Angelina Jolie Defends 'Exploitative' Casting Techniques

The actress drew criticism for how she auditioned Cambodian children for her upcoming film.

By Grace O'Neill
Angelina Jolie has responded to criticism over controversial casting techniques used in her new film, First They Killed My Father. The backlash began late last week after Jolie detailed her auditioning process for the film in an interview with Vanity Fair. In the piece, the writer describes a "game" Jolie used to audition Cambodian children, many from orphanages, for the film's lead role. According to Vanity Fair, the children were offered money, then the money was "snatched away" to test their emotional responses.
Now, Jolie is insisting the anecdote has been taken out of context.
"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," she wrote in a statement to Huffington Post. "The suggestion that real money was taken from a child during an audition is false and upsetting. I would be outraged myself if this had happened."
First They Killed My Father is a Netflix original film based on a memoir of the same name, about a young girl, Loung Ung, who lives through the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the '70s. In the Vanity Fair piece Jolie describes Srey Moch, the girl chosen for the lead role, as standing out as she was "the only child that stared at the money for a very, very long time.”
“When she was forced to give it back, she became overwhelmed with emotion. All these different things came flooding back,” Jolie continued. “When she was asked later what the money was for, she said her grandfather had died, and they didn’t have enough money for a nice funeral.”
Jolie, who is a United Nations special envoy for refugees, says the wellbeing of children involved in the project was prioritised during the entire filming process. “Every measure was taken to ensure the safety, comfort and well-being of the children on the film starting from the auditions through production to the present,” she said. "Parents, guardians, partner NGOs whose job it is to care for children, and medical doctors were always on hand everyday, to ensure everyone had all they needed. And above all to 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."
Huffington Post also reports that the "game" described is actually a scene from the film, in which Loung Ung is caught stealing.