By Lindsey Bahr, Film Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) --Angelina Jolie says accounts of her casting process for children to appear in her film "First They Killed My Father" are false and upsetting. An excerpt from a Vanity Fair profile of the director sparked backlash online earlier this week from people who criticized the methods as being cruel and exploitative.
Adapted from Loung Ung's memoir, the biographical drama centers on her childhood under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Jolie co-wrote and directed the film, which she talked about in a recent Vanity Fair profile.
The article described a scene in which casting directors in their attempt to find a child actress to play the lead role presented money to impoverished children only to take it away from them as an acting exercise.
Jolie and producer Rithy Panh issued joint statements Sunday responding to the outrage and refuting claims that the production was exploitative through a representative from Netflix, which is producing and distributing the film.
"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. The suggestion that real money was taken from a child during an audition is false and upsetting," Jolie said. "I would be outraged myself if this had happened."
Jolie said parents, guardians and doctors were on set daily to care for the children and "make sure that no one was in any way hurt by participating in the recreation of such a painful part of their country's history."
Panh, who himself is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, added that casting "was done in the most sensitive way possible."
He described a process that was informed both by families' preferences and NGO (non-governmental organization) guidelines in which the children understood that they would be acting out a scene.
"The children were not tricked or entrapped, as some have suggested," Panh said. "They understood very well that this was acting, and make believe."
The Vanity Fair article went into more detail about the production than the one paragraph that circulated on Twitter, which sparked the initial outrage.
A representative from Vanity Fair issued a statement Sunday saying that author Evgenia Peretz "clearly describes what happened during the casting process as a 'game' " and "that the filmmakers went to extraordinary lengths to be sensitive in addressing the psychological stresses on the cast and crew that were inevitable in making a movie about the genocide carried out in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge."
Jolie's film will debut on Netflix sometime after showing at the Toronto International Film Festival this September.
Review: Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”
In its first two hours, "The Substance" is a well-made, entertaining movie. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat treats audiences to a heavy dose of biting social commentary on ageism and sexism in Hollywood, with a spoonful of sugar- and sparkle-doused body horror.
But the film's deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitably polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable.
What begins as a dread-inducing but still relatively palatable sci-fi flick spirals deeper into absurdism and violence, eventually erupting — quite literally — into a full-blown monster movie. Let the viewer decide who the monster is.
Fargeat — who won best screenplay at this year's Cannes Film Festival — has been vocal about her reverence for "The Fly" director David Cronenberg, and fans of the godfather of body horror will see his unmistakable influence. But "The Substance" is also wholly unique and benefits from Fargeat's perspective, which, according to the French filmmaker, has involved extensive grappling with her own relationship to her body and society's scrutiny.
"The Substance" tells the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a famed aerobics instructor with a televised show, played by a powerfully vulnerable Demi Moore. Sparkle is fired on her 50th birthday by a ruthless executive — a perfectly cast Dennis Quaid, who nails sleazy and gross.
Feeling rejected by a town that once loved her and despairing over her bygone star power, Sparkle learns from a handsome young nurse about a black-market drug that promises to create a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of its user. Though she initially tosses the phone number in the trash, she soon fishes it out in a desperate panic and places an order.
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