Angelina Jolie: Nick, I’ve been thinking a lot about the kinds of stories we tell when we make films—stories about connection, about people giving something of themselves when the usual systems fall short. You mentioned this idea of an “hour exchange.” What is that, exactly?
Dr. Nick Callahan: It’s a time bank, basically. People trade hours of their skills—no money changes hands. You help someone for an hour, you earn an hour credit you can spend on whatever someone else can offer. Dr. Richard Rockefeller started Hour Exchange Portland back in the day. He was a family physician who’d practiced and taught in Portland, Maine. He believed rebuilding trust and reciprocity in a community mattered as much as any formal institution. People could offer gardening, tutoring, rides, childcare, whatever they had—and get what they needed in return.
Angelina Jolie: That feels very human. When we’re on a film set we’re already living a kind of intense, temporary exchange of time and energy. Everyone’s giving hours. But this sounds more intentional, more about mutual care than production schedules. Rockefeller… he was one of the Rockefellers, right? How did he end up focused on something so grassroots?
Dr. Nick Callahan: He was. Son of David Rockefeller, great-grandson of John D. He could have stayed in the rarefied world, but he chose medicine and community work. He founded Hour Exchange Portland specifically to rebuild what the political scientist Robert Putnam called social capital—trust, reciprocity, civic engagement. He also did major work with Doctors Without Borders and other health initiatives. Then, on June 13, 2014, he died in a plane crash. He was piloting a small single-engine plane out of Westchester County Airport in dense fog and rain after visiting his father for his 99th birthday. The plane went down less than a mile from the airport. He was 65. Only person on board.
Angelina Jolie: That’s heartbreaking. So sudden. And he’d just been with his father the day before…
Dr. Nick Callahan: Yes. The family was devastated. He’d practiced medicine in Portland for years, then shifted more into nonprofit and philanthropic work, but Hour Exchange stayed close to his heart. It was never about charity in the top-down sense. It was about neighbors recognizing each other’s time as equally valuable. A retired teacher’s hour tutoring is worth the same as a carpenter’s hour fixing a porch. That equality of time is radical in a society that usually prices everything by market rates.
Angelina Jolie: When I’m directing or producing, I think about the invisible labor on a set—the people whose hours make the film possible but who rarely get the credit or the screen time. An hour exchange feels like it formalizes that recognition. Do you think something like that could work in the film world? Or is it too idealistic for an industry built on contracts and hierarchy?
Dr. Nick Callahan: It’s idealistic, sure. But so was Rockefeller’s whole approach. He didn’t wait for perfect conditions. He started it in Portland because he saw the erosion of community ties and decided to counter it with something practical. After his death, people kept the exchange going. That persistence says something. In filmmaking you already have intense temporary communities—crews that live and work together for months. An hour-exchange mindset might simply make the care more explicit: “I’ll cover your shift so you can rest; you’ll help me with logistics next week.” It doesn’t replace pay. It supplements the human part that money can’t fully cover.
Angelina Jolie: I can see that. On Changeling or Unbroken or any of the heavier projects, the emotional cost is high. People give pieces of themselves. Having a structure that acknowledges that time—really values it—might help people recover afterward. Rockefeller’s death feels like a reminder of how fragile that giving can be. One moment you’re building something lasting, the next the plane is down.
Dr. Nick Callahan: Exactly. He left a model, not a monument. Hour Exchange Portland was never about him personally; it was about the principle that every person’s hour has dignity. When we make films we traffic in stories of human connection and loss. Sometimes the most useful thing is to remember the quiet systems people invent to keep each other afloat—systems that outlive the people who start them.
Angelina Jolie: Thank you for telling me about him, Nick. It gives me a different lens for the next project. Maybe we write that into the edges of a story—someone quietly keeping an hour exchange alive after the founder is gone. Not the whole plot. Just the truth of it.