Jolie good 007 (From The Northern Echo)

Jolie good 007

12:22pm Thursday 19th August 2010 in

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Mrs James Bond? Angelina Jolie certainly has all the attributes for becoming the world’s bestknown secret agent. Steve Pratt reports.

IF BY the time they get around to making the next James Bond movie Daniel Craig is feeling a little too old for all the action stuff the role demands, then the producers could do no better than give Angelina Jolie a call.

Her new movie Salt finds her playing a spy, a CIA operative suspected of being a Russian sleeper agent - and Salt is an all-action spy, as handy with her fists and her feet as her brain.

The Bond reference isn’t entirely frivolous. Jolie had a meeting with Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal a few years ago when it came up in conversation that the studio was getting ready to make one of the new Bond movies.

“I playfully said, ‘I want to be Bond’.

That was our little joke, and then she found this project,” recalls Jolie.

She’s already demonstrated in the Lara Croft movies and as an assassin in last year’s Wanted that action was a game she can play very well indeed.

Anything a leading man can do, she can do - and probably better.

She goes where other A-list actresses wouldn’t dare go but would call for a stunt double. So when Salt walks along a ledge 12 storeys up in her bare feet that really is Jolie doing it. Attached to a harness that will be removed digitally later but her risk-taking is impressive.

The role was originally conceived for an actor with Tom Cruise lined up to star at one point. When Jolie was cast Edwin Salt became Evelyn Salt but none of the action was diluted. Quite the opposite, as Jolie pushed to do more and more as the CIA agent forced to go on the run when she’s suspected of being a sleeper spy.

Among those Jolie could look to for help in playing the character was the film’s technical advisor on the CIA Melissa Boyle Mahle, who worked in the agency as an operative for 16 years. Salt is married but, says the actress, it’s a job that can put a lot of strain on a relationship.

“I talked to one woman, a former operative, who said it was such a relief when she left the agency – after years of not being able to communicate anything that she did or where she was going, her whole relationshp with her husband changed. She didn’t realise how much it had kept them apart, how difficult it had been.”

She spoke to a lot of women in the CIA – “lovely sweet women that you can’t imagine being put in a dangerous situation, but they really are”.

Jolie had definite opinions on how Salt would handle herself. “She fights aggressively, in face-to-face combat. In some movies I’ve done, there’s been a temptation because I’m female to make the action nice”.

But nice, she adds, is not how a trained operative accused of being a sleeper mole for the enemy would fight.

The film reunited Jolie with stunt coordinator Simon Crane, with whom she worked on Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Mr & Mrs Smith (the film on which she met her other half Brad Pitt).

“Angelina is very much into doing all the action herself,” he says.

“She’s really game for anything. She was always trying to find or come up with new ways of doing action.”

THE actress herself says simply that she loves doing action movies, that she has “always loved to run and jump around and be physical”.

One major action sequence sees Salt, cornered by her pursuers, leap off a freeway overpass and land on top of a moving truck on the highway below.

Still being pursued, she’s forced to take some dramatic evasive actions in the middle of a six-lane thoroughfare.

Crane, working closely with stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood and Jolie’s stunt double Eunice Huthart, planned the shot – and points out that it’s really Jolie on top of the vehicles.

“I trust them so much with their rigs and harnesses,” she explains. “Instead of feeling scared, it’s like working with the circus for the day, and you get to play.

They know me and they know what I can do, and what I’m not very good at.”

As for the scene in which she walks along the ledge, she says “I happen to like heights, so we’ve found these moments where I can use that.”

She worked with Crane on developing a fight style that her character would use. “Because I’m a girl and I’m light on my feet, we naturally went to styles like Muay Thai, which is very long and beautiful,” says Jolie.

This employs the Art of Eight Limbs in which not only fists are used to make strikes but also elbows, shins and knees.

“But then we realised it wasn’t as practical a fight if you have face-to-face combat, and it didn’t look as aggressive,” she says.

So Jolie and Crane and his team added Krav Maga, a more brutal form of fighting developed in Israel and used by the FBI and American special operations forces, to Salt’s fighting techniques.

“She fights secret service guards in the film. You can’t have her take those guys out too easily, or it would soften the whole film. Salt is very efficient – she doesn’t really want to kill anyone.”

■ Salt (12A) is in cinemas now.