Those readers who haven’t seen the exquisite 2015 By the Sea movie directed by Angelina Jolie and co-starring Brad Pitt can watch the full film first and return to read the rest: Spoilers ahead! Viewers of By the Sea may have felt as though they were getting a personal peek into the troubled marriage of Jolie and Pitt, but that notion wasn’t true, according to Angelina in 2015. But in 2017, Jolie is revealing more about the movie’s filming. Harper’s Bazaar reports that Jolie and Pitt referred to the movie as their “workingmoon” instead of their “honeymoon,” since they worked on the film right after the couple married in 2014.
However, the dark premise of By the Sea should have been a foreboding warning to anyone watching the troubled marriage – both onscreen and off-screen – from the outside. Pitt and Jolie filmed the movie in Malta instead of taking a non-working honeymoon. Angelina described in interviews prior to the recent The Hollywood Reporter’s Award Chatter podcast titled “ Angelina Jolie – ‘First They Killed My Father’ ” that the problems faced by the couple in the movie were not the same problems that she experienced in her marriage with Brad.
“I’m counting on the audience to know that if this was close to us at all, we could never make this film. It’s because we’re actually very, very stable and these aren’t our issues.”
However, Jolie says there was a certain “heaviness” while filming: https://t.co/YfVuzWfBEG
— Harper’s Bazaar (@harpersbazaarus) December 5, 2017
Yet those who’ve soaked up the By the Sea movie can recognize, in hindsight, issues that may have plagued the couple. Pitt played a character who had a drinking problem but escaped to the sea to try and find inspiration for his writing. Angelina starred as a beautiful woman who is at one point stared at by her real-life husband, who waxed on about how gorgeous she was when they first met. The couple found time to bond in the film when they discovered a hole in the wall that gave them a vista of a young couple who enjoy the hot sex life they once enjoyed.
The By the Sea movie was indeed a heavy movie and Jolie admitted there was a “heaviness” felt by the actress during the making of By the Sea. Angelina’s character kept referring to something lacking in the marriage of the By the Sea couple. That big secret in the movie is where the main plotline differs from the controversial split between Angelina and Brad in real life: The wife cannot have children. Pitt and Jolie have six children.
Jolie thought her By the Sea movie would be good for her and Brad. It reminded her of meeting Pitt on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith .
“A piece of art can be something that can be healing or something that’s difficult. I still don’t know. I’m happy we did that film because we did explore something together. Whatever it was, maybe it didn’t solve certain things, but we did communicate something maybe that needed to be communicated to each other.”
