Of the five films Angelina Jolie has directed, four have depicted war. But her latest, “Without Blood,” delves most directly into the haunting aftermath of carnage.

"I think conflict tends to bring out the worst in our behavior toward each other and often the best, when those who are fighting against each other or above us are the ones who are above us," Jolie said during an interview at the Variety Toronto Film Festival Studio. "As artists, a big part of our work is this study of what it means to be human. So these extremes of the human condition are what we sometimes try to understand and are drawn to. I'm certainly someone who, as I've traveled and done other [humanitarian] work in the field, I've always wondered why and how."

Jolie was joined by the film's stars Salma Hayek Pinault and Demián Bichir, who play Nina and Tito, respectively, two people who years earlier found themselves on opposite sides of an unspecified war. Hayek Pinault, for one, admitted she was reluctant to sign on for her second collaboration with Jolie. (They previously starred together in 2021's Marvel tentpole "Eternals.")

“I was afraid to play this role. I didn’t jump into it right away because she, my character, is suffering so much and I had to go there and suffer the whole time of the shooting,” she said. “You can’t take away the pain. You have to let it boil, boil for hours, for days, for weeks. So I was terrified and I didn’t want to do it. The more we talked about it … I started to see myself, my own traumas, the traumas of people that I know, that are close to me, in this character that was so strange in the beginning and that I didn’t want to go to. I started to realize, ‘What do you mean you don’t want to go to? You’ve always been there.’ I started to see how it connected to so many women, even if you’re not post-war. We’ve all been pushed aside and somehow not seen or abused.”