Angelina Jolie on her movie ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey’

“What I really want is some food!” Angelina Jolie is walking into a big, empty room in New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, dressed like a businesswoman prepped for a meeting in a tailored black daytime suit and high-heeled black pumps. And it’s true: The lady needs to eat, her famously lithe frame having become thinner, paler, more birdlike since the last time we talked, a year and a half ago when the action thriller “Salt” came out.

A generous buffet will magically appear in the hall outside, but for now Jolie must content herself with a small bottle of water that she idly seesaws up and down while talking about her new movie. Not “her new movie” in the usual sense that it’s her famously puckered lips plastered on billboards from L.A. to Lesotho. Rather “her new movie” in the sense that she wrote, directed and produced it.

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At a special screening of her directorial debut, 'In the Land of Blood and Honey,' Angelina Jolie, joined by Brad Pitt, explains why the hardest part of making the film was keeping a balance between sides, and not causing offense. (Jan. 11)

“In the Land of Blood and Honey,” which opened Friday, stars a cast of virtually complete unknowns, actors from the former Yugoslavia who appear in a story about the Bosnian-Serbian conflict in 1992. It’s a rigorous, sometimes raw look at life during wartime at its most senseless, an often startlingly effective portrait not just of atrocities that included rape, sexual humiliation and gratuitous killings, but of stark international apathy. In many ways Jolie’s film resembles “Hotel Rwanda,” about a similar instance of collective paralysis in the face of unimaginable violence.

“The crux of the story was my frustration with lack of intervention,” says Jolie, the bottle of water tipping back and forth in her small hand. “I spent so much time with people in post-conflict situations where I wish I could just turn back the clock, before they were so scarred, and before so many losses.” She wants audiences to experience her own feelings firsthand, so that “if you’re watching the film,” she says, “you’re thinking, ‘Can somebody please stop this? It’s getting worse, I want to get out of this theater, I just want to get out of here!’ ”

But first, of course, she wants to get people into the theater, not an easy proposition for a subtitled drama in Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian, about a war that took place in a faraway place and time, featuring actors American audiences have never heard of. After shying away from initially exploiting her celebrity, she’s now a ubiquitous presence on the movie-marketing hustings, showing up for awards ceremonies, interviews and, just last week, when she and her partner, Brad Pitt, attended a special screening at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“I didn’t do this film because I wanted to direct or be a director,” Jolie says. “I didn’t even intend on doing that when I wrote it. [Brad and I] kind of joked about it, because it seemed so impossible for me to write a film that would become a movie. We said, we’re going to send it to people from all sides of the conflict with my name off of it. If they agree, we’ll consider making a film, and if they don’t, we’ll throw it in the trash. . . . I’ve tried to do the best I could, and I feel this is a representation of who I am. Most of the films I do are [about] characters that I have fun with, but are not representative of who I am and what I believe.”