toting, bungee-jumping, supremely toned action hero that made her a star. Soon after, she adopted her first child from a Cambodian orphanage and returned again and again on humanitarian missions. Now, she's back for another movie, "First They Killed My Father," but this time as a director, and the subject matter is a far cry from Lara Croft.
"When I first came to Cambodia, it changed me. It changed my perspective. I realized there was so much about history that I had not been taught in school, and so much about life that I needed to understand, and I was very humbled by it," said the 40-year-old Jolie Pitt, who grew up in Los Angeles where she felt "a real emptiness."
She was struck by the graciousness and warmth of Cambodian people, despite the tragedy that left an estimated 2 million people dead. While shooting Lara Croft in 2000, some scenes required sidestepping land mines, she said, which made her aware of the dangers refugees face in countries ravaged by war. "That trip triggered my realization of how little I knew and the beginning of my search for that knowledge."
It was during an early trip back to Cambodia with the U.N. that Jolie had another epiphany -- this time about motherhood.
"It's strange, I never wanted to have a baby. I never wanted to be pregnant. I never babysat. I never thought of myself as a mother," Jolie, now famously a mother of six, says with a laugh. But while playing with children at a Cambodian school, "it was suddenly very clear to me that my son was in the country, somewhere."
She adopted Maddox in 2002, and a year later opened a foundation in his name in northwestern Battambang province, which helps fund health care, education and conservation projects in rural Cambodia.
Maddox is now 14 and sporting what his mom calls "a blonde stripe" -- a shaggy mohawk with the top dyed blonde. He joined her in Cambodia to help behind the scenes for the project that she sees as a unique merger of her film work and family with humanitarian interests.
"For me, this is the moment, where finally my life is kind of in line, and I feel I'm finally where I should be," Jolie Pitt said.
She expects to return to hold the film's premiere in Cambodia at the end of the year, before its release on Netflix.