Angelina Jolie slammed for 'casting game' practice with children for upcoming film

The 'Salt' actor expressed remorse over the backlash

Angelina Jolie responded to the growing backlash over the casting process for her latest film, saying she was "upset" that an improvised scene during auditions had been misconstrued as taking real money away from impoverished children, reports Reuters.

The film, directed by Jolie and titled First They Killed My Father, is a biographical thriller based on Loung Ung's memoir of the same name. Ung, who co-wrote the film with Jolie, is a survivor of the mass killings in Cambodia known as the Killing Fields, which occurred as part of the state-wide genocide the '70s under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime. The film is a Netflix original, set to premiere sometime in 2017.

According to the article, in order to find a child actor to play the young lead, Loung Ung, the casting directors played a “game” with Cambodian children. The casting directors would place money in front of each child and asked them to think of a reason why they needed that money, and then asked them to steal that money. Then the directors pretended to catch the child in the act, and the child was supposed to come up with a lie, reports Elite Daily.

"Srey Moch [the girl ultimately chosen for the part] was the only child that stared at the money for a very, very long time. When she was forced to give it back, she became overwhelmed with emotion. All these different things came flooding back. When she was asked later what the money was for, she said her grandfather had died, and they didn't have enough money for a nice funeral," Jolie describes the casting process.

Unsurprisingly, the Salt actor received criticism and flak for the "inhumane" selection process potent with inflicting psychological and emotional harm on the impoverished child.

Users on social media slammed Jolie's casting game as cruel and exploiting impoverished children.  Evgenia Peretz called the casting game "disturbing in its realism" in the profile, while Kayla Cobb at pop culture website Decider.com compared the game to a psychological thriller.

https://twitter.com/margeincharge/status/890271197275049986

Angelina Jolie is crazy. What a cruel psychological game to play with impoverished children. pic.twitter.com/iAEUhINBui

— Deniz S. (@MrFilmkritik) July 26, 2017

https://twitter.com/Skullcat/status/890278124125995008

Holy hell this is disgusting. And so cruel. https://t.co/n012sYgbSm

— Keah Buy The Secret Summer Promise Brown (@Keah_Maria) July 26, 2017

Is this Angelina Jolie mentally abusing these impoverished children? And what is the name of the movie?--so I will know to avoid it.

— Ignoreland (@KoolaidUSA) July 26, 2017

What a monstrous psychological game to play with impoverished children.

— kate sullivan (@teadrunkkate) July 26, 2017

Jolie, a special envoy for the United Nations refugee agency, told Vanity Fair she looked for her lead star in orphanages, circuses and slum schools.

"I am upset that a pretend exercise in an improvisation, from an actual scene in the film, has been written about as if it was a real scenario," the actor expresses remorse over the backlash.

"The suggestion that real money was taken from a child during an audition is false and upsetting. I would be outraged myself if this had happened," she adds.

First They Killed My Father is about the 1970s Khmer Rouge regime under which more than 1 million people died. It is due to be released globally and on Netflix in September.

Jolie said the young girl who won the part, Srey Moch, was chosen after "she became overwhelmed with emotion" when forced to give the money back, saying she needed the money to pay for her grandfather's funeral.

"The children were not tricked or entrapped, as some have suggested," Rithy Panh, a Cambodian producer on the film, said, defending the casting process. They understood very well that this was acting, and make believe," he added.

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