When Angelina Jolie made her directorial debut in 2011 with the Bosnian War romance “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” reviews were middling to respectable, though the film was still dismissed by many critics as a sort of noble vanity project. (The Golden Globe voters didn't help it much by handing it a shamelessly celebrity-courting Best Foreign Language Film nod.) But Jolie — as in pretty much all her ventures — is proving herself to be pretty serious about her directing career.
Later this year, she'll deliver the Christmastime WWII biopic “Unbroken”: scripted by the Coen Brothers, starring red-hot up-and-comer Jack O'Connell, and presently being touted as a major Oscar prospect for Universal Pictures. And whether that pans out or not, she's already got a third directorial venture in the works: Deadline reports that she's in talks to film an original screenplay she's written herself, with an eye to star in it opposite partner in crime Brad Pitt.
No other details are available at this stage — and no distributor has been set — but this promises to be a pretty big deal. Jolie and Pitt may be the premier celebrity power couple of the day — a sort of less tempestuous Taylor-and-Burton pairing — but haven't collaborated on screen since the project that united them in the first place, 2005's action comedy “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” If “Unbroken” makes a legit filmmaker of Jolie, that'll only heighten the stakes. Pitt, of course, now has an Oscar for behind-the-camera work, having co-produced “12 Years a Slave”; I'm sure they'd like matching ones eventually.
Are you eager to see Jolie and Pitt on screen together? And do you think she could be the real deal as a writer-director? Tell us in the comments.