Angelina Jolie: 'I need classical music, but I have to be careful what I listen to'

13 December 2014, 14:33 | Updated: 13 December 2014, 14:55

EXCLUSIVE: While Brad Pitt and the children listen to music all the time, Jolie says she has to be careful what she listens to

Hollywood A-lister Angelina Jolie is deeply influenced by music - so much so that she says she has to take care over what she listens to.

"Brad actually jokes that I took the music out of his life - which he'll probably hate me for saying," Jolie says on this week's edition of Charlotte Green's Culture Club (Sunday 3pm).

"Because some people can just turn the radio on all the time, put CDs on all the time, my kids have their earphones in all the time.

"But if I hear a piece of music I will actually be moved towards it," the actress says. "If it's very deeply sad I might become more melancholy. If it has a great energy and rhythm and drums behind it, I might feel that extra bit of fight and fire in the day. So I have to be very careful what I put on because I know this about myself."

Classical music, though, has the effect of helping Jolie calm down.

"I need classical music because I move too fast," she says. "There's too much going on all at once and I think that much in my head is quite loud." 

She says she listens to the classics sometimes when she is working, and particularly enjoys the music of Pachelbel.

Pachelbel: facts and music >  

"It's the complexity of it that I think can keep your mind engaged and helps like a meditation to focus you and spark your mind. Because it has that complexity that makes you think in a different way," she says. 

"So I use it. But I use it like medicine when I need to be prescribed a certain tone or a certain influence."
 

Jolie has been in the UK for the premiere of the new film, Unbroken, which she produced and directed. It tells the powerful true story of Olympic track star and World War II hero Louis Zamperini who survived a plane crash in the Pacific and spent 47 days at sea drifting on a raft, only to be captured by the Japanese navy and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp for two-and-a-half years.

On Sunday's Culture Club she pays tribute to the film's composer Alexandre Desplat who she met first when he worked with Brad Pitt on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008.

"He's so extremely talented," she says of Desplat. "He has such a sense of not just music but the emotion and the intent behind the music and how much to use or how little to use.

"And of course he has such beautiful taste and he has such an extraordinary ear. All you can ever think when you're with him is, 'Oh I wish I had that talent.'"