A solid gold pendant nestles in the plunging neckline of Angelina Jolie's black dress.Forgive me if this is the first thing I notice when she rises to greet me.
But it leaps out because it’s no ordinary bauble; it has the unmistakable shape of a machine gun.Apparently it was made by a jeweller based on a drawing by her son, Maddox, and given to her as a Mother's Day present by her partner, Brad Pitt.
I suppose I'm mostly taken aback because of our situation; Jolie is very pregnant, with twins expected any day now, and we are in the rarefied surroundings of a suite in the Carlton hotel in Cannes.
It's old-school luxury: yellow Provençal wallpaper, a salmon-pink sofa upon which Jolie perches and a matching chair for me.
(As it happens, she is even more rarefied than the setting – and this suite costs £1,600. Despite the Carlton being the temporary home of all the big Hollywood studios and production companies during the film festival, she and Pitt are actually staying in a £4,000-a-night villa at the Hotel du Cap, a 30-minute drive from Cannes on the outskirts of Antibes, where Harrison Ford, Robert De Niro and Madonna are also staying. A helicopter is on standby there for a swift maternity-hospital transfer.)
But as it happens, the machine-gun motif is entirely apt, as we begin by talking about guns and how she would kill for real if compelled to do so. One of the movies she's in Cannes to promote is Wanted, in which she plays assassin Fox, part of a shadowy team called the Fraternity who kill the bad guys before the bad guys get to kill anyone else.
James McAvoy plays a nerd who's hauled out of a boring, nine-to-five existence to be trained up. McAvoy said he felt odd handling the weapons in the film.
Jolie had no such qualms. And she says intense training in various combat techniques for films such as Wanted and Mr & Mrs Smith – the action thriller on which she met Pitt – means she could protect herself in a fight if she had to.
'If anybody comes into my home and tries to hurt my kids, I've no problem shooting them,' she says with a dry candour.
'I bought original, real guns of the type we used in Tomb Raider for security. Brad and I are not against having a gun in the house, and we do have one. And yes, I'd be able to use it if I had to. I could handle myself. I think there are certain combat skills that would come out. I tend to want to throw an elbow. I don't know why. I've learned all the punches, head butts and kicks – yet getting someone with my elbow is my first instinct.
'I think it's good for anybody to learn a skill when it comes to fight training – be it kung fu, boxing or kick-boxing – because self-defence is important. Brad and I want our kids to learn it. They're going to get into a fight some day, so they might as well learn how to take care of themselves.
I was kind of a punk when I was a kid, but I didn't get picked on.
I was left alone because I was a bit of a loner. I would get into fights on behalf of other people. I wasn't a pushover. So I wasn't the one who was targeted.
'There's a side to me that people know is humanitarian, and there's a side to me that's a mummy. But there's also the side that likes to get down and dirty and run and jump around and fire guns. I don't want to lose touch with that.
That's one of the reasons I like to do action movies. It's good for me every once in a while.'
Looking at her now, I believe she could handle herself. She's looked thin, but not any more; Jolie is impressively big – she rests a protective hand on her mighty bump during our talk – and her arms are no longer bony.
She's 33 in a few days' time; her exotic face, with those skyscraper-high cheekbones and naturally full lips which must be on the wall of every plastic surgeon in Hollywood, look just as good in real life.
She has a deep West Coast drawl and is refreshingly direct – ask a question and she bats it right back .
She is still completely redolent of the girl who looked sensational in Lara Croft's spray-on latex tankini, complete with a Magnum in each thigh holster, or the sexy, heavily tattooed, gun-toting assassin she plays in Wanted.
Based on the Mark Millar comic books, the film contains violent action throughout, but Jolie has no issue with this.
'If the Fraternity was just a bunch of people that killed for fun and enjoyed torturing people, then I wouldn't be interested. But I liked this idea that if there were people who you knew were going to kill others in the future, should you take them out? And that's interesting in a bigger political way.
'For example, we have an international criminal court that can issue arrest warrants for Darfur, the Congo and other places. But are we ready to back it up? And if we don't back it up, what's the other solution?
'Do we just go to war and kill a bunch of civilians in the process? I think there does need to be something to prevent other kinds of violence.'
In the past, expressing her wild side took the form of some very out-there behaviour – wearing a vial of blood drawn from her then-husband Billy Bob Thornton, a fascination with knives, a suggestion she'd be open to gay sex.
These days, when Jolie kicks loose it's on a film set in action movies. It's also a good way of impressing the children, apparently – Maddox, seven, whom she adopted as a baby before she started seeing Pitt; Pax, four, and Zahara, three, who are both also adopted; and two-year-old Shiloh, her biological daughter with Pitt.
'Maybe they'll finally think I'm cool, because now, for them, I'm just Mum. My son asks me to play a video game and I'm appalling at it, and so is Brad.
We don't even understand it properly. So maybe one day my kids will see films like Wanted and see that Mum is not a total dork.'
But what about the violence? 'It's just not a reality in this day and age to say, "I'm never going to let my kids watch a movie that has a gun in it." It's important to know that this exists. But I'm very clear with my children about who's a good guy and who's bad. If they're watching a movie at home and they say, "Is that a bad guy, Mummy?", I say, "Well, is he trying to hurt somebody?" If you see somebody picking on a person or starting the fight, that's the bad guy.'
Angelina Jolie
Jolie's preparation for Wanted saw her reunited with Eunice Huthart, a 41-year-old Liverpudlian and a former winner of TV's Gladiators, who has been her stunt double since she made the Tomb Raider films. 'Maddox is a Liverpool fan,' says Jolie.
'He watches them whenever he can and that's because of Eunice. She got him into soccer and she's a Liverpool girl.
'The great thing about her is that she knows me very well, so she can help set up a stunt that's safe enough for me to do.
'So while in the film I get to do the majority of stunts, she is the one who preps them and makes sure they work. That's the dangerous thing. She makes it safe for me.
'Actually, I got a bad injury on Tomb Raider, but it's always the stupidest things that get you; the big, crazy stunts are fine. Like when I had to run and jump over a box. The floor was wet and my ankle snapped. I tore the tendons and came back two days later with a cane. They tried to rush me off the set, saying, "Not great for crew morale – could you please put the cane away?"
She didn't prepare as intensely for Wanted as she did for the two Tomb Raider films. 'I didn't get into such great shape, because I just don't have the time, with the kids. I used to be able to train all the time, but it's different now. My body has changed, I've had a baby and I've breast-fed, although bringing up four children is harder than making an action movie.
'In Wanted, James and I have a fight, and I get to kick his ass – it's always fun to do that stuff. I like doing the risky stunts. It's an adrenaline rush and it's fun. It's very much in our family. Brad and I met doing that kind of thing on Mr & Mrs Smith. We have a healthy competition in the house for craziness.'
That love of an adrenaline kick extends to driving and flying. Not for her a girly party to celebrate her pregnancy: 'My girlfriends rented a sports car for me instead. So Brad and I just drove around LA in this Mercedes all day. It was fantastic. I love to drive, but I don't get to do it very much these days, because I don't like being followed by the paparazzi.'
Seven years after the first Tomb Raider, this is where her celebrity has taken her. The night before our interview, she and Pitt walked up the Cannes red carpet for the premiere of the animated film Kung Fu Panda (one of the movies she is pushing). A collective madness descended.
Thousands of people screamed from the streets around the Palais des Festivals. Later on, the couple briefly attended the after-screening party, and as limousines ferried them the short distance from the Palais, fans swarmed down La Croisette trying to snatch photos of them on their mobile phones.
Freedom and security are constant themes. She and Pitt own a single-prop Cirrus aircraft and both have a pilot's licence. 'I've now got an instrument rating, which means I can fly in bad weather and at night.
'The plane has a parachute – like a rocket chute – in case you get into trouble. I love the idea of just being up in the air, but I think it's more about the travel for me, the freedom it represents.
'I just want to go to places that are still unmapped. I mean, from here the two of us could hop in a plane and go to lunch in Italy...'
As well as that striking machine-gun pendant, Jolie is distinctive because of her tattoos.
Two are visible today on her left arm – one on the inside of her wrist, a tiny 'H' for Haven, her brother, and the other on her forearm, the Tennessee Williams quote 'A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages'.
There are plenty more, though – map co-ordinates of where she adopted her children (which cover up an old Billy Bob tattoo), a tiger and dragon on her back, 'What nourishes me also destroys me' in Latin, and a letter 'M' on the palm of her right hand, representing her mother, the actress Marcheline Bertrand, who died from ovarian cancer in January 2007.
The tattoos are normally a nightmare for the make-up department, but not on Wanted. They added more. 'I loved it,' says Jolie. 'I wanted to get tattooed when I finished the film. I had four or five on my arms, a big piece on my back and two on my bottom.
I can't keep track of how many real ones I have now.' Despite her obsession with her body, there's far more to Jolie than most female stars.
Her work as a goodwill ambassador for the Office of the UN High Commissioner For Refugees began after filming the first Tomb Raider movie in Cambodia.
She then started visiting other troubled countries – more than 20 to date – and along with Pitt has donated millions of dollars to humanitarian projects.
'When you've been raised around Hollywood and you suddenly find yourself with a backpack in a war zone, where people are dying and crying because they don't have enough food for their kids, you very quickly realise what matters.
At the time it was like being smacked in the face and told, "What are you so upset about?"
From that moment on I never lost that focus. 'On my first trip to Sierra Leone I ended up in a convoy with just one other woman.
'Another truck broke down, the group became separated and suddenly we were responsible for truckloads of people. It was getting dark and we were going through roadblocks that were just some guys with guns.
'And that was the country where they were cutting everybody's arms and feet off. And I remember thinking, "God, they could just decide to kill us… What am I doing here?" I remember having this bizarre feeling of being very far from home and feeling very vulnerable.'
Jolie and Pitt have homes dotted around the world – one in LA, another in New Orleans and even a place in Cambodia.
There is constant speculation that they are about to marry. 'It's funny, because it's news to us,' she laughs.
'We're together because we want to be, and we want to raise these children together. We've both been married before. It's not about some piece of paper.
'I'm sure we'll do it one day.'
She's had a hard time getting along with her father, actor Jon Voight. He separated from Jolie's mother shortly after she was born, and Jolie and her brother were raised by Bertrand.
There have been long periods where Jolie had no contact with Voight. But recently, she reveals, they spoke on the phone.
'We've had a difficult relationship. It was important for me to distance myself from it, because it was unhealthy.
'But I called him and we've spoken recently. We're going to try to see each other. I don't think we'll ever have that daddy-and-daughter relationship, but maybe we can get to know each other as friends.'
With three films in the can – she is also in Changeling, Clint Eastwood's new film – and the twins due, she is taking the rest of the year off.
In fact, she says she can see a time when she quits acting altogether. 'I have now considered only doing films few and far between, and then only films that are really important to me.
The criteria have changed for me.' What would she be doing if she weren't making films? 'Oh, I'd be at home baking cookies,' she laughs. And then she winks – a very naughty Mrs Smith wink indeed. 'Wanted' is released on June 27
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