Angelina Jolie "wasn't afraid" to take advice from her cast and crew on her directorial debut. The Oscar-winning actress' movie In The Land of Blood and Honey tells the tale of a romance between a Serbian soldier and Bosnian Muslim woman set in the Yugoslav wars and ensured it was as authentic as possible by quizzing the local actors and behind-the-scenes staff she hired for the project.

"I wasn't afraid to ask the DP [director of photography]. And I listened to my cast, most of whom lived through the war. I listened to their stories and tried to incorporate it into the work. [I] read a lot of books about the war. I talked to a lot of people, I watched, I listened. I just wanted to tell the real story. I wanted to be respectful of people. [If I did not know something,] I asked."

Angelina shot the movie twice, once in English and again in the native languages of her cast, Bosnian, Serbran and Croatian, and the brunette beauty recently revealed she had discussed every aspect of the scripts with her actors. "We all spoke about every speech and every scene, and made sure it was right and true. So everybody helped to educate me and we all adjusted the script together."

Earlier this year, Goran Kostic, one of the film's lead actors revealed he was "pleasantly surprised" to learn Angelina had written the movie: "All information was hidden. It was obvious it was somebody big. You're an actor, you audition, and they don't tell you who it is, you know it's somebody from the top. I had no idea. Nor did I want to speculate. I did what I had to do. Later, when they told us Angelina Jolie wrote the script, I was quite pleasantly surprised to see how she was able to put all of it together."