Head for heights: Angelina Jolie, who performed many of her own stunts in Salt, seems to be enjoying herself as she hangs off a New York buildingWhat Angelina Jolie wants, she tends to get. When Sony boss Amy Pascal took Jolie to lunch four years ago and asked her whether she'd like to play a James Bond girl, she replied that she would prefer to play Bond.
They both laughed - but Jolie wasn't joking and Pascal had taken her seriously.
Jolie's wish was somewhat granted when Tom Cruise withdrew from playing a super-spy in Edwin A. Salt, a blockbuster conceived to rival the Bond and Jason Bourne movies.
The script was overhauled to accommodate Angelina, and the spy's name became Evelyn Salt; a CIA operative who goes on the run when she is suspected of being a Russian spy.
And Jolie was quick to ring in the changes. Salt's young daughter was written out of the film and the original conclusion was jettisoned. And a scene was added in which Salt covers a security camera with her underwear.
Jolie, 35, who also fought for the film's action scenes to be toughened up, says: 'My character doesn't use her sexuality. It's the roughest I've looked. I wanted my fight scenes to get darker and I wanted everyone to see that it was me.'
The film's Australian director, Phillip Noyce, thinks she has done a great job. 'This film is owned by Angelina,' he says. 'You can't imagine anyone else who could have pulled it off so effectively with her combination of extreme athleticism and acute acting ability.'
In action: Jolie takes things more seriously when the cameras are rolling. She has been praised for 'owning' her new role as CIA agent Evelyn SaltJolie's edgy portrayal was undoubtedly helped by her research into the shadowy world of real-life spies and agents.
Before taking on the role she talked to several women CIA spies, including the film's technical adviser, Melissa Boyle Mahle, who worked for the agency for 16 years.
'You wonder what these women are like - are they powerful?' Jolie says. 'My preconception of what a spy was like was blown out of the water. Melissa spoke about the loneliness of not being able to communicate with her family and what that does to you when you come home from work and you just can't share anything about your life.'
The film has benefited from priceless publicity with its release coinciding with news that the U.S. government had arrested 11 alleged Russian 'sleepers'.
These are agents trained to infiltrate the American way of life for many years before Day X - spytalk for the time they are eventually activated by Moscow.
No more Mrs Nice Guy: Jolie says of Salt, 'In some movies I've made, there's been a temptation, as I'm a woman, to make the action, well, nice. Not this time'
Tough day at the office: Apart from hanging off buildings, Jolie had to jump from one moving truck to another'At first, we thought the whole idea of sleepers was a bit of a fantasy', says Jolie. 'But as we found out more from the CIA spies, we discovered it was more real than we could have guessed.'
Jolie is no stranger to the action movie genre. She's played Lara Croft in two Tomb Raider movies and assassins in both Wanted and Mr & Mrs Smith (starring opposite Brad Pitt, then married to Jennifer Aniston but now Jolie's partner).
But in Salt, Jolie takes her combative streak to another level. She hangs off the side of a New York building, falls out of a helicopter 60ft above the ground and leaps off one speeding truck on to another.
Back to glamour: The blood, sweat and scars were swapped for red-carpet chic at the London premiere of SaltJolie performed most of the stunts herself. She says: 'In some movies I've made, there's been a temptation, as I'm a woman, to make the action, well, nice. Not this time.'
After one physical scene, she feared she had gone deaf - 'although it turned out I'd forgotten I still had my protective ear-plugs in'.
And, after all the big stunts, she came a cropper tackling one of the easier calls - rolling along the floor for one of the film's final scenes, she banged into a desk, leaving her with a scar above her nose.
Jolie says raising six children with Pitt - three biological and three adopted - makes her more inclined to put herself on the line.
'Maybe it's because I spend so much time at home with the kids that I really like to get out and jump on something and not be an ordinary mum for a bit. I liked the character because in the story she has had a damaged life and is a little off. Well, I'm a little off, too.'
But Jolie didn't have things all her own way on Salt. 'Angie had the fantasy that she could jump on a motorcycle pillion and then we would find out that Brad Pitt was the motorcycle rider leading her to safety,' Noyce says.
But her dream of him making a cameo appearance was dashed when Pitt happened to be looking after their children on the day that the scene was filmed.
It's the second time that Pitt has missed out on being in one of Noyce's films. The director reveals that he turned down Pitt to star alongside Sharon Stone in the 1993 flop Sliver in favour of Billy Baldwin.
It's Noyce's first blockbuster in a decade following time out making smaller movies. And in the interim he says that Bourne and Daniel Craig's Bond films have sent the action movie genre into a spin.
'Those are two benchmarks that changed everything,' he says. 'You now have to invest your story with emotion and deliver sequences that throw the audience into the middle of the action.'
As for who would triumph in a battle between Bourne and Evelyn Salt, Noyce has no doubts. 'Salt would win because she's a woman,' he says. She can get away with stuff that men can't.'
So, on the evidence of Salt, can Angelina Jolie.
source: dailymail
