Angelina Jolie is a mother of six children, but there once was a time when she never thought she’d be a mother.

‘It’s strange, I never wanted to have a baby. I never wanted to be pregnant. I never babysat. 

I never thought of myself as a mother,’ the 40-year-old actress told the Associated Press during an interview in Cambodia on Wednesday. 

The Oscar winner has been in the country to direct her next film

First They Killed My Father, which is based on a Khmer Rouge memoir written by survivor Loung Ung that recounts the 1970s Cambodian genocide.

She first thought about a life with children when she was shooting Tomb Raider in the year 2000. 

The wife of Brad Pitt was playing with children at a Cambodian school when it became ‘suddenly very clear to me that my son was in the country, somewhere.’

She adopted Maddox in 2002, and a year later opened a foundation in his name in northwestern Battambang province, which helps fund health care, education and conservation projects in rural Cambodia.

Maddox is now 14 and sporting what his mom calls ‘a blonde stripe’ — a shaggy mohawk with the top dyed blonde.  

He joined her in Cambodia to help behind the scenes for the project that she sees as a unique merger of her film work and family with humanitarian interests.

‘For me, this is the moment, where finally my life is kind of in line, and I feel I’m finally where I should be,’ Jolie said.

Her fondness for Cambodia is mutual, says the country’s most celebrated filmmaker Rithy Panh, who says First They Killed My Father will be the first Hollywood epic filmed in Cambodia about the country’s genocide — a sign that the government trusts her to respectfully revisit the horrors of the past.

‘I don’t think they authorized Hollywood to come here. They authorized Angelina Jolie. It’s not the same. She is special. She has a special relationship with the Cambodian people. There is a mutual respect,’ said Panh, her co-producer.

‘I wonder if she’s not a reincarnated Cambodian,’ he laughed, then thought about it. ‘Maybe. Maybe in a previous life she was Cambodian.’

She expects to return to hold the film’s premiere in Cambodia at the end of the year, before its release on Netflix. 

The film, which she is directing and co-wrote with Ung for Netflix, is in Khmer, with an all-Cambodian cast and according to Jolie ‘the most important’ movie of her career. 

‘When I first came to Cambodia, it changed me. It changed my perspective. I realized there was so much about history that I had not been taught in school, and so much about life that I needed to understand, and I was very humbled by it,’  she said.

She added she felt a ‘real emptiness’ growing up in Los Angeles.

She was struck by the graciousness and warmth of Cambodian people, despite the tragedy that left an estimated 2 million people dead. While shooting Lara Croft in 2000, some scenes required sidestepping land mines, she said, which made her aware of the dangers refugees face in countries ravaged by war. ‘That trip triggered my realization of how little I knew and the beginning of my search for that knowledge.’

It prompted her to contact the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to learn about the agency’s work before joining as a goodwill ambassador in 2001. She was then given an expanded role as Special Envoy in 2012. 

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Source: The Wall Street Journal