Watch Sucker Punch - Comic Con Press Conference!

So, as you may have noticed over the last few days, I'm falling in love with Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch. I can't wait for it to hit theaters in March 2011 and rock my world.

The posters look great, the trailer is fantastic and now I have the transcript from the Sucker Punch Q&A in San Diego last weekend.

Give it a read and get a feel for what it was like making the movie for Snyder and his co-writer/ wife Deborah as well as some of the actors.

Props to Silas Lesnick for doing a fantastic job putting all of this together. Buy him a beer if you see him.

SDCC: The Sucker Punch Press Conference

Heading straight from their well-received presentation in Hall H, writer/director Zack Snyder proudly led his cast to a press conference in the neighboring Hilton. Ready to talk Sucker Punch in depth was Emily Browning (Babydoll), Vanessa Hudgens (Blondie), Jamie Chung (Amber), Jena Malone (Rocket), Carla Gugino (Madam Gorski) and Zack's wife and producing partner, Deborah Snyder.

The first completely original film from Zack, Sucker Punch takes place in the 1950s and tells the story of young woman (Browning) who is confined to a mental institution by her abusive father. Facing a lobotomy in five days, Babydoll works on an escape plan with her fellow inmates. The story moves in and out of anachronistic fantasy sequences, replete with dragons, robots, heavy weaponry and musical numbers, depicting Babydoll's perception of reality of a number of imaginary levels.

Also starring in the film but, unfortunately, not present for San Diego are Abbie Cornish, Jon Hamm, Oscar Isaac and Scott Glenn.

Q: A zombie film, comic book movies, an animated owl story and now this. So you are just schizophrenic, right?
Zack Snyder: Completely schizophrenic.

Deborah Snyder: Who isn't?

Zack: That's my wife. But yes. The real answer is, "What's not cool about all that stuff?" Nothing. I think we've been trying to make movies that, so far, are things that we're interested in, that we think are cool. If it happens to have a broad -- Though, I would say that zombie movies and comic book adaptations aren't a crazy jump there. Animated owl film? Okay, I'll give you that one. But it is animated, so there's the whole maybe-relationship.

Q: Are you finding it harder and harder to top yourself?
Zack: Well, I don't think of it like that. I'm not saying, "I've gotta top myself!"

Emily Browning: I should say, in Australia, "top yourself" means "commit suicide".

Zack: Oh, great. If I don't do good, I will top myself. This is what happens with an international crowd.

Q: Vanessa, your early career started with Disney. Is that a hard association to break and is that something you're consciously doing with edgier pictures like this?
Vanessa Hudgens: It was a bit of a challenge at the beginning, because I felt like a lot of people could only see me as the girl who randomly broke into song and dance. But I sort of loved this movie. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I auditioned for it several times and just tried to put the work in. I hope that people give me a chance and, once they see me in this, I won't be the little showtune girl.

Jena Malone: Yeah, but to her credit, every young actor has something they start in that they need to break out of as they get older. Whether it's Disney or whether it's this or whether it's that. You could ask any actor that question.

Q: What sort of discipline, dancing or otherwise, did you have to learn for playing your part?
Vanessa: Well, I enjoy it. I love it. I grew up dancing. I spent six years of my life in the dance studio just going every single day. As I grew up, I started to move around and stopped dancing. Dance studios in LA are pretty intimidating, so I haven't gone back to it. Once i found out that were going to do a little bit in this movie, I was just so excited. It's more of a themed dance in this. And it's just so much fun, you know? It's very theatrical. You just get to play.

Q: 300 was pretty much an all-male cast. Can you talk about working with a primarily female cast in this one?
Zack: Yeah, I vowed never to have just one gender in a movie and sort of hopscotch genders, if at all possible. No, I'm kidding. It really just worked out that this story happened to be about these girls. So it wasn't anything where I was, "Oh, I've been around men too much. I've got to make a movie with only women in it."

Deborah: 300 had some kick-ass women, too.

Zack: Yeah, it did. Absolutely. The one... That character was based off of one frame in Frank [Miller's] graphic novel. But that's okay. Some things are based off one frame.

Q: Do you ladies have any special gear or technology that you love?
Jamie Chung: Oh, technology?

Zack: They all came from a farm.

Deborah: I want to steal Zack's iPad. I don't have one yet, so I've been trying to get it out of his hands. Especially because you can get service all over the place. The computers and the phones aren't working too well here because everybody's on them. But he seems to have good luck. I'm going to steal his.

Zack: No!

Emily: I'm fond of the occasional videogame now and again, but not very cool video games like Mario Kart and those sort of things.

Vanessa: I want to find the Call of Duty: Black Ops people here. I think they're showing a little bit here and I love that game.

Zack: That is a good game.

Emily: Your stock just went up so much here, Vanessa. Everyone is just like, "Oh my god! She's amazing!"

Q: Your known for striking effects and visuals. Can you talk specifically about the production design of this film?
Zack: You know, we tried to just make good looking shots all the time. It's not just in an action sequence. We really did just try to do it all the time. That influences production design and it influences everything. Because movies are visual, I tend to like it all the time. I think that influence the movie all the way across. Every aspect of the film, I think we did something that was striking. That's kind of how I want the experience of watching the movie.

Q: Vanessa, do you still feel any connections to High School Musical?
Vanessa: Well, I see Zac [Efron] a lot (laughs). But I do feel different responsibilities. High School Musical was very much a part of my childhood and, as soon as it was finished, I thought, "Okay. It's time to grow up and figure some things out." But I'm enjoying myself. It gave me the chance to do things like this, which is just awesome.

Q: Carla, this was your second time working with Zack. How did you come aboard the film?
Carla Gugino: Well, once you work with him once, you want to work with him again. Watchmen was such a great experience and Zack and Debbie both create this environment where every single person in every department is at the top of their game. It's just game on. Nobody there is just punching a time card. It's amazing and we have this great leadership and a really collaborative team that just comes together. I don't know. I recall Zack having this role that he thought I could do and we sat down to talk about it, both excited by what she could become. In terms of being able to work together again, one of the great things is that you learn this creative shorthand. You know going in that you're on the same page. I know that he'll let me fail miserably, if need be and will be able to say, "That didn't work. Let's try something else." That's how you find really good stuff.

Q: Why did you make the decision not to go 3D?
Zack: When we started talking about it, I had a certain idea of how I wanted to move the camera and I had a certain idea of how I wanted the film to feel. I am a fan of 3D. Legends is all 3D. It was conceived in 3D and, if anyone has seen it, I think the 3d is pretty friggin' awesome. If I do say so myself. We did talk about and, in the press, there was word that we were going to do it in 3D. We really were considering it. But we had seen a bunch of tests and conversion didn't sit with me that great. Without being baked in, it just felt a little weird. But they also showed me a test of 300 that was pretty awesome. But it didn't feel right for this movie. It's in eye-numbing 2D, which is also awesome.

Q: The footage was amazing, but the plot was a little unclear. Can you put the story for Sucker Punch in your own words?
Zack: Well, the movie doesn't come out till March and the point of the footage was not to tell the story.

Q: Can the actresses each talk about your characters a little?
Jena: I play Rocket and, basically, Babydoll comes to this mental institution and meets all these characters that she sort of brings into these alternate realities. I sort of help her rally the troops and form a really beautiful bond with Babydoll. And, you know, I'm kind of crazy.

Vanessa: I play Blondie. She's in this whole crazy world as well. She starts off as kind of a follower. I feel like in a lot of the fight sequences she becomes a total badass, which is kind of funny because it's a complete difference. As well as the whole Blondie thing.

Emily: I play Babydoll. She's the only character whose story you get to see any of outside of the asylum. She sort of comes into the institution and has very little time to kind of escape, so she rallies these girls together and gets them to help her escape as well. It sort of goes into her imagination a lot. It's really cool, being at the center of those fantasies.

Jamie: I play Amber and she's kind of the first one to jump onboard with Babydoll's plan. She's really sweet and she is extremely loyal to her friends but, you know, she's always there for Babydoll. All she really has is her friends.

Carla: I play a Polish psychiatrist named Dr. Gorski. It's all in the world of the 1960's, but it's kind of Zack's reality, so there's a heightened reality to it as well. The time and place is sort of questionable. In the alternate world, I play the keeper and sort of Madam of the brothel who is Madam Gorski. She just has a really interesting journey because she's clearly been through a lot before. She's in charge of taking care of these girls and she does it in a very strict, tough love way. But there's probably no one who understands them like her. It was such an incredible experience because you're trying to see all these characters come to life as we were filming. We were discovering things while we were shooting, which is a luxury that you oftentimes don't have. We'd find these little gems of the relationships.

Zack: If you get a chance to look at the footage again and pay close attention, there's a lot of the background in there.

Deborah: What I think is amazing is that a lof of these women are so multi-dimensional. They can be strong and they can fight, but they can also be feminine and sexy and vulnerable at times. I think we haven't really seen that yet in these female action films. I think that, for me, that's what was so exciting for the project.

Q: Can you talk about the special training?
Emily: Yeah, we trained for like three months before we started filming. We did lots of martial arts and gun training and me and Abbie [Cornish] did like swordfighting. We also just did a lot of physical strength training with scary Navy SEALS. It was sort of our whole lives for three months. It's all we did.

Zack: The idea for me was to give these guys a chance to live like a pro-athlete instead of an actor for a little bit.

Jena: And eat like one, too.

Zack: To feel like, in a sense, that there was no movie to be made. That what they were doing was just every day going to train, go to the gym, shoot a gun, go to bed and wake up and do it again. I think that that's kind of a cool way to think about it and I hope that their experiences together in that setting then had an influence on the movie itself and, having to do those scenes, there was a weird leftover from the sweating and the gun shooting.

Jena: In a lot of ways, three months of training in the stunt gym felt a lot like a mental institution. You just do it, pushing past this idea of pain or emotional discomfort. You get to this point where you're crying.

Zack: Take your vitamins!

Jena: You get 45 minutes and a juice break. But it's amazing because once you get back that routine of discomfort, you get to this amazing point of exhilaration. You're totally finding new things inside you every single day. As a woman, I've never been asked to push myself to such extremes. So you're finding out some strengths that you can play directly to the characters and the relationships between the characters. So that was smart on your part.

Zack: I didn't do it on purpose. (laughs)

Q: What was it like acting without the CG backgrounds? Was seeing the footage close to how you imagined it?
Vanessa: You can never imagine it to be as good as it is. There are scenes where I'm shooting at this dragon and Zack's just like, "Shoot in the air and then go there and go down there and shoot there!" Shooting at the little balls on the green screen. And then seeing it today, my god.

Jena: And we weren't shooting in a vacuum. We had the ultimate resource which was the interior of Zack's mind. It was all there. As much information as we needed. Of where to go and what to shoot and what everything looked like. We had so many things to pull from.

Jamie: And there were images onset and clips of what the scene was supposed to look like. So that really helped, visually.

Emily: But even seeing the footage today, we all knew it was going to look cool. But it was 10,000 times cooler than I had expected.

Q: Carla, can you compare this film experience to Watchmen?
Carla: What was very different is that, with Watchmen, we had a very specific bible that was always something that being allegiant to was of the utmost importance. So there was something that predated any of us that we had to refer to. This was also, absolutely, a bible that had as much significance to us as that did. But because the creator of that bible was also the director of the movie, it was cool because we could ask, "Is this where you're coming from?" And we could ask and try things. There was a certain kind of exploration that was a little bit different because there was less pressure.

Zack: Yeah. With Watchmen, there was, "She says this, so say it." Where, with this, we could play with it.

Q: She was Polish in Watchmen as well.
Zack: It's interesting.

Carla: But she hid her Polish nature!

Zack: Yeah, Alan [Moore] didn't want her to be Polish and I did.

Q: Was it fun to wear those outfits and did you take anything home with you?
Vanessa: Absolutely not, but I did think about it.

Q: Were you able to incorporate those outfits into your performances?
Jena: I think they incorporated themselves. We had to learn how to fight for three months and then, with the outfits, we had to learn how to fight again. They got in the way a little bit just figuring out the belts and the straps and what these things here were.

Zack: What hurts.

Jena: Exactly.

Emily: But I felt tougher in the costume, actually. I found it kind of easier to fight in costume. Michael [Wilkinson], when he designed, was obviously somewhat revealing, but also wanted to make sure we were really comfortable. I felt awesome in my costume. It was kind of easier to fight, in a way.

Jamie: It really helped put you into character in all the different fantasy realms that we were in. All of the costumes translated really well. They still gave the essence of your character. They were great. Most of the things were vintage of handmade. The corsets were custom-made to fit our bodies.

Carla: What's great about Michael is that he's just really a genius. He'll work with you. There was an entire crystal outfit that just snapped on. There were certain moments were it was just like, buck up. They're so beautiful that you have a to have a sense of humor.

Zack: Yeah, a sense of humor is perfect. You don't have to wear it too long.

Salt - Liev Schreiber Interview!

Katey Rich and cinemablend.com posted a great interview with Salt star Liev Schreiber and we wanted to share it with you.

Take a read and see what Schreiber has to say about filming in DC and New York and how he handled the sexual tension situation between himself and co-star Angelina Jolie.

Worry not, there aren't any spoilers. It's just a good interview with one of the stars of the movie.

For more information on the movie and how and where to watch Salt streaming online after the release on July 23, 2010 click the link and read the article.

What was it like filming that big church scene in New York, especially as a New Yorker familiar with the city?
That was amazing. That’s probably up there with running through the Washington mall in my dress shoes. But that was just amazing to me, that we were at St. Bartholomew’s church and not only had we stopped traffic but there were like 20 bagpipers marching up the middle of Park Avenue. It was like, wow, this is really decadent.

Could it have been the same if you filmed in Toronto?
No offense to the Canadians, but I believe location is like a character and authenticity really matters. When you’re in a place like New York or DC you just can’t beat it, and it’s so hard to recreate because they are both such distinctive places. I think it’s pretty easy these days to tell films that are shot in Toronto.

What did you take away from meeting all the spies before filming?
The first thing I was intrigued by was the fact that the average CIA operative was not ex-military or special forces or in anyway lethal looking or James Bond-y. The average CIA agent looked more like Aldrich Ames than they did Daniel Craig. That was interesting to me because it turns out most of them are analysts. They’re language students, poli-sci students, who are selected through an elaborate process. But then it was contradicted again because than I met Valerie [Plame] and I was like wa wa wow! Talking to Valerie I found out she had extensive weapons training and extensive combat training and I was like, "I guess I was wrong, you’re not all nerds."

But I like the fact that they’re nerds. I like duality in character, I like the opposition. I think that’s what’s so successful about Tom Clancy’s books and with Harrison Ford. As attractive as he is, I think one of the things he was able to bring to it was the sensibility of a middle-aged man. He had a bad back and people would shoot at him and he would dive behind cars and his back would hurt. I thought that’s interesting and compelling because he’s humanizing it. That’s an exercise for an actor. I’m not that interested in working with impervious people.

What was it like working with Angelina? Had you known her before Salt?
I hadn’t known her very well, at all. I was very nervous in the beginning. I get very nervous around famous people and I get nervous around beautiful women. This was a big double whammy for me and initially really uncomfortable, which was worrying me. I felt like the important part of the job for me was to develop familiarity with her because that was the humanizing factor. But then we bonded over kids very quickly. I have 2 small kids and she has 2 small kids and it quickly became, "Oh you’re doing time-outs now? That’s just teething." And all the sexual tension went out of the room. All the anxiety about her being very famous and a super-human celebrity
kind of went away and I found this very nice easy person that I could relate to.

I love that you and her are trading drag roles, since you did drag in Taking Woodstock and she does drag in Salt?
I’m actually nervous because Angelina is very powerful in Hollywood and she's got in her head that she wants to do a movie with her, I, and Chiwetel, where Chiwetel and I are the girls and she’s a man. I have a feeling that she’s actually going to make this happen. I’ve been thinking about doing a cop show with Chiwetel where we’re cross-dressers called Sassy and Butch. I’m Butch.

You've been playing a lot of dark characters lately. What has been drawing you to them?
I don’t think I play a dark character in this movie, but I don’t look at it that way. I also don’t have as much control over what I get as you think I do. I think there’s that perception of me. A lot of times in Hollywood you’re as good as your last job. You do something well and people go, 'Oh that’s what he does.' When I was in school everything was comedy, all I did was comedy. I haven’t been able to get back to comedy in ages. You screw one goat…

Salt - Angelina Jolie Interview!

With Salt getting set to release on July 23, 2010 the trailers, TV ads, photos and posters have all been released. And now we are starting to get interviews surfacing as well.

I think that this interview from Edward Douglas and comingsoon.net may be my favorite by Angelina Jolie so far. Take a read and get ready for the movie.

And for more information read the article and learn about it and how to watch Salt streaming after the release.

______________________________

ComingSoon.net was down in Washington D.C. for the Salt junket and we got to talk to Jolie along with other journalists from around the country.

Q: The recent capture of the Russian spies, that was all promotion for the film, right?
Angelina Jolie: Uh huh. We did well. It was a good marketing department.

Q: Do you feel you've inspired a new set of action heroes and would you consider this a feminist role?
Jolie: We certainly didn't intend (to). We made a really, really big point of while we were making it to make sure that we didn't actually make it about a woman. That's why I think it worked. I'd actually read things written for women in this genre a lot and they tended to start make it about being a woman, and that's where it tended to lose half the audience and not be as strong. So we thought the most important thing was to make her stronger, harder, tougher, all those good things. But it was surprising when we looked into it that a woman hadn't done an action movie based in reality. There are all the ones that I've done that are fantasy or some kind of science fiction. So it hadn't been done or worked and so I think it made us all a little nervous and we did think that if it worked it would be really, really nice for women. Having daughters I'm happy, too.

Q: When you first read the script was it already modified to be Evelyn Salt?
Jolie: No.

Q: How did that happen then?
Jolie: I got a call that said, "We've got a role, we've got a movie for you and your name is Edwin and you have a wife."

Q: Can you talk then about how you worked to develop that and change it?
Jolie: Well, the first thing is that the big transition he made was that he had a wife and child and in the end he was able to say, "I love you." This was the big arc. I said that wasn't something that would be surprising for a woman, and I don't think this woman would have a child. So the first thing was that we couldn't have a child and we had to find a way to have this relationship with a husband or a wife that is very different. What would you not expect a woman to do, what would be unusual, what would suit a woman but be something that we could do? What do we do with that? That was the first thing and then once we decided what we were going to do it was how we were going to make that work in the movie.

Q: The concept of you trying to save your husband, some people might not believe a woman would do that, except when it's you doing it. Why do you think that is and are you aware of that quality you have that would bring that to an audience?
Jolie: Thank you. I think instinctively if something ever happened to somebody I love, I would do anything possible to get them and I would be fearless about it because that's the way that I am for somebody I care about or something I love. So maybe there's just that, man or woman, if it's in your make up to be willing to have a certain fight at times. People can believe it or not believe it because it needs to be inside of the person. Maybe. Maybe I'm lucky.

Q: Can you talk about working with Phillip Noyce again? Were you the one who brought him on board?
Jolie: We all kind of came together at the same time it seemed. I just knew because of the other films that he'd done, I knew that he was that very rare director that really loved action and good action and understandable action but also really loved drama and could really tell a story and was sensitive to getting performances and all of that. I knew that the film wouldn't be simplified into some kind of run around action movie. So I was very comfortable with him and it was interesting because the first time we worked together I played a rookie and it was kind of who I was at the time. Now, ten years later I play someone a little more sure of herself and it suited our relationship. I think I was a little more like, "I would do this I think."

Q: Now at this point you can throw in more ideas than back then, right?
Jolie: I think I was more collaborative, yeah.

Q: What sort of collaboration came about in working with Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor?
Jolie: It's so hard to talk about it without giving away the movie. They're all extraordinary actors. The man who played my husband is an extraordinary German actor. Daniel [Pearce] was extraordinary, the guy who played the Russian. The nice thing about this kind of film is that sometimes in these action movies, there's not enough great characters. This one had had really great strong characters and so it welcomed really strong actors and so it was such a pleasure to have these very real scenes and very deep relationships with each one of them. Instead of the action movies I've done where it's been really about that, in this I got to do that really great scene work. I just think the world of all of them. It was really fun also because when you see the film, the relationships just change a lot, they morph. So we had fun with that because one day we'd be one thing to each other and the next we'd be something else.

Q: What kind of rigorous training did you go through for this?
Jolie: The thing is when you have six kids and you say, "I just don't have the time to train like I did for 'Tomb Raider.'" A lot of it for me was just getting back into shape at all. It had been so long since I'd worked, and I'd had babies and it was just actually getting my boots back on and punching again. So we really crammed it in pretty fast. So it was a lot of learning while doing and it really suited the film because we just had to jump in. But they did try to train me in different styles, as I said. We started kind of fancy. We started with a lot of Muay Thai, with a lot of kicks, a lot of that, but then we realized that it had to go more street fighting and it had to go more with hands in somebody's face and it just had to grapple and kick and punch. The quickest way to take somebody down instead of the most interesting and prettiest way.

Q: You've worked with Simon Crane multiple times for combat training. How did the physicality in this movie differ from other times you've worked together?
Jolie: Simon's thing with me is always, "Are you ready to suffer?" and I say, "Yes, sir." I call him Dr. Crane because he always fixes everything. On this one, he knows all the other films very well, all the kinds of guys movies and other things and he said, "You have to be meaner. You have to stop being so elegant when you fight. You can't kind of be long in your kicks because this is real now. So that would be pretty but this can't be pretty. You have to find a way to stand and get more ground and get more rooted and be meaner and be more believable." So he was pretty hard on me all through it. If my posture was too hard or whatever it was he would just laugh at me and make me start over and do it tougher.

Q: Yesterday, we spoke to the movie's CIA consultant, and she mentioned how you two worked together. Can you talk about picking her brain and what you were trying to gather from her?
Jolie: For the walk in I think it was just details. I asked her a lot of different and specific things, how she'd behave, what was appropriate, whether something was technically right – that kind of stuff. But it was more for me understanding the loneliness of somebody who's not allowed to talk to their family about anything and just studying her which she probably didn't realize I was doing. I was asking her questions but really I was watching her mannerisms and just her behavior and just her and thinking, "This is just so the opposite of this kind of tough [image]." I was feeling, "Am I tough enough?" Then I meet her and I think, "Well, she doesn't fit that package of the obvious tough either and yet she is the real thing." So that gave me comfort to know that I could also be a lady, a woman and that there was some reality to that as well and to not kind of go tough, to not try to mimic some idea but to actually study this lovely lady who had all these elements.

Q: Do you have a most memorable moment while working on the movie?
Jolie: I don't know. It wasn't that kind of a movie for me. Maybe watching the children. They had to sit me down and they showed me all this footage of children in all these institutionalized settings doing all these things and then the little me which kind of looked a bit like Shiloh to me and she was almost in it for a moment. I guess it told me so much about my character but I think it also made me think about those kids and those people and my character is forced to be an orphan, stolen. But to see the little baby in the classroom by his self, I would say that's something that I'm drawn to.

Q: The movie is sort of left open at the end, so was that always the case?
Jolie: I don't remember exactly how it was. I suppose if the character is alive it's open ended in some way, but I don't know if it was this. I guess we ended in a way that is still mysterious and so it still asks questions. Like, in the end we like the idea that we didn't answer everything.

Q: Would you be interested in revisiting this character if it turns out that this will be a franchise?
Jolie: I would actually. I think if we can keep up the mystery and find another really great story, but she's really fun in that she's got so much depth because of her childhood and her life and a lot of what she's gone through. She's nicely complex. I love the possibility of the different disguises and different personalities and accents. It's kind of like a playground for an actor, that kind of role.

Q: Do you generally enjoy watching films like this, and like the "Bourne" movies?
Jolie: I have seen them, yeah. I like them. I like "Three Days of the Condor." I like "The Quiller Memorandum." I like those. We watched the more recent ones to make sure that we weren't copying anything and we'd get it different and find a new language but we also watched the old ones to make sure that we were having enough of that good taste from the long time ago films. I think we all got boxes of spy films.

(The next question is somewhat of a spoiler so skip ahead if you don’t want to know any of the many plot twists.)

Q: What did you think of yourself as a man? Were you shocked and how long were you in that get-up?
Jolie: I don't know. It was probably something like four or five hours. It was long. Obviously you do everything. You tape your breasts down. You have to put sweatpants on and all these things underneath to try and make you bulk up. But it was just weird. I liked the half-stage. I liked when I was this odd, alien looking thing. It was very strange. Brad came to visit. I remember him saying, "When do you want me to come visit?" I said, "I'm a man tomorrow. It's going to be very weird." He said, "It's you. It'll be fine.' I said, "No, no, no. It's weird." Then he showed up and went, "It's weird."

Q: What kind of badass woman do you look up to, who inspires you as a woman?
Jolie: My daughters, speaking of badass. The toughest people I've ever come across. Jane Goodall is also a friend of mine and I just find her really tough and really inspiring.

Q: The recent "Vanity Fair" cover focuses on your retirement. I think it says "farewell" in fact. So what would be next for you?
Jolie: I'm not retiring. You seem to be excited about that. Not at this time. Basically I said something as simple as "in the years to come I'll be doing less film" I'm sure and that there are many other things to do in life. So it wasn't as exciting as it sounds, but I think it sells magazines.