Angelina Jolie recently told The Hollywood Reporter that she considered By the Sea to be a last-ditch effort to make her marriage with Brad Pitt, which ended in September 2016, work.
In 2015, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt premiered By the Sea, their only film as a married couple, and their first together since meeting on the set of Mr & Mrs Smith.
“I wanted us to do some serious work together,” Jolie said. “I thought it would be a good way for us to communicate. In some ways it was, and in some ways, we learned some things. But there was heaviness, probably, during that situation that carried on, and it wasn’t because of the film.”
The couple officially began their relationship in 2005, just before Mr & Mrs Smith was released and married in August 2014, after their family had grown to include six children. Jolie, who did the podcast to promote her film, First They Killed My Father, said that she was able to withstand the media scrutiny over her initial relationship with Pitt because of her international work with refugees in several countries, including Cambodia, where she adopted her first son, Maddox.
“By that point, I was a very different person . . . when I left Cambodia, I was much more conscious of the world. I started to learn more about what was happening, and I became more involved and I learned about refugees and UNHCR, and I wanted to educate myself further . . . when you see people that have suffered so much when you see if only they had a spotlight on them, you don’t complain so much about your stupid little problems.”
In her comments, Jolie indicated that she thought she and Pitt might have been able to improve their overall relationship after working together again. And though they announced their split less than two years later, Jolie said she does not regret doing one last film with Pitt.
“I’m glad we did [By the Sea] because we did explore something together,” Jolie said. “Whatever it was, maybe it didn’t solve certain things, but we did communicate something that needed to be communicated to each other.”