AOC 2007 founding muse Angelina Jolie fronts the November 2015 issue of WSJ Magazine, the Innovators Issue. Angelina is photographed by Peter Lindbergh in classic images styled by Anastasia Barbieri./ Hair by Adriotha Lee; makeup by Toni Garavaglia

Jolie is promoting her new film 'By the Sea' starring herself and husband Brad Pitt. Interviewed by Julia Reed, The actor reflects on the many challenges of making the film about a couple whose marriage is in deep crisis. AOC has followed the film from its beginning. Read here.

“It was not easy,” says Jolie Pitt. “We just had to be brave and say, ‘OK, honey, we’re strong enough to do this; let’s somehow use this to make us stronger.’ ” Jolie Pitt wrote the script, her first, not long after her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died in 2007. “I didn’t really know if I could make film and I didn’t think I could write film, so I wrote with a certain amount of freedom,” she says. “I gave myself the task that it would be about grief and how different people react to and process it.” In one scene, the local barkeep (played by a remarkable French actor, Niels Arestrup) talks to Pitt’s character, who is trying to restart a foundering writing career, about forcing himself to love his terminally ill wife enough to let her go. “That’s me speaking about my mother,” Jolie Pitt says. “I think maybe his character came from the purest place inside me.”

For Pitt, the movie represents the first time he was directed by a woman. In this case, she is the most important woman in his life.