Angelina Jolie has a W Magazine photo spread of intimate family moments captured by her longtime partner, Brad Pitt. The cover features a corner of her breast as she nurses one of her twins and the interview inside the issue starts with a bang, too, with Angelina talking about going to buy knives with her seven year old son, Maddox:

Every family has its unique rites of passage, those generational milestones that mark a child’s growth and remind parents of their own similar experiences, years earlier. In the Jolie-Pitt household, one such event is the day a kid begins collecting daggers. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s seven-year-old son, Maddox, like many boys his age, has lately developed a fondness for guns and knives, and Jolie proudly notes that the predilection runs in the family.

“My mom took me to buy my first daggers when I was 11 or 12,” she recalls. “And I’ve already bought Maddox some things. We take him to a special shop.” She emphasizes that the knife blades are dulled so they’re not dangerous, and that the purchases are accompanied by discussions about violence. But, she says, “we also talk about samurais and about the idea of defending someone as good. We talk about everything.”

[From W Magazine]

My son likes guns and he’s four. I’m not exactly encouraging it, but when he won a toy gun-like thing at a carnival this weekend I let him keep it. Then I kind of put it to the side and encouraged him to play with his Legos. I figure it’s easier than taking it away from him and making it seem like this forbidden toy. I can’t see specifically going out and buying him guns or knives, though. Maybe that’s Maddox’s thing. He did have a military-themed birthday party and was seen wearing a little gun necklace.

There’s a lot more in the long Angelina article, available online, including many details of their private lives. I’ll include a few tidbits below. Angelina addresses the issue of her family moving around the world and says that’s how she intends to raise her children so that they learn about other cultures. As for Roseanne Barr’s criticism of her, she says that she’s just one of many people who have opinions.

They have nannies and one live-in helper
There are nannies, of course, including the couple’s first part-time live-in helper; Jolie says she and Pitt were starting to get “loopy” while attending to the twins and trying to find enough time for the others, so for now someone stays over a few nights a week.

On her partnership with Brad: they’re in it together
“I do think that I’m good in a partnership now,” she says. “I think it just needed to be the right man.” And she believes she was correct about needing to find a shared purpose with someone. “It’s not just that I love being in Brad’s company, which obviously I do, but it’s that we both roll up our sleeves and take on what we care about in the same way,” she says. “I have a lot of respect for him, and he helps me to be better and fight hard for things that I love.”

More on how Brad convinced her to have biological children
“When we first met, he talked about having children in that way. I talked about only adopting children,” she says. After they had agreed that Pitt would adopt Maddox and Zahara, she recalls, “he stopped talking about having other kids in the other way. So I suppose in my heart I realized that he was happy with them as his children, completely. I knew he would never see them as different, and that gave me a certain peace. Then I suppose I just looked at him and loved him and just felt open to [getting pregnant]. I suddenly wanted to. It’s one of those things you can’t explain.”

Traveling around the world is how she wants to raise her kids
“We have such a big family, such a close family, that we like being with each other a lot,” she says. “We’re happy to spend a lot of time alone and meet new people wherever we go.”

“It’s part of how I want to raise them,” Jolie says, adding that they’ve shown no resistance to being uprooted. “If you tell them we’re getting on a plane tomorrow, they’re all excited to pack their bags, and if you say we’re not coming back for months, they won’t bat an eye,” she says. “I think they see the world as a home. I’ve seen Madd run through the markets of Addis Ababa [in Ethiopia] and not notice that it’s very poor, or that everyone is African or that he’s Asian. It wouldn’t matter to him.”

On Roseanne Bar: she doesn’t know me
Asked what she thought this summer of Roseanne Barr’s much circulated Internet screed about Pitt and her—an incendiary rant that mocked, among other things, the couple’s habit of earning tens of millions of dollars from violent action movies and then giving away a portion of it to convince the world that they care about humanity—Jolie appears to have no idea what I’m talking about. Told the details, she responds with a direct gaze, a calm smile and silence. Doesn’t it make her angry?
“No,” she says. “I mean, how should someone respond to something like that? She doesn’t know me. I have nothing to defend in my life. I’m sure she’s one of many people that have opinions.”

On the millions in baby photo money
“There’s nothing to say other than it’s bizarre. But we’re happy that we have our hands on it to distribute it to people we think are worthy, rather than some paparazzi.”

Angelina’s work and charity schedule will be busy
During the next few months, Jolie plans to ease herself back into the workforce. In Edwin A. Salt (which will likely be retitled), she will play a CIA officer accused of being a double agent. Meanwhile, one pet project, the long-delayed screen adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, is coming closer to fruition: Jolie says a script is ready and discussions are in progress with various directors, including Eastwood. On the humanitarian front, the Jolie-Pitt Foundation is now building a children’s tuberculosis/AIDS clinic in Addis Ababa, similar to one it already established in Cambodia; Jolie is also eager to return to the Burmese border, where she last traveled in 2004 to visit with refugees. And this fall, when the family relocates to Germany, Jolie will bring her plane so she can start flying again.

At least one kid sleeps with them a night
“Most nights, someone ends up in our bed,” Jolie says. “They’ve just taken over in there—especially right now, because we want them to feel that the babies aren’t special in the room. So our door is much more like a swinging door.”

The Jolie-Pitt bedroom, of course, remains off-limits to journalists. And sometimes even to kids, Jolie declares.

“The kids do knock before entering,” she says. “We’ve at least got that part down. Because Mommy and Daddy need some space.”

[From W Magazine, subtitles added]

The photos shown on the W website are pretty intimate and the magazine promises to have a much larger spread. Say what you will about Angelina, she gives a good interview and is lovely photo subject. Forbes just declared that Angelina sells more magazines than anyone else in the world and the issue is sure to be a best seller for W.

The famous family is now back in Berlin holed up in a large estate. The W Magazine issue featuring Angelina comes out on October 21, right before the release of her new film, Changeling.