Angelina Jolie Talks About the Movies That Inspired 'Unbroken'

After making her directorial debut in 2011 on the small war-time romance The Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie decided to ratchet up the difficulty level for her sophomore feature.

"The interesting thing about Unbroken is that it’s so many different movies in one,” the director tells Yahoo Movies, laughing at the incredibly complex mash-up of genres that she had to put together.

The story of Louis Zamperini, a former Olympian and survivor of plane crashes and Japanese prison-of-war camp, is several things at once: A period piece that spans the first half of the 20th century, a sports film, a war movie, and a psychological drama. So Jolie and her team, which included legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins, spent a lot of time watching a whole range of films for inspiration.

"Of course for prison camp scenes and war we looked at The Hill, Papillon, and The Bridge on the River Kwai," she says. "For the running, there’s so many different films, all the way to Chariots of Fire.”

They also watched plenty of “really boring” training videos for pilots of the B-24 — the plane that Zamperini and his fellow soldiers flew — so that star Jack O’Connell and his cast mates could learn how to simulate flight.

O’Connell, meanwhile, faced the challenge of playing a character who goes through several extreme phases throughout the film, deteriorating from a young and cocky Olympian and aviator to a beaten, haunted prisoner.

To prepare, he not only watched the Paul Newman film The Great Escape and the Sidney Lumet and David Lean-directed classics that Jolie listed, but also several psychological dramas.

“One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was good, in terms of the distinction between being a man of the world or being a man of incarceration,” he explains, adding that the 1983 Turkish prison camp film The Wall was also a source of information and inspiration.

Though she doesn’t appear on screen in Unbroken, Jolie was able to tap into her own experience as an actor help guide her through the massive production. The lessons she absorbed from several directors over the last decade were particularly instructive.

"One of the best experiences I had as an actor was on A Mighty Heart with Michael Winterbottom,” she says. ”The way he set the environment and tried to make it as casual and organic as possible, I learned from him.

Her time on the set of 2009’s Changeling was especially instructive, because she learned the art of communication, believe it or not, from Clint Eastwood.

"He doesn’t do a lot of take so you have a sense of real communication with an actor of how many times they have to do it, what’s going to happen, and communicating with them," Jolie says. "[You communicate] even on the technical work as well sometimes, so they understand what you’re trying to pull off together, so they can participate and know when it’s okay to give everything you got and know that you’re going to catch it."

Unbroken hits theaters on Dec. 25.