Angelina Jolie: Behind the camera

She's often called "the most beautiful woman in the world," but Angelina Jolie has worked hard to prove she's far more than that. Restless in her role as a movie star, she's now turned to directing, with a film she wrote about the Bosnian War. She talks candidly to Bob Simon about her career, her family, and the "darker times" she's put behind her.

The following is a script of "Angelina" which aired on Nov. 27, 2011. Bob Simon is correspondent, Tom Anderson, producer.

Every once in a while you draw the short straw here at "60 Minutes." This time, we were told to spend a few days with a woman who is often called "the most beautiful woman in the world."

Angelina Jolie.

She may well be the most photographed, the most recognizable and the highest paid actress in Hollywood. She is certainly the number one target for paparazzi everywhere. And that's how many Americans know her - from the tabloids - as wild, weird and eccentric.

But the Angelina we met was quite different from all that. For starters, she just wrote and directed a film about a very serious topic. It'll be released next month and she doesn't even appear in it.

For the first time, Angelina has moved behind the camera where, she says, she feels more comfortable.

We linked up with her in the indisputably beautiful city of Budapest which is where she shot most of her film - "In the Land of Blood and Honey."

Angelina Jolie: We came here to Budapest for logistics and financial reasons 'cause we're a tiny movie.

It may be a tiny movie but look at it, it's about a heavy subject - the war in Bosnia - which was fought in the early 90s, killed at least 100,000 people and brought ethnic cleansing to Europe for the first time since Hitler.

Bob Simon: What did your-- what did your friends and colleagues say when you said, 'Hey, I'm gonna direct a film about the war in Bosnia.'

Jolie: I think people that really know me weren't surprised. But I think they all thought it was a bit crazy. I think everybody still thinks it's a bit you know-- it's not, I still think it's crazy.

Simon: You could have done a light comedy or an action flick.

Jolie: I think I'd be terrible with a comedy.

There's certainly no humor in this movie about a Muslim woman named Ajla who starts to fall in love with a Serb named Danijel. After the war breaks out, Bosnians are rounded up and locked up by the Serbs and Danijel, a Serb captain, becomes Ajla's jailer.

Jolie: It is a gorgeous building. Is this-- there are gorgeous--

Simon: You made horrible things happen inside here.

Jolie: And beautiful things.

Angelina shot the jail scenes in this Budapest museum and she relied heavily on her actors. They all come from the former Yugoslavia. She let them rewrite scenes and they speak their native language in the film, which will be released with English subtitles. Angelina said she wanted to make the film as realistic as possible.

Jolie: We all spoke about every speech, every scene and made sure that it was right and true. So everybody helped to educate me and we all adjusted the script together.

While we were there, Angelina gave the cast a sneak preview of the film's trailer and they thought it reflected the reality of their war.

Goran Kostic and Zana Marjanovic play the two lovers.

Zana Marjanovic: People I know and my friends and their families never thought in their life that everything they had could be taken away from them.

Goran Kostic: It goes to the core of who I am and where I am and what we are, I suppose. It's very personal.

Others might find the plot implausible - an affair between a Muslim prisoner and the Serb commandant of the prison where women are getting raped every day. Some Bosnian women who'd been through that, found the film objectionable. The Bosnian government temporarily withdrew Angelina's permit to shoot there.

Simon: You walked into a mine field. And when you were writing the script, did you realize that every step you took, there was a mine in your way?

Jolie: I didn't know it was gonna be as sensitive. Everything was something to be very careful about and sensitive.

But Angelina says, 'Remember, it's a movie, a love story, not a documentary.'

Simon: There's a lot of heart, there's also a lot of brutality.

Jolie: There's a lot of brutality.

Simon: A lot more than there ever was in a film that you acted in.

Jolie: Yeah. That's true.

She's acted in more than thirty films and her first ones, like "Gia" - about a drug addicted fashion model, felt edgy and real. Angelina, whose actor parents broke up before she was one, experimented with drugs and a few other things early in her life. She says she used those experiences to get into her roles.

She won an Oscar for her chilling portrait of a schizophrenic in "Girl, Interrupted." Later, she switched gears as Lara Croft, a character from a video game in Tomb Raider. And played a spy, Mrs. Smith, to Brad Pitt's Mr. Smith.

Simon: You were once asked if you wanted to play a Bond girl and you said, 'Nope.' You wanted to play Bond. Well you didn't play Bond, but you played a Bond-like character in "Salt." Is that one of your ambitions, to punch through these gender stereotypes?

Jolie: It's not something I intentionally did, but when it comes my way, it's-- and I'm aware of it, it was really fun to do especially 'cause I just had kids. I just had my twins, and I'd been in a nightgown for about seven months. And I felt like-- I felt like getting up and punching something.

Her favorite movie was not an action flick but a tragedy, based on a true story. In "A Mighty Heart," Angelina plays Marianne Pearl, the widow of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded by terrorists in Pakistan.

[Excerpt from "A Mighty Heart": Angelina Jolie is screaming.]

Simon: That was a moment I'll never forget.

Jolie: That was the hardest thing. Yeah. As an actress that was the hardest thing.

Many of her films earned her more money than praise. Critics have often been tough. But some directors rave about her. Clint Eastwood said she's a great talent hampered only by the fact that she has quote "the most gorgeous face on the planet." That face has sold a lot of handbags and magazines, but early on Angelina Jolie flirted with a very different career.

Simon: You wanted to be a funeral director.

Jolie: Uh-huh, I did.

Simon: And you even took courses to prepare yourself.

Jolie: It sounds like this very strange, eccentric, dark thing to do. But, in fact, I lost my grandfather and I was very upset with his funeral. And so, we discussed that maybe there are ways where this whole idea of how somebody passes and how a family deals with this passing and what death is should be addressed in a different way. If this acting thing didn't work out, that was gonna be my backup.

She can joke about it now, but there were other times - scary and dangerous times - that she told us were not funny at all.

Jolie: I went through heavy, darker times, and I survived them. I didn't die young. So I'm very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn't survive certain things.

Simon: You talk about heavy, darker times. What are you referring to?

Jolie: I was hoping you'd miss that. Ah, nothing I want to go into a lot of detail about. But I think people can imagine that I did the most dangerous and I did the worst, and I, for many reasons, I shouldn't be here.

Simon: That's a very provocative phrase, for many reasons--

Jolie: Well, sure. You just--

Simon: --you shouldn't be here.

Jolie: You just think that-- those too many times where you came close to too many dangerous things, too many chances taken too-- too far.

Her odd behavior was out there for everyone to see-- the intimate way she kissed her brother in public, the vials of blood she and her second husband, Billy Bob Thornton, wore around their necks. Angelina acknowledges she's taken quite a walk on the wild side, but says she's moved on.

In recent years she has been traveling the world as a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN. She's visited more than 20 countries, primarily to work with refugees.

Simon: You used to be a pretty bad girl. Now you are a UN ambassador. You are a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jolie: Uh-huh.

Simon: You're a humanitarian activist. Do you ever miss being a bad girl?

Jolie: I'm still a bad girl.

Simon: Yeah?

Jolie: You know, I still have that side of me that is-- it's just-- it's in its place now. It belongs-- it-- you know, it belongs to Brad. Or it belongs to our adventures.

Angelina and Brad Pitt have had three children together. She also adopted three from three different countries: Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam. The tabloids have the couple splitting up one week, getting married the next. Angelina told us they have no plans to get married.

Simon: The vast majority of Americans know you because you're on the cover of magazines every week and every time they go to a supermarket, they see you. What are they missing?

Jolie: Um, me. Yeah. I don't-- I don't see those things, and I don't know what they are, but I assume--

Simon: Sure you do, you know what they are.

Jolie: I assume they're not me. I assume they're not me. They're-- they're not who I am, they're not what I spend my day caring about. I find them quite shallow and often very wrong when I do hear about what they are.

But they make it impossible for her to do anything in public. Even in Budapest, we could only lunch with her in the private room of a restaurant. When you're Angelina Jolie, though, there's no such thing as private. Take her tortured relationship with her father, the actor Jon Voight. He actually went on television and said his daughter had serious mental problems. That even shocked Hollywood. For years, Angelina refused to talk to her father. After her mother died, she started seeing him again. But she gives her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, all the credit for where she is today.

Simon: Your mother is a beautiful woman.

Jolie: Yeah, she is.

Simon: You're pretty chubby as a kid.

Jolie: I was all cheeks, yeah.

Simon: Big lips.

Jolie: Big lips.

Angelina also says it was her mom who taught her how to raise her own kids. At the house Angelina's renting in Budapest, we weren't allowed to film her children, unless you call Jacques one of her kids. He seemed to love the camera almost as much as the camera loves Angelina.

Simon: You're here because Brad is shooting a film here?

Jolie: Uh-huh (affirm).

Simon: You're not shooting a film?

Jolie: No, we never work at the same time.

Simon: What's better, when Brad is working and you're with the kids--

Jolie: Yes.

Simon: Or when you're working and Brad is with the kids?

Jolie: When I'm home with the kids.

Simon: Bet a lot of full-time parents would love to be shooting movies.

Jolie: Yes, they would because it's easier. My mother was-- was a full-time mother. She didn't have much of her own career, her own life, her own experiences, her own-- you know, everything was for her children.

Simon: And do you try to be the same kind of mom that she was?

Jolie: I will never be as good a mother as she was. I will try my best, but I don't think I could ever be. She was-- she was just grace incarnate. She was the most generous, loving-- she's better than me.

Simon: It's clear that you can talk about anything but your mother without-- without welling up.

Jolie: Yeah. That's my-- that's my soft spot. Yeah, yeah.

Angelina's biggest regret is that her mother won't be there for the premiere of "In the Land of Blood and Honey" - a film she suspects won't have the commercial appeal of anything she's done.

Simon: It's going to open soon.

Jolie: Yeah.

Simon: Nervous?

Jolie: I am nervous that people are going to not understand it.

Simon: Right now if you had to decide that in six months you are going to either act in a film or direct a film, what would you do?

Jolie: I'd prefer directing.

Simon: Yeah?

Jolie: Yeah. I loved having the spotlight on somebody else. And I would much prefer it.

Angelina's already writing and planning to direct another war film about Afghanistan and she knows as a director her beauty and her acting skills won't be worth a nickel.

Jolie: It's nice. It's nice for all of that not to matter.

Simon: It's also risky.

Jolie: Is it? I mean, I think what's risky is living your life and-- and never trying for anything and never doing something brave and never getting yourself scared and...

Simon: Are you scared?

Jolie: In a good way.