BATTAMBANG, Cambodia: Between bites of spicy Cambodian curry and fried fish with rice, Angelina Jolie Pitt explains how this tiny country with a tumultuous past changed the course of her life.

She first visited Cambodia 16 years ago to portray “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” — the gun-toting, bungee-jumping, supremely toned action hero that made her a star. Soon after, she adopted her first child from a Cambodian orphanage and returned again and again on humanitarian missions. Now, she’s back for another movie but this time as a director.

“First They Killed My Father,” is based on a Khmer Rouge memoir written by survivor Loung Ung that recounts the 1970s Cambodian genocide from a child’s perspective. The film, which she is directing and co-wrote with Ung for Netflix, is in Khmer, with an all-Cambodian cast and according to Jolie Pitt “the most important” movie of her career.

In person, Jolie Pitt is engaging and down-to-earth, dressed in a T-shirt and long black skirt, her hair pulled into a casual bun. She goes out of her way to play down her celebrity, hopping into the back of an SUV and squeezing into the middle seat beside a reporter for a short drive from the set to the crew’s outdoor lunch tents.

It was during an early trip back to Cambodia with the UN that Jolie had another epiphany — this time about motherhood.

“It’s strange, I never wanted to have a baby. I never wanted to be pregnant. I never babysat. I never thought of myself as a mother,” Jolie, now famously a mother of six, says with a laugh. But while playing with children at a Cambodian school, “it was suddenly very clear to me that my son was in the country, somewhere.”

She adopted Maddox in 2002.