Angelina Jolie returns to the Toronto International Film Festival this year with her new film, “Without Blood,” which she directed. The actress and filmmaker told TheWrap that the film is a kind of conclusion to her trilogy of films about war and conflict.

Based on the novel of the same name by Alessandro Baricco, Without Blood continues Jolie’s focus on the aftermath of war, which she explored in previous films, Blood and Honey and First They Killed My Father. In this new film, Salma Hayek Pinault plays Nina, a war-torn woman who meets Tito (Demián Bichir), a lottery salesman. At first their conversation seems harmless, but hard truths about the true intent of their interaction soon emerge, and the film plays largely as a conversation between the two characters.

Jolie, Hayek Pinault and Bichir spoke with TheWrap’s Joe McGovern about the tricky adaptation at TheWrap’s 2024 TIFF Studio, sponsored by Moët & Chandon and Boss Design.

“Some parts are found at different times in life,” Jolie said. “Most of the films I’ve directed are about war and conflict, and in some ways this film is the final chapter of that. This film is set after the conflict, and what I liked so much is that when I read it, I thought I believed something, I wanted something, and then when that changed, I realized it corrected my views. It helped me understand something I hadn’t expected. That doesn’t happen to me often. It’s not easy. I think it’s true of a lot of post-conflict situations.”

And the film’s unusual structure, which consists largely of conversations between Nina and Tito, didn’t scare Hayek Pinault. Not that she didn’t have other worries. “I wasn’t afraid of the dialogue. I was more afraid of the fact that I had to make an entire film where I had to go to the set every day, throw myself so deeply into torture and go through the whole work day and not be able to get that out,” said Hayek Pinault. “I had to go to places where trauma lurks and hides and suffocates you and makes you feel the most intense emotional pain a human being can feel, but you can’t let it out, because that was the character. That was what she wanted. I was afraid to go there.”

Watch the full conversation in the video above.