Angelina Jolie will cover the Dec. 5 issue of Entertainment Weekly with "Unbroken" leading man Jack O'Connell, Popwatch reports.

By the time Jolie's $65 million World War II epic "Unbroken" began filming on Oct. 16, 2013, actors O'Connell, Domhnall Gleeson, and Finn Wittrock floated nearby in a small yellow raft in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Queensland, Australia, on a strict diet of 500 calories a day for two months.

"If you saw that first shot and my reaction to it, you'd be absolutely sure that this was going to be one of the great disasters of filmmaking history," Jolie told EW staff from a sofa at Milk Studios in Los ­Angeles.

The director referred to an incident where O'Connell was being taken by the tides, coming in and out of frame.

"The only thing you could do was laugh at how insane this was all going to be, and then you just had to take a deep breath and figure out what to do next," Jolie said.

Which brought to mind what Jolie's next project would be, as both a director and actress. The star was last seen in the title role of Disney's "Maleficent," which grossed over $757 million worldwide and is the third highest-grossing film of 2014.

"I didn't know what I was up against when I was first getting into it," Jolie said. "I had never done anything like it. I was up for the challenge, but I had so much to learn."

Last week, Jolie, 39, showed another side of herself at the debut of her second film as director, "Unbroken," which had its premiere in Sydney, Australia on Nov. 17. She told People magazine that she "had to convince the studio she was up to the task of directing," and was "terrified."

According to "Unbroken" producer Matt Baer, the film was in development hell for decades, and Jolie had to fight to get the film made.

"In my long journey to get this film made, Angelina was certainly the catalyst director to connect with what I was trying to get going," Baer told People. "Lou's story is difficult to tell in film, it's so long and so epic, but Angie wasn't afraid to take it on. For many years, others were afraid to take it on, but Angie had it instinctively in her creative soul."

Jolie is also noted for being tough-as-nails on camera as well as off, and O'Connell wasn't the only actor who had to suck it up during filming. Japanese singer-actor Miyavi, 33, who portrays a sadistic POW camp guard, admitted to E! Online he felt "physically sick" while filming torturing the captives.

Based on the 2010 non-fiction novel of the same name by Laura Hillenbrand, biographical war drama "Unbroken" follows Olympic track-and-field athlete Louis Zamperini, who survived a plane crash over the Pacific, only to be imprisoned in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, where he spent two and a half years. Zamperini died at 97 after a 40-day bout of pneumonia on July 2, 2014, nearly six months before the film's scheduled release.

Jolie and Ethan Coen adapted the script. "

Unbroken" receives its theatrical release date on Dec. 25.

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