Earlier this week, actor and filmmaker Angelina Jolie claimed that the Vanity Fair magazine had misrepresented her description of the audition process for her movie First They Killed My Father. After reviewing the transcript and audio interview, the publication has said that it stands by its story. This was in response to Jolie’s demand to remove the paragraphs about the casting process.
In the cover story published in September, Evgenia Peretz had written that the casting directors set up a game, in which money was placed on a table. The participants, which included children from vulnerable backgrounds, were asked what they wanted to do with the money before it was snatched away. The story had sparked outrage, but Jolie claimed that it was “false and upsetting”.
Jolie’ s film, based on the memoir of the same name by Loung Ung, is about a young girl who survives the excesses of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s.
“I am upset that a pretend exercise in an improvisation, from an actual scene in the film, has been written about as if it was a real scenario,” Jolie said, with backing from producer and acclaimed filmmaker Rithy Panh. “The suggestion that real money was taken from a child during an audition is false and upsetting. I would be outraged myself if this had happened. The point of this film is to bring attention to the horrors children face in war, and to help fight to protect them.”