Here’s how Angelina Jolie enters the story: by water taxi, a wood boat polished to a high sheen, fluttering three flags, speeding across the black water of a Venetian lagoon. She is seen from above, from the window of a very old palace—it had once been the home of a nobleman, then a monastery, then an embassy, and is now a hotel, which is the entire story of Venice. I want to slow the picture here, show her frame by frame (the way Hitchcock first shows Grace Kelly in Rear Window, when she leans in to kiss Jimmy Stewart): first her arm, long and elegant, a gloved hand reaching out for help. Then a foot on the stairs. Then another. Then Jolie herself. She is stunning in a period sort of way. She’s in a black evening gown and a cape, which, I’m later told, was made for her by “Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood.”

She sits in an antique chair and sighs. Her tattoos have been covered with makeup. You can see where they are by the powder, which looks like a burn. Her hair is pulled back, her lips are full, her eyes huge and alien, her head alien also, too big for her body, for her narrow shoulders and skinny waist—alien in that big-headed Martian way, proportions that Hollywood and conspiracy theorists use to denote species of a higher evolutionary order, whether of good or ill intent. Her back is red where the main phrase of her dominant tattoo is covered: “Know Your Rights,” which, she says, comes from the Clash song. Covering these words seems symbolic, but I’m not sure how, or of what.

The room is the Presidential Suite of the Dei Dogi hotel. It’s been reserved for the purpose of this interview, giving the affair the feel of a tryst, afternoon delight, rooms rented by the hour. There is a sleeping loft, a ceiling crossed by wooden beams, paintings of knights. There are French windows, some which look over red roofs, some which look out on San Michele, the island of the dead, and Murano, the island of the glassblowers, as well as the airport—we can see planes alighting like egrets—which fills Jolie with dreams of escape.

The 35-year-old actress is here to film The Tourist, which is, in a way, a play on Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, all rooftops and canals, waltzes and blue moods, a caper in the most mysterious city in the world, where everything is doubled by its own watery reflection. Somewhere in town is Brad Pitt, with the six kids, the nannies, and the teachers and help. Johnny Depp, Jolie’s co-star, is somewhere here, too. The paparazzi swarm with their cameras, the tourists swarm with their feet, and a cloud of volcanic ash swarms overhead.

Venice is the perfect city for Jolie. It is, in fact, the perfect city for movie stars in general. It’s the city that, with its heroic paintings of prophets and saints, paved the way for the pop icon. It’s a city of images, of cult idols on movie posters, though, of course, no one calls them that. Its paintings are like the billboards on Sunset Boulevard. They’re everywhere. They’re ripe. They’re the people of a lost society saying, “This is what happened to us,” or “We hear this is what happened to those who came before us.” It’s Jesus and Mary and the loaves and the fishes. It’s the theft of the evangelist’s bones storyboarded on the golden arches of the old cathedral. It’s the Adriatic sky, as blue as the blue of blue screen, on which any fantasy can be projected.

I have long believed that celebrity, the way we worship and package and sell our pop stars, is what filled the need for gods that was once filled by the pictures in stained glass. Hollywood is post-Christian Venice, in other words, a pantheon of saints without the hassle and heartache of religion. Seeing Jolie here, in this earlier showbiz capital, you notice just how easily her image fits with the paintings and the icons. You drop a fresh rod into the ancient core and pretty soon the atomic machine is popping and giving off sparks.

Even if Angelina is only here a short time, she’s exactly where she belongs.

‘It’s just so beautiful,” Jolie says. “You get a sense of how people used to take the time to make things. They’d take the time to go out. The opera house is extraordinary. It’s just a different way of living your life. It’s slower, more elegant.”

Jolie and Pitt arrived in Venice at the end of winter. There was snow on the ground, water in the streets. Now and then, coming out of a restaurant or bar—Harry’s, say, where Hemingway put away Bellinis, one, two, three, just like that—they pulled on knee-high gum boots and splashed through the water of St. Mark’s Plaza. Movie stars, the biggest in the world, followed by six children, some adopted, some not, gathered from the corners of the world—Maddox from Cambodia, Zahara from Ethiopia, Shiloh from the womb of the actress, Pax from Vietnam, Knox and Vivienne, the twins, born in Nice, France, in 2008—playing in this mock Byzantium. They moved into a house on the Grand Canal, a huge place, white with blue awnings and high windows, that long ago, when Venice had been a power in the maritime world, belonged to an aristocratic family. The house is a stone’s throw from Saint Angelo Square, a few water doors from the house where Byron once lived and swam in the canal, which, by the way, you can’t do anymore. (During the filming of David Lean’s Summertime, Katharine Hepburn fell into one of the canals, and, so the story goes, was never again the same physically.)

The Jolie-Pitts settled into a routine, became Venetians, sank themselves into a new life, this being a great pleasure of Angie’s existence, the fruit of all those cities with no permanent home—she’s forever shuffling the deck, trading fantasy for fantasy. And now it’s Venice! “It puts you in the perspective of history,” she told me. “You feel like you’re just passing through this place, borrowing it for a while. In a hundred years, it will be the next group, then the next. Big old cities do that.”

In Venice, the kids, who live something like army brats, forever relocating to a new base, and something like subjects in a social experiment—gather six children from four cultures, put them in the care of two of the world’s biggest stars, move them from city to city, observe—resumed their scholastic routine, which, according to Jolie, follows a traditional program, but seems more like her own invention. “We have two teachers who travel with us, and we found a wonderful local man who teaches them the history of Venice and some Italian,” she explained. “It’s a nice mix—this is what we do. They go to school every day 10 to 4 at home. They’re on the Lycée curriculum. We keep them in that system when we’re back in L.A., and in New York they sometimes go to a Lycée school.”

Jolie and Pitt, who are helped, of course, but no one knows just how much—in this world, the struts and supports, the nannies and maids, remain hidden—have worked out a program: they alternate, one making a movie while the other stays with the kids. “I keep telling Brad he owes me,” said Jolie. “He’s had a few months off in one of the most beautiful cities in the world with the children. And he’s such an artist and goes to the stone yards and the art exhibits, and loves being in such a cultural place,” while Jolie’s stuck at work till all hours with Johnny Depp.

Many days, Pitt takes the children on an outing, another boat ride to another church or museum. (One morning, for example, he took them, along with Depp’s kids, fishing for crabs.) He then heads back to the office he set up in his rented house, to talk on the phone and work on his art. “He sculpts and designs,” Jolie told me. “He makes furniture, sculpts things related to houses. Traditional male.”

When I asked Jolie if Pitt still has that wispy beard that had been seen in every tabloid, that strange, Lebowski-like concoction, she smiled sadly and said, “Yes, he does.”

When I asked her opinion of it, she smiled, again sadly, and said, “I love Brad in every state.”

By the time I arrived, the Jolie-Pitts were so settled in Venice they were, in fact, ready to leave. (From here, they would go to their home in the South of France, then to Los Angeles, where Jolie becomes the stay-at-home while Pitt films Moneyball, based on the book by V.F. contributing editor Michael Lewis.) When I asked if she ever got tired of all the running around, she said no, this has always been her preferred way: the life of the high-end nomad, moving from town to town. “Brad’s the same,” she told me. “That’s one of the things that brought us together.” Like the hero of Apocalypse Now, wherever Jolie is, she wants to be in the other place. This can make her seem removed, less like a person living in the now than like someone living in the five minutes from now. She seems both mystical and beyond petty nationalism, but her footloose drive for new experience is pure Americana. “Anytime I feel lost, I pull out a map and stare,” she told me. “I stare until I have reminded myself that life is a giant adventure, so much to do, to see.”

When a movie star sits and talks to you, it’s almost always, and only, because she’s promoting something. In this case, Salt, directed by Phillip Noyce, co-starring Liev Schreiber, which opens this month and which, with its hanging chad of an ending, seems meant to start a Bourne-like franchise, in this case chronicling the exploits of the ass-kicking Evelyn Salt. Most of the time, the thing being sold is of no special interest, but Salt—how it came about, anyway—really does say something significant about Jolie. It goes to character, as they say in court.

“It started with a call from Amy [Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures],” Jolie told me. “She asked if I wanted to play a Bond girl. I said, ‘No, I’m not comfortable with that, but I would like to play Bond.’ We laughed, and then, about a year later, she called back and said, ‘I think I found it.’ ”

Salt was developed with a male actor in mind, specifically Tom Cruise, who was attached to play C.I.A. operative Edwin Salt. After Cruise, deciding the part was too close to the one he played in the Mission: Impossible franchise, took a pass, the script found its way to Jolie. Writing for a man, then swapping gender, is, as it turns out, the best way to create an utterly liberated hero, a character with none of the tropes that writers, even if they don’t mean to, fall back on when creating a role for a woman. “You think it would be easy [to change],” Jolie told me. “You just flip the character from Edwin to Edwina. But it was a lot trickier than we thought. For example, the male character had a child. And he knows he’ll be in danger much of the time. And we realized that, as a woman, if you knew your life was at such risk, you’d never have a child. The physicality had to change, too. I’m smaller than everybody, so how do I go up against a bunch of men without looking silly? How do I fight? We made her meaner than a guy, and dirty. She uses the walls, the fact that she’s lighter and can throw herself around. It’s the Chihuahua up against the big dogs.”

In the end, the role seems like part of Jolie’s greater project: to combine beauty with a Harrison Ford—like physicality. In action movie after action movie, she has played against type, creating a new type in the process. Political without being political, she’s a stealth feminist, expanding gender roles from the inside, taking the blockbuster male lead and adding a vowel to the end of the character’s first name, “Edwin to Edwina.” In a larger sense, it’s less about gender than about power, control. It’s something Jolie seemed to understand from her earliest films: no one admires a lady in distress, no matter how beautiful. Domination is the thing, revenge, the sound of the guns.

Salt opens with the actress stripped to her skivvies, bloodied and beaten, under the extremes of torture—it’s a fetishistic fantasy. The rest of the movie is about re-education, teaching us just how wrong we were in that first impression.

Jolie had an hour for lunch. In the afternoon, she would waltz on a ballroom floor with Depp. She was nervous about the dance, or said she was, but in fact seemed at ease. She was wearing the black gown I’ve already mentioned, her tattoos covered and her eyes painted with a tremendous amount of makeup. I had met Jolie before, for another story for this magazine, and, at that time, she was pregnant and at leisure in Texas, and I made the mistake of thinking, Well, yes, she’s pretty but not that pretty, but now I could see my mistake, for here, in Venice, where she was working, she was set to maximum wattage, was the flame on the stove when the burner is turned all the way up, when the fuel is entirely consumed by the fire.

I was at a disadvantage, having arrived in Venice from Los Angeles an hour before, having had no sleep, traveling the previous night and day, then been dropped into this painting by Canaletto, into this room by Leibovitz. “It’s an interesting trick to fool with the interviewer,” she said, laughing, “get them really jet-lagged.”

We talked for an hour or so, during which Jolie picked at her lunch (could’ve been veal, could’ve been chicken).

I asked if she had any favorite action movies, anything she used as a model for Salt.

“I don’t like to watch them,” she told me. “I just like to be in them.”

She smiled, then said, “Brad will tell you. He puts a movie on, I’m asleep in 10 minutes. I have no patience. But the kids love action movies with comedy, Jackie Chan and all that.”

Will you and Brad ever make a movie together again? I asked.

The couple met on the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The story of an undercover assassin, who, unbeknownst to her, has married a rival undercover assassin, Mrs. and Mrs. Smith is a fable of power dynamics in a relationship.

“I’d love to,” she told me. “We’ve talked about it. We’d have to figure out who’s going to watch the kids, but it’s really about finding the right thing, because we’ve looked. When you’re a couple, there are certain things people don’t want to see you do. It becomes too indulgent, too personal. I don’t think people want to see people who are really together intimate on-screen. Maybe we have to play bad guys that try to kill each other, so it’s just fun and aggressive, not dealing with some man-woman deal.”

How about a sequel to Mr. and Mrs. Smith? I asked.

“People have tried,” she told me. “And it’s strange: do we have kids in the movie? We’ve thought about that, but it becomes personal now that we actually have kids. And if we work on it, we pull from our own life, which is funny to us, but you feel strange sharing too much. We did ask somebody to look into Mr. and Mrs. to see if they could crack a sequel, but there wasn’t anything original. It was just, Well, they’re going to get married, or they’ve got kids, or they get separated. Never great. And it would pull us away from living that at home. We like working together,” she explained, “but we work together every day. We’re building the most important thing together. A family. We have great adventures, we have travel, we’re raising children. So we don’t need to take away from that to express it on film.”

Are you going to get married?

This question seemed to flow naturally from the above, but it started me on the tabloid road, which, to be honest, is not an entirely unpleasant road. It is paved and well lit, and you can really fly. (This is what Angelina said of all the tabloid rumors: “There’s a cycle that goes through the newsstands—we’re separating, I’m pregnant, we’re getting married, we’re separating, I’m pregnant, we’re getting married.”)

“We’re not against getting married,” she said. “It’s just like we already are. Children are clearly a commitment, a bigger commitment [than marriage]. It’s for life.”

Are you pregnant?

“You’re really going for it, aren’t you?”

Well, I flew 4,000 miles.

“If I was, do you think I would tell you?”

You might.

“No, I’m not pregnant.”

Do you want to have more kids?

“We’re not opposed to it,” she said. “But we want to make sure we can give everybody special time. They’re kids now, and can play together, but they’re going to need a lot more talking in the middle of the night, like I did with my mom for hours. We want to make sure we don’t build a family so big that we don’t have absolutely enough time to raise them each really well.”

I told her about a kid I’d seen earlier in Venice. He was an American, about 14, with a rat tail and a little mustache, and he was cursing his parents right out on the canal, in the shadow of the Rialto Bridge, with time itself looking on, snickering.

What do you do if your kid is a moron? I asked.

We talked about this for a while, then she said, “I had some great advice: ‘You’ll know they’re teenagers when they close the door.’ And when they start closing the door, don’t talk to them, listen. Because there’s nothing you could say. You’re not going to be able to tell them you know better. You’re not going to be able to correct them.”

Yeah, but what about the rat tail? I asked. Do you sneak in at night and cut it off?

“You have to raise them right before that,” she said. “Then you need to listen for a good five years, just keep your mouth closed. Just be their friend—don’t try to always tell them they’re wrong.”

I asked what she thinks her kids will do when they’re grown.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Mad’s a real intellectual, which I can take no credit for genetically. He’s great at school, great at history. He feels like he could be a writer or travel the world and learn about places and things. Zahara’s got an extraordinary voice and is just so elegant and well spoken. Shiloh’s hysterically funny, one of the goofiest, most playful people you’ll ever meet. Knox and Viv are classic boy and girl. She’s really female. And he’s really a little dude.”

What were you like when you were a kid?

“Like Shiloh,” she told me, “goofy and verbal, the early signs of a performer.”

She looked out the windows as she spoke, remembering. “I used to get dressed up in costumes and jump around,” she said. “But at some point, I got closed off, darker. I don’t remember anything happening. I think you just get hit with the realities of certain things in life, think too much, start to realize the world isn’t as you wished it would be, so you deepen. Then, as I had kids and got older—being goofy, lighter—it all came back.

“There is a period where you’re protected,” she explained, “and you feel all the wonderful things we see in our children, and hope we can preserve. But you know they’re going to have their first broken heart, that first disappointment, or learn the horrors of the world. And something develops. It’s a beautiful depth, and it comes at a certain time. Then you get used to those things, or find a way to handle them. And if you’re lucky, you find something that makes you happy. Whether it be work, children, love. And you can play again, enjoy again.”

I asked if she found this happiness in her work.

“Not so much that if I couldn’t act tomorrow I would be heartbroken,” she told me. “I don’t not like it. I like acting. It’s not the most important thing in my life. Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I’m very, very grateful, it’s a fun job. It’s a luxury. Look, I’m at work today in the middle of Venice. But I don’t think I’ll do it much longer.”

Her satisfaction comes not from work but from her kids and Brad—that’s what she told me. “Because I have a happy home,” she explained. “I got back from work last night, and everybody was playing music and dancing and I suddenly found myself dancing around with a bunch of little fun crazy people.”

An assistant came in, tapped her watch. We went down to the garden, where the hotel staff was lined up, hats in hand, like nobles waiting to be knighted. When you’re Angelina Jolie, every crowd becomes a receiving line, every hello ambassadorial, something people remember. We walked to the end of a wooden dock—Jolie was in heels and the slats proved treacherous—then climbed into a boat. The speed limit for traffic in the city is strictly enforced at under five miles per hour. As a result, our progress was stately, the afternoon cool and clear, the taxi leaving a tiny wake as it moved through the interior canals. What is it that Robert Benchley cabled after he first reached Venice? “Streets full of water. Please advise.” Now and then, as we passed under a bridge, a couple or a family would wave, but it was unclear if they were waving because they recognized Jolie, or if they were just happy to be in Venice.

We sat in the back of the boat. Jolie talked about growing up in Nyack, New York, about the places she had been and still wants to go (China tops the list), about her first rock concert (does Michael Jackson count?), about her upcoming dance scene with Depp. “Funnily enough, I don’t know a lot about him,” she told me. “You think everybody knows everybody in this town, but I had never met Johnny.” Interesting that, one, people really do think there is a Hollywood community and Jolie is saying there is not, and, two, that she refers to “this town,” when in this case “this town” is Venice, meaning that, to a movie star on location, every town is Hollywood.

The boat turned into a side channel—Venice is a maze of streets and canals, and, at the center of the maze, in the room inside all the other rooms, Johnny Depp leads Angelina Jolie across a dance floor as the music swells. A warehouse had been turned into a ballroom, and, in front of it, on one side of a bridge, scores of men in dinner jackets smoked cigarettes and tossed butts into the water. “Dancers for the big scene,” Jolie said. On the other side, more men, an entirely different physical type, lay on the concrete without shirts. “And that,” said Jolie, “is the crew.”

The boat slipped through a black velvet curtain that had been hung, building to building, across the water, a V.I.P.-only barrier behind which Jolie would go back to work.

I saw Jolie again later in the week. It was arranged like a meeting between heads of state, or a meeting between military leaders at the end of a war, in a ballroom in Yalta, at a railroad crossing deep in the woods.

At 11:59 a.m., a boat picked me up at the landing of my hotel, though I prefer the word rendezvous. It was piloted by a man named Massimo. He was bald in a sporty way, and told me, as we cruised the canals of Giudecca Island, across from the main island of Venice, how, five years ago, he had spent four months in Manhattan—four months, five years ago, during which he stood outside Madison Square Garden as tourists stand outside St. Mark’s, with real tears streaming down his face. “Because I’m a boxer,” he said, “and the Madison Square is for me a church.”

After drifting for an hour, word came: the movie has broken, Angelina’s on her way. Five minutes later, a powerboat, pitched back, riding high, burned down the canal, followed by a launch, a security guard perched in the stern. J.F.K. meets Churchill off Bimini. We tied up alongside, a man held out his hand, and, a moment later, I was being hoisted into Jolie’s boat.

She was in a cabin belowdecks. I noticed everything as soon as I went down, as you notice everything on a new level in a video game: because who knows what you’ll need, what will mean your advancement, what will be your demise. There was a table and a pizza box with what looked like a 12-inch pie. There was a door with a bedroom beyond, which was all bed. There were windows and views of the city. There was the sound of engines as the boat cruised toward the Lido and the open sea. And there was Angelina, face and eyes made-up, but casual in sweatpants and sweatshirt, less clothed than sheathed. She took off her sweatshirt—she had a white muscle shirt underneath—and slid onto the bench next to me. She’s one of those people who always seems to be taking something off or putting something on, the curtain going up or coming down, the practiced moves of the impresario.

She grabbed a piece of pizza, then, noticing a plane passing overhead, talked about her love of flight. “I learned to fly a few years ago in England,” said Jolie, who owns a Cirrus SR22 turbo. (Pitt learned to fly after they met.) “It’s the only place I’m completely alone—up in the air, detached from everything. Brad loves the technical aspects. He loves the checks, loves all the math. I’m terrible at the math, but I love that I can just go anywhere, have that freedom. He’s more patient. I tend to drive it to the ground.”

Jolie hesitated when I asked, “Who’s the better pilot?,” then said, “We haven’t …I am.”

Though she does not like to fly with Brad—if something happens, you always want one parent left behind—they went up together recently. “We made sure that everything was in order,” she said. “We didn’t go far, and the plane had parachutes, so if anything were to happen—”

She laughed, waving the slice of pizza around—and now the pizza was the plane, breaking through the clouds—then said, “Brad commented on my landing. He thought I was coming in too fast. He thought we were going to crash, but didn’t say anything until we landed.”

When I asked why he didn’t say anything, she shrugged, and I sensed a kind of code: better to go down with the ship than question the captain’s command.

I asked if she wondered what it would be like to spend her entire life with one person.

“I feel fortunate to have a relationship where I actually feel safe enough to imagine growing old together,” she told me. “When you’re not in a good place, getting older can be scary. But it’s nice for us.”

Why did you decide to take flying lessons? I asked.

“When Maddox was one and a half, we used to go to the airfield, have lunch and watch the planes,” she said. “And it dawned on me: I could fly. So I promised him I would fly by his second birthday.”

I asked—because I had now established that she liked to watch planes with her kids—what else they liked doing together.

“Family sleep,” she said.

Family sleep?

“Yeah. That means everybody crawls into our bed. And we actually have a giant bed. We had sheets specially made. I don’t know if it’s twice as big [as a king], but it’s notably bigger. Everybody files in and we watch a movie. It breaks all the rules. Mommy and Daddy are very tired the next morning. We have that in L.A., and when we hang out in France, we’ve got it there. When we had two kids, the nine-foot bed was extraordinary. With three, it was verging. Now, at six, it’s tight. We end up pulling the couches to the sides. We’re thinking of building a room just for family sleep.”

When I was preparing for this story, more than a few people told me to find out “what’s up with Shiloh’s clothes.” Apparently, Shiloh dresses, as Jolie herself would say, “like a little dude.” I won’t go into all the mechanics of my technique, but I saw my opportunity and took it.

“Shiloh, we feel, has Montenegro style,” Jolie told me. “It’s how people dress there. She likes tracksuits, she likes [regular] suits. So it’s a suit with a tie and a jacket and slacks, or a tracksuit. She likes to dress like a boy. She wants to be a boy. So we had to cut her hair. She likes to wear boys’ everything. She thinks she’s one of the brothers.”

I suddenly realized we were onto kids again. For a moment, I felt this was my failing as an interviewer. Because I have kids myself, I keep steering the conversation back to kids. Then I realized, No, it’s not me. It’s her. She’s like the streets of Venice. Follow them long enough, you end up back at your hotel. Talk to Angelina long enough, you end up back at the kids: “We took them to Kenya to be with the Masai, and they know Africa, spent weeks there, and kept telling Z. her country was cool, her continent was cool, being African is cool. They all went to Ethiopia, and know Ethiopia, and know what Ethiopian food is, and know that with Z.’s food you don’t have to use forks—you use bread. And they know her music, and know Bob Marley relates to the country. Her middle name is Marley. And they know Bob Marley liked Rasta, and Rasta has something to do with Ethiopia, but they don’t quite know how it all connects.”

All this—the kids, the Masai, etc.—is the center of her world and explains everything: why she had to change her character in Salt (“As a woman, if you knew your life was at risk, you’d never have a child”), why she and Brad might get married (“I honestly think we will, if the kids want us to”), and why she and Brad don’t need to get married (“Children are a bigger commitment”).

It’s a challenge, writing about actors, especially a good actor, because you can’t always tell when they’re being honest and when they’re pretending—that is, when they’re acting. The really good ones don’t always seem to know themselves. With Jolie, though, it seems genuine—she is completely absorbed in the role of the matriarch, architect of a perfect family. For this role, she will cast aside all others. You can’t help but see her performance as drawing, Stanislavsky-like, on her own memories of childhood, divorce, trouble with her father. Her family situation, though unusual (a new sport: extreme parenting), seems to result from the simple desire expressed by the old-time movie mogul: she wants re-write; she wants to give her kids the life she imagined for herself but never got to lead. It’s a fantasy—as Disney as It’s a Small World—but it’s a good fantasy, and Jolie is playing it all out. “I want to work, then, as my kids get older, I want to have adventures,” she told me. “I want to visit all their countries, learn and live inside all their cultures. [Brad and I] will do films for the next few years, then we’ll do something else. That doesn’t mean we’ll never attempt another film, but it will be different.”

The engines groaned as the ship turned back to the city. The golden domes drifted across the windows. “It’s not your time anymore,” she told me. “It’s coming up on their time.”