Angelina Jolie on directing war epic Unbroken: I fought shamelessly to get this job

Angelina Jolie has revealed how she fought for the right to direct her new movie Unbroken by presenting a bin-bag of storyboards and ideas to Hollywood executives.

The star has an Oscar and three Golden Globes as an actress as well as previous directing experience. But she said she knew it would count for little when it came to telling the blockbuster story of Louie Zamperini.

Zamperini, who died in July at the age of 97, was an American hero of the 1936 Berlin Olympics who faced unspeakable suffering after his plane crashed into the sea during the Second World War. He spent 47 days adrift in a life raft before being captured by the Japanese and held as a prisoner-of-war.

Jolie, 39, said: “I had to fight for the job. There was really no shame — it was anything I could do to get this job.”

She produced different storyboards which showed inspiration and where faith, abuse and endurance came into the plot line: “I brought these boards in this garbage bag up to this room and that was my big pitch.”

The epic scale of the film and her own doubts as to whether she could do it made her even more determined to show she could, by learning about effects, locations and even planes.

“I took it as a big challenge,” she said. “There were many days where I had my head in my hands but the one person who told me I could do it was Louie.”

Jolie said film-making takes so long it needs to be a story worth telling. “I felt so inspired by him,” she said of Zamperini, who is played by British actor Jack O’Connell, 24.

She said the story had relevance today because Zamperini’s suffering had an enormous impact on his post-war life, adding: “I can’t possibly understand what it would be like to come out of a war and to suffer post-traumatic stress syndrome but I think it is important to think about.”

Jolie, who has been caught up in the storm over leaked Sony emails, was shooting her film in Australia at the same time as husband Brad Pitt was making Fury, a Second World War tank drama, in Britain. “It was very interesting that we happened to be in different theatres of the same war at the same time,” she said. “We wrote each other letters. We got very Forties romantic.”

Unbroken is released on Boxing Day.