When Brad Met Angie

By Lev Grossman

Watch the first scene of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which comes out next month,very closely: the first time you see Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie is actually pretty much the first time the two actors laid eyes on each other too. The movie was so bedeviled by scheduling conflicts and cast changes that the two stars hadn't met before the first day of shooting. "It was going to be rolling the dice," says director Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne Identity). "I decided I would take advantage of the awkwardness. They don't really know each other. They're not comfortable. Just sit them down, Day One, first thing in the morning, and roll the camera. You can see right then and there, they had great chemistry."

Chemistry can be a dangerous thing. Mr. & Mrs. Smith is one of those movies that has been marked with every possible harbinger of doom: reshoots, budget overruns, megastar casting woes, mid-shoot script rethinks and, of course, a notorious did-they-or-didn't-they on-set hookup between the two principals. So fervent is the tabloid interest that the two stars, who should be promoting their movie, are on another continent. Can the movie rise above its reputation? Will dozens of wrongs actually make a right?

The script, which was screenwriter Simon Kinberg's graduate thesis at Columbia University Film School, had been kicking around for months. Liman had already passed on it once. It's the story of a seemingly conventional suburban couple facing two very big problems. One, their marriage is arid and joyless. And two, they both, each unbeknownst to the other, are topflight assassins at rival agencies. When professional circumstances pit the Smiths against each other, a hilarious fire fight between two trained killers ensues ("I missed you, honey" becomes a double entendre), which somehow, mysteriously, becomes a portrait of a marriage rediscovering its lost flame. It's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with concussion grenades.

The fun started in 2002 when Pitt walked away from director Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain at the last minute. "Cost the studio a huge amount of money," Liman says. "When you're a movie star and you do something like that, you make it up to the studio by picking another one of their projects." Pitt picked Mr. & Mrs. Smith. He recruited Liman to direct. Nicole Kidman hopped aboard. And ... action!

Except not. Filming ran long on The Stepford Wives, causing Kidman to bow out and leaving Liman to scramble for a new Mrs. Smith. "Which is crazy," says Liman, "because now I'm trying to convince Brad to stay in the movie, when he's the one who sent me the script! I could just see the whole film coming undone." Liman wound up casting Jolie, who was in England doing publicity for Tomb Raider II, over the phone.

Liman has a knack for making bad luck work for him. That first shot is a good example: the Smiths are trying couples counseling, and their unfamiliarity with each other as actors and as people plays perfectly onscreen as the awkward distance of a husband and wife who have become strangers. But Liman's MacGyver-like improvisational style can come at a price. "It was a very hard shoot," he admits. "I don't necessarily go into a movie with the characters figured out." He built an entire snow-covered mountain on a Fox sound stage, then scrapped it when he decided the mountain scene was all wrong for Mr. Smith's personality. He also had to scrap the two main villains and held two reshoots after the movie wrapped. "I'm extremely tenacious," Liman says. "The movie becomes the most important thing in the world, and I don't care if it destroys my career and I can never make another movie."

Then, of course, there are the alleged off-camera improvisations of Pitt and Jolie, which nobody associated with the production wants to comment on, despite pages of photos in Us Weekly of the two frolicking on a beach together. "We don't know--nor do you, nor does anyone, that they have actually hooked up anywhere," says Sanford Panitch, president of New Regency, which is releasing the film, with Clintonian aplomb. Whatever happened, they made a movie in which they look smooth trying to kill or kiss each other. Apart from Jennifer Aniston, who doesn't want to see that? --With reporting by Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles

With reporting by Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles