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Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek Pinault sat down to discuss "Without Blood," the war drama Jolie directed, which is now playing in theaters four years after it first premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.
Jolie co-wrote the screenplay with Alessandro Baricco from Baricco's novel of the same name.
Hayek plays Nina, a woman who loses her family in war and sets out to find the man she believes holds the truth behind their deaths. Demian Bichir, Jorge Antonio Guerrero, and Nika Perrone round out the cast.
Angelina Jolie and Hayek previously worked together on Marvel's "Eternals" (2021).
In a new interview, the two actresses opened up about the making of the film, reflecting on its themes and their collaboration on screen.
Hayek admitted she initially resisted taking on the role of Nina, daunted by the emotional weight of playing a character who has to carry unresolved pain for the entire shoot rather than release it.
"You cannot expel the pain; you have to keep it boiling, boiling, boiling for hours, for days, for weeks. So I was terrified, and I didn't want to do it," she said. But as she worked closely with Jolie during prep, Hayek realized the character’s internal agony hit much closer to home than she initially thought.
"I started seeing myself, my own traumas, the traits of people that I know. You realize, 'What do you mean you don't want to go? You've always been there.'"
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"There wasn't a way to act it, and there wasn't a way to direct it," Jolie described the challenge of filming the movie's emotional climax and guiding Hayek and her co-star Demian Bichir, who plays Tito, through it.
The conversation also turned to the psychological toll of conflict. Hayek reflected on a line from her character: "When we kill, we kill because it seems to us at that moment that revenge is the only pill to calm the pain. The only drug that can heal you."
At its core, the film wrestles with whether revenge actually offers freedom, or whether it just leaves behind more ghosts.
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