Donald Trump wants to make Hollywood great again – apparently. The US president caused a stir at the weekend when he suggested films made outside the US could be hit with 100% tariffs, to prevent Hollywood ‘dying a very fast death’. Not only was the UK film industry concerned, but news about the potential tariffs briefly hit share prices for US media companies such as Walt Disney Co. and Netflix on Monday.

Writing on his own social network, Truth Social, Trump said ‘Hollywood, and many other areas within the USA are being devastated’. He added: ‘Therefore, I am authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative, to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100 per tariff on any and all movies coming into our country that are produced in foreign lands.’

Due to lower costs or tax incentives, it can be attractive for production companies to film outside the US – in locations such as Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand Canada and the UK. (For example, box office smash hits Barbie and Wicked Part One did most of their filming in the UK.) Trump later said other nations had been ‘stealing the movie-making capability of the United States’ and that if companies ‘are not willing to make a movie inside the United States, we should have a tariff on movies that come in’.

But there was a reason for Trump’s outburst – as a day before his announcement, Trump had met Angelina Jolie’s father, Jon Voight, at Mar-A-Lago.

Voight’s manager Stephen Paul said himself and Voight – who has been given the title of ‘special ambassador’ to Hollywood – had submitted a ‘comprehensive plan’ to Trump. It follows months of meetings Voight has held with people across the industry, to get ideas on how to lure big money film productions back to the US. In Voight’s proposal, tariffs were mentioned, but only in ‘in certain limited circumstances’.

In a video posted to X earlier this week, Voight lamented the state of the film industry and welcomed the president’s help. ‘Our industry recently has suffered greatly over these past few years, and many Americans have lost jobs to productions that have gone overseas,’ he said, speaking in front of a US flag. ‘The president loves the entertainment business and this country, and he will help us make Hollywood great again.’

Jon Voight, 86, won an Oscar in 1979 for his role as a Vietnam veteran in Coming Home. But, according to Voight, it was following his role as a former boxer in 1979’s The Champ, that he says he met Trump at an Oscar’s afterparty.

Due to lack of detail, there’s a lot of confusion about what Trump’s proposed plans will mean, and whether tariffs would only affect films exported to the US, or American film companies producing films abroad. As the BBC remarked: ‘There are more questions than answers at this stage.’

In an interview with Variety published on Wednesday, Voight reportedly refused to ‘talk about specifics or logistics’ and, following negative press, said the media should be showing ‘enthusiasm and gratitude’. ‘This shouldn’t be political,’ he also added. ‘I don’t know the political identities of the people we’ve talked to. We’ve talked to a lot of people here. I don’t distinguish them on their party affiliation.’

However, these tariffs might not come to fruition, as Trump later told reporters at The White House on Monday that he didn’t want to harm the moviemaking business. ‘I’m not looking to hurt the industry, I want to help the industry,’ the US president told reporters. ‘So we’re going to meet with the industry. I want to make sure they’re happy with it because we’re all about jobs.’ And earlier this week, White House spokesperson Kush Desai told various outlets ‘no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made’.

A few headlines about the Voight-Trump meeting have mentioned the fact Voight is Angelina Jolie’s father. But Jolie and Voight have long had a complicated relationship. After Voight split from Angelina’s mother Marcheline Bertrand, Jolie spent a lot of time growing up estranged from her father. ‘When my father had an affair, it changed [my mom’s] life,’ she later reflected in a 2020 New York Times article. ‘It set her dream of family life ablaze.’

And in 2002, Jolie dropped Voight from her name, a month after her father said in an interview that she had ‘serious mental problems’. Later responding in a statement, she said: ‘I don’t want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father.’

But later, it seemed as if the pair reconciled thanks to Jolie’s six kids – Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Knox and Vivienne – with Voight and the children meeting in 2010.

Voight has also publicly spoken about his daughter. Last year, he commented on Jolie’s divorce from Brad Pitt in an interview with Fox News. ‘I wish that would be over [and that] they found a way to make peace,’ he said. He then added that he was concerned about the kids, saying they needed ‘some stability’. ‘I love the kids and I love my daughter, and I want Brad to step up, too, [and do] what he has to do [and] end this nonsense,’ he said.

And in another interview for Variety last summer, he called Jolie’s views on the Israel-Gaza war ‘ignorant’. Jolie, who has spent over two decades working for the UN, called for a ceasefire in Gaza in October 2023, writing on Instagram: ‘Humanity demands an immediate ceasefire. Palestinian and Israeli lives – and the lives of all people globally – matter equally.’