Hollywood royalty Angelina Jolie has been forced to deny toying with children's emotions after the audition process for a Cambodian genocide film she is directing came to light.
Jolie, who adopted her son Maddox from Cambodia in 2003, was the subject of an unflattering Vanity Fair piece after she explained how she cast Srey Moch, the child actress starring in upcoming film First They Killed My Father.
In the piece, author Evgenia Peretz spoke about how the 42-year-old actress and filmmaker visited Cambodian "orphanages, circuses, and slum schools, specifically seeking children who had experienced hardship".
She and the film's casting directors would then set up a game that Peretz described as "disturbing in its realism" - putting money on a table, asking the child what they needed it for and then snatching it away. They would then pretend to catch the child, who would have to come up with a lie.
"Srey Moch [the girl chosen for the part] was the only child that stared at the money for a very, very long time," Jolie said.
"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."
The remarks were slammed online by those who'd read the article, with people calling the casting game "cruel" and "crazy" - forcing Jolie to offer up a statement explaining why it wasn't child abuse.
"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," she wrote.
"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 went on to explain that "every measure was taken to ensure the safety, comfort and wellbeing of the children on the film starting from the auditions through production to the present".
"The point of this film is to bring attention to the horrors children face in war, and to help fight to protect them."
Netflix is expected to release First They Killed My Father later this year.
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