Key Points

In director Alice Winocour’s movie Couture, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, Jolie plays a mother and filmmaker who's working on a Paris Fashion Week runway film while getting divorced and learning of a breast cancer diagnosis.

“I felt very vulnerable,” Jolie said of making the movie during an interview with Variety at the festival, reports variety.com.

The star, who underwent a preventive double mastectomy in 2013 because she carried the BRCA1 gene, couldn’t help but think of her family history.

Her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of ovarian and breast cancer in 2007, and her aunt and grandmother also died of the illness.

The Oscar winning actress sought comfort by wearing one of her late mother’s necklaces onscreen in Couture, reports people.com.

“I feel like it’s such a personal film,” the mother of six said.

She added: “It felt so private that in my mind, it’s probably the one film that doesn’t feel like a film.”

“I thought it would be interesting to show her fragility and the woman behind the icon," the director said.

"What I love about Angelina is that she’s in the Hollywood system, but at the same time, she’s a kind of a rebel, a rebel to the authority.”

Jolie knew signing on to the film would “bring up many personal things.”

“But I have always found the heaviest films tend to have the most loving sets. There’s something quite comforting about having real conversations and having real feelings with a shared community.”

“It was quite healing in many ways because you look at the other faces of the people on the set, because one in three people have cancer, and most everybody’s been in a hospital room with somebody they’ve loved. Everybody on set has lost someone they’ve loved.”

She continued, “You recognize that life is fragile and time goes quickly, and people pass away that we can’t imagine the world could exist without... It’s hard not to feel very close to a crew and other actors in this kind of a piece.”

Among Jolie’s other upcoming credits are Anxious People, Maude v Maude and Maleficent 3.

- IANS