CHILDREN were so scared of Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie in her new wicked role that they were terrified to appear with her. In the end five-year-old daughter Vivienne had to play a scene as a young princess.

"We have never intended – and still don't – to put our children in film, to encourage them to be actors," says Jolie, explaining her and partner Brad Pitt's approach to raising their children.

"We want to encourage them to be happy in whatever they wish to be. But the reason we ended up needing to put Vivie in the film is because it's a character when Aurora is five and she has to not see me as a demon. Crew members would bring their children and all the little kids that came to visit the set would see me and be terrified.

"They would cry or freeze and certainly couldn't do a scene with me. So it was genuinely out of necessity that we used Vivienne so we could have a good scene."

Her reaction to seeing her daughter on screen is the same as any proud parent. "Like anybody would think, it's our little girl. So we see her and she's just silly and sweet. The idea that she's in a movie is still kind of funny to her mum and dad," she adds.

The character that caused children to cry is Maleficent, the new Disney movie that explores the untold story of the iconic Sleeping Beauty villain who curses baby Princess Aurora.

She was intrigued by the idea of making a film about Maleficent while wondering, "how can you possibly make a film where the central character curses a baby?" The answer in Linda Woolverton's script is to tell her back story and events leading up to her becoming evil and delivering the curse at Aurora's christening.

"That's a really interesting thing to do, to question human nature. There's a lot in this film for people who loved the original animated film but we also wanted to make it more for modern audiences with more complex characters and relationships. Not just put a new spin on it but update it to make more meaningful," says Jolie.

The villainous Maleficent was a favourite character from Disney films.

"I thought she was so cool when I was young, and powerful and had such a great voice. As an actress I do film, I don't do theatre so I don't naturally have that voice and am not used to that kind of performing. But she had to have this big voice, there's no halfway," she continues.

"The horns and everything about her meant I had to embrace my bizarre and my silliness. It was hard at first and I was quite afraid to do it. It's a beautiful story and has a lot of depth but we got a little crazy and had a lot of fun. I hope that resonates and people are entertained by it."

She wasn't into fairy tales when she was little partly because she was of the generation seeing the earlier Disney films when the female characters weren't little girls she admired. Maleficent was the exception.

"The princesses were not characters I looked up to or identified with. That's very different now for my girls," she says.

"I usually make up stories for my kids. I like to tell them stories every night and I just make up any crazy kind of thing. I like to involve them as characters. The side of fairy tales I don't like is that there are these happy endings. That there's just good and evil and things are perfect. A good story for children has a sense of being a moral tale. That's what I try to teach my kids and what we tried to do with this film."

Getting the script and unwrapping the origins of Maleficent's evil was like being a kid again. It was much more fun than she expected. She knows that all kids are curious about evil characters and are drawn not so much to the bad guys but thinks that are dark. "It's not simply a desire to be wicked. There are things that frighten us in life, especially children and they want to understand so it frightens them less," she says.

After being wicked in front of the cameras was she able to shake it off when she got home? "You'd have to ask my family. I thought I came home lovely."

The Pitt-Jolie children are getting to the age where they can see their parents' films, like Mr and Mrs Smith on which they met. "The older ones recently saw that and thought it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen. Watching your parents fight as spies is some strange child fantasy," she says.

"They have started to watch our films. They're not as excited by it which is kind of great. My littlest one, Maddox, sees Tomb Raider (in which she played action girl Lara Croft) and thinks mummy can do all those things. Maleficent is maybe the one I'm most excited about because we can all see it and I think they're really going to like it."

Jolie fans should make the most of her latest film as she intends to scale back her acting duties and spend more time pursuing the international charity and humanitarian projects in which she's already involved.

Acting is going to take more of a back seat. "I've had a wonderful career and am very happy to have had all the opportunities that I've had to tell stories and work for as long as I have," she explains.

"There will be a few more films but I'm happy to be selective and have fun with characters like this. I would like to focus more on writing and directing and, above all, I would like to focus more on my work with the UN (United Nations) and PSVI (Prevent Sexual Violence Initiative)."