For starters, there were issues with the Pakistan secret police. In the spirit of realism, Winterbottom spent 10 days in Karachi in July shooting exteriors and a few outdoor scenes — footage of some of the very places where Daniel Pearl had stopped on the day of his kidnapping. ''We were filming the real locations, the real restaurant where he ate and the real hotel he went to,'' says Winterbottom. ''At first, I was a little nervous, but when you get there you see that they're just normal places, like anywhere else. Bad things may have happened there, but that doesn't make it a bad place.''
The production had been granted permission from the Pakistan government to film in Karachi, but the ISI — the secret police — apparently never got the memo. ''The ISI guys would follow us from our hotel every day,'' recalls Andrew Eaton, Winterbottom's longtime producing partner. ''And they would videotape us filming our movie. I'd love to get ahold of their footage. It'd be great for the DVD.'' At one point, the ISI actually tried to stop the crew from filming, having four extras dressed in cop costumes arrested on charges of impersonating an officer. ''It was total harassment,'' says Eaton. ''It was a pretty creepy experience.''
When Winterbottom and the rest of the crew gathered in India in October, they got a more enthusiastic reception — too enthusiastic, actually. The secret police were out of the picture, but photographers could be just as brutal, shouting insults at Jolie in hopes of grabbing her attention for a shot. Jolie's bodyguards took the abuse especially hard; one of them was videotaped literally wringing a paparazzo's neck. But the incident that caused the biggest PR headache happened while the cast and crew were shooting a scene inside a local Mumbai school. Jolie's guards were accused of physically blocking parents from picking up their kids, though they claimed they were merely trying to keep the paparazzi from swarming in. Three guards were arrested when the cops arrived, and the ensuing media frenzy got so out of hand Pitt himself had to plead for calm on Indian TV.
''I'll say this,'' Jolie offers. ''We were in a school we were legally allowed to be in. We had permits for exactly what we were doing. And the paparazzi tried to get into the school when we were at the gate, and the parents showed up to get their kids. And the paparazzi rushed through the gates and caused chaos. It was not the film production that caused chaos. We were only guilty of bringing the paparazzi.''
To be sure, things could have been even worse for Jolie. Most of the film was shot in one location, in a house in Pune standing in for the one in Karachi where Mariane held vigil during the the kidnapping. And even when Jolie did venture outside, she wasn't always immediately recognized; to play Mariane, who was five months pregnant when Daniel disappeared, she strapped on a prosthetic belly and wore a curly wig — to say nothing of the exotic French-Cuban accent she needed to learn to sound more like Mariane. (The studio says that initial reports that she darkened her skin with makeup for the role are false.) ''It would usually take about five minutes before people would figure out that it was Angelina,'' says Futterman. ''So we ended up shooting a lot of the exterior stuff in five-minute increments.''
Jolie, though, sometimes had a harder time staying inside. Winterbottom's inimitable shooting style is a little like the taping of a reality show: He uses handheld cameras and no studio lighting, encourages as much improvisation as the story line allows, and then simply follows his actors around wherever they go. ''The crew would have to find places to hide — behind curtains or in the bathroom — to stay out of the shots,'' Jolie says of the process. ''The great thing about it is if you felt like going somewhere else while doing a scene, you could. But it could get intense. Michael and I would have disagreements over wherehe could follow me. We came up with a system. If I closed the door, he couldn't follow. If I left it open, he could. I just needed to know that if things got too heavy, there'd be a place for me to cry by myself.''
That, by the way, was not something Jolie worried about on the set of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Or on Mr. & Mrs. Smith. And it's one of the things that make A Mighty Heart so potentially interesting. Since winning her Oscar, Jolie's onscreen persona has been transformed by a series of tentpole action roles, and her offscreen footprint has grown so huge (something to do with that boyfriend of hers) it threatens to eclipse all else in her life and career. But with A Mighty Heart, the actress has the chance to show why she got that little golden guy in the first place. She can remind people of something her new supersize celebrity status almost makes them forget.
That she can actually act.
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