Vanity Fair August 2010 : Angelina Jolie by Patrick Demarchelier

On having more kids: “No, I’m not pregnant [but] we’re not opposed to it. 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.”

On tying the knot with Brad Pitt: “[We're not] against getting married [but] it’s just like we already are. Children are clearly a commitment, a bigger commitment [than marriage]. It’s for life.

On taking a break from 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.” Jolie says this reassessment is mostly due to her family: “Because I have a happy home….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.

On her many kids: “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.”

On how Shiloh dresses: “Like a little dude. Shiloh, we feel, has Montenegro style. It’s how people dress there. She likes tracksuits, she likes (regular) suits. 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.”

On being most like Shiloh growing up: “Goofy and verbal, the early signs of a performer…. I used to get dressed up in costumes and jump around. 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.”

On Brad’s beard and what he’s been up to in Venice: “I love Brad in every state… He sculpts and designs. He makes furniture, sculpts things related to houses. Traditional male.”

On Brad with the kids: “I keep telling Brad he owes me. 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.”

On a potential Mr. & Mrs. Smith sequel: “People have tried. 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. & 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.”

On co-starring again with Brad: “I’d love to. 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.”