The Washington Post: The art of preventing a Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie run-in at Venice

When and where a movie premieres at a film festival can tell its own kind of story. Certain early time slots are often reserved for the programmers’ unspoken favourites. If a movie has a ton of big-name stars and is showing on one of the last days, that’s usually the sign of a miss. (Although “Joker: Folie à Deux,” predicted to be a major awards contender, is coming to the Venice Film Festival unusually late, on Wednesday, apparently to work around Joaquin Phoenix’s schedule.)

And then there is the rare case when two Hollywood A-listers - locked in a years-long acrimonious split - each have major movie premieres, and no lagoon is big enough to accommodate them both.

Angelina Jolie was making her comeback to movie star glory, with a soaring performance as opera singer Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s “Maria.” Brad Pitt would be co-starring in “Wolfs,” a frothy, fun buddy comedy with George Clooney in which they both play fixers who fall into a fierce, banter-y competition when they get assigned to the same job. (They’re already talking about a sequel.)

What’s a world-famous, extremely beautiful ex-couple to do? They were together for 12 years and married for two of them, and have been in a divorce dispute for a full eight years, ever since Jolie filed papers back in 2016.

So they agreed, or at least the festival intuited, that they needed to share alternating custody of premiere dates.

“There is no way that they can cross each other at the Lido,” the festival’s artistic director Alberto Barbera told Vanity Fair about their genius compromise. (The Lido di Venezia is a small island a 20-minute boat ride from Piazza San Marco, where much of the film festival takes place in buildings erected by the fascist government in the 1930s.)

Jolie, 49, would take the early slot, premiering on the first day, Thursday - and walking the red carpet solo in a gorgeous beige draped chiffon gown custom designed by Tamara Ralph, with a faux fur stole over her shoulders, and a bold red lip. By Saturday afternoon, she could be found at the Telluride Film Festival in the mountains of Colorado with Larraín, giving Q&As and posing in a group photo next to Martha Stewart (who’s the subject of a documentary premiering there).

Pitt, 60, would take the late shift, arriving on Saturday and premiering Sunday - and bringing girlfriend Inés de Ramón, a 34-year-old luxury jewellery executive who used to be married to Paul Wesley of “The Vampire Diaries” - while resting assured that Jolie was on another continent.

While both of the exes were gracious to their fans, working the rope lines along the red carpet (again, separately, days apart), their premieres couldn’t have been more diametrically opposed.

Pitt’s “Wolfs” premiere was the Brad and George show. A crowd that rivalled the population of Monaco had showed up just to glimpse them, and the two movie stars seemed to delight in movie-starring it up. After taking selfies with fans, Pitt followed Clooney’s lead and jumped in to take photos with the red carpet photographers.

Both men had come with their respective tall, gorgeous, brunette partners. But Pitt and de Ramón were ninja-like, only taking photographs together while getting out of the car and then somehow managing to evade the red carpet like expert thieves working a laser maze in “Ocean’s 11.” Was this all a plan? It looked like it! While Clooney and his civil rights lawyer wife, Amal, distracted the photographers by being gracious and taking a ton of photos, Pitt bee-lined with de Ramón straight inside, and then came out on his own for solo photos and to clown around with Clooney. The stars were so engrossed in greeting the public that the movie started playing 45 minutes late.

And they were still hamming it up during the standing ovation, giving each other hugs, and dancing to Sade’s “Smooth Operator.”

It seems clear that Pitt won Clooney in the divorce. The friends went on a double date with their partners in Venice on Saturday night at the Clooneys’ favorite Venetian restaurant, Ristorante Da Ivo, according to a glowing write-up in People that was likely planted by either the restaurant or by the Apple TV executives whose private party they accidentally crashed. (Clooney spent 20 minutes going around table to table, pretending to be a waiter.) The Clooneys also reportedly moved with their twins from the shores of Lake Como to a 25-acre estate and winery in Provence - that happens to be half an hour from Château Miraval, the winery Pitt runs that’s also been the object of numerous legal disputes with his ex. (Vanity Fair dubbed it their “War of the Rosé.”)

And at the Sunday afternoon news conference for “Wolfs,” Clooney did most of the talking. Maybe it was due to force of personality, or it could have been a besties agreement beforehand so Pitt could stay out of the news as much as possible. Pitt joked that he and Clooney decided to work together for the first time since 2008′s “Burn After Reading” “because of the restraining order …” The two also joked about getting to punch each other in the face for “Wolfs.” But the most revealing thing Pitt said was that, as he gets older, working with people he knows he likes gets more important to him.

As for Jolie, she left the Lido having firmly launched a bid for the Best Actress race, earning rave reviews, even if the reception for the movie as a whole was a bit tepid. Unlike Pitt’s laconic news conference, Jolie was out there working to vigorously promote “Maria,” and telling reporters about the seven months she spent learning how to sing opera, as well as Italian to better understand her arias. (In the film, the camera captures Jolie singing, but what we hear in the film are tracks mixing Jolie and Callas to various degrees.)

She also alluded to the divorce and its strain. Asked about her comeback after a several-year absence from films, she talked about how she’d “needed to be home more with my family these last years.” In the film’s press notes, she called playing Callas “the therapy I didn’t know I needed.” When a reporter asked what music she liked, she was surprisingly revealing. In her younger days, she said, she loved the Clash. But now, she’s found it hard to give up listening to opera, long after the end of filming, because “when you’ve felt a certain level of despair, of pain, of love, at a certain point … [opera] would be the only sound that would explain that pain.”

During the film’s standing ovation, she cried throughout.

After Telluride, she’s headed to the Toronto International Film Festival to receive a tribute award at their fundraising gala on September 8, and to premiere “Without Blood,” a war film she directed, starring Salma Hayek. She told the Hollywood Reporter that she’s obligated to stay in LA until her kids turn 18, but after that, she wants to “spend a lot of time in Cambodia.” She refused to discuss the status of her divorce.

The last time Jolie and Pitt appeared together at the Venice Film Festival, in 2007, they were at the height of their long reign as the world’s most beautiful couple, with Pitt bringing Jolie as his date to the premiere of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” (He played rogue-ish outlaw James.)

They’d been dating for two years at that point, after having caused a major scandal by getting together after their chemistry burned through the screen in the steamy spy thriller “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” During filming in 2004, Pitt was still married to Jennifer Aniston and Jolie was a single mom to her son Maddox, whom she’d adopted from Cambodia in 2002.

In that appearance before the Venice flashbulbs, they looked impossibly cool and enviable, posing with Pitt’s co-stars Casey Affleck and Jeremy Renner, holding hands walking into the theatre, and riding off into the night on a water taxi filled with their ever-growing family: Maddox, Pax, Zahara, and Shiloh.

They have six children together, with twins Knox and Vivienne, 16, rounding out the bunch. Maddox is oldest, at 23. And in what seems to be a pointed distancing from her father, Shiloh filed a petition on her 18th birthday to legally change her last name from Jolie-Pitt to Jolie. The change got approved in August. Anonymous sources told People magazine that Pitt is aware and “upset.”

An alleged physical altercation in 2016 between Pitt and Jolie, also involving their children, is what Jolie said, in heavily redacted FBI documents, prompted her to file for divorce. Both are legally single. They’re still, reportedly, at an impasse over custody of their kids, and Jolie’s stake in the Château Miraval winery.

Anonymous sources have told People magazine that Pitt is estranged from most of his children, who remain close to their mother. Sons Maddox and Pax were assistant directors on the “Maria” set, and Pax was the on-set still photographer; you can see his name in the credits.

At the “Maria” news conference, Jolie’s most revealing answer might have been when a reporter from the Philippines asked her how she related to Callas. “Well, there’s a lot that I won’t say in this room, that you probably know, or assume,” she said and then paused. What she related to the most, she said, was “probably the part of her that’s extremely soft and doesn’t have room in the world to be as soft as she truly was, and as emotionally open as she truly was … and I think I share her vulnerability more than anything.”

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