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INTERVIEW: BRAD PITT
(CHUD, May 14, 2004)
All week we've been bringing you the cast and crew of Troy, Warner Bros' epic version of Homer's The Iliad. It's been a big week with everyone from Eric Bana to director Wolfgang Peterson, but now we bring you the money shot, Achilles himself: Brad Pitt.
I can't help but editorialize a bit here - Brad Pitt's a damn nice guy. He's funny, he's bright and he's very laid back. I didn't bother transcribing all the nonsense that some of the press wanted to know about his marriage to Jennifer Aniston ("What do you guys do when you hang out?") but he took it all in stride.
Brad showed up with his head shaved, so that was the first thing he was asked about:
Q: Your haircut, is that for Mr and Mrs Smith?
Pitt: That’s for comfort really. It was a direct response to having spent an hour in hair for Troy every day.
Q: Do you still go to the gym every day?
Pitt: I dabble.
Q: Was getting into shape something Wolfgang came to you with at the beginning? Was it a big part of the character?
Pitt: It’s no different than what we do. Ever since DeNiro put on 60 pounds for Raging Bull it set the course for it. He screwed us all, really.
Q: And with Brando in Godfather.
Pitt: Well, I don’t think that was intentional.
Q: But you really got cut for this role.
Pitt: I hit it pretty hard. Maybe it was an impending midlife crisis.
Q: There has been a real vogue for period pieces and epics in Hollywood. Do you think that reflects the audiences’ interest in getting back to old fashioned stories?
Pitt: I think that’s probably insightful. I see cycles come and go. It’s a little strange how you’ll see baseball movies come out of nowhere. And now westerns, you’ll be seeing a bunch of westerns next year. But I think definitely in confusing times we’ll reach for these kinds of stories to define things for us.
Q: Do you have a western for next year?
Pitt: Yeah, I have a thing with Andrew Dominic, who directed Chopper with Eric Bana. We’re going to do The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It’s being written right now.
Q: Is Achilles an anti-hero or a hero?
Pitt: I’m not good with that. I saw him as extremely human with an immense talent for fighting. What I was drawn to in that character was the search for himself. He is faced with this choice, he makes this choice and he wrestles with this crisis of conscience with this choice. What I really liked is that his character is forged through experience and his responses to experiences. Sometimes he goes to the extreme, not necessarily down a good road. It’s not by adopting any kind of dogma or belief system, it’s by trial and error. Serious trial and error.
Q: Achilles' thing in Troy is the drive for immortality, living beyond his life in the words of others.
Pitt: Is it a bit like fame? Is that where you’re going with that?
Q: Yeah. Is that a reality in your life and fame?
Pitt: Not that blatant but you can certainly draw parallels to chasing fame. Avoidance of death, wanting to leave a mark. Fear of death, fear of not meaning anything, fear of a lack of purpose in your life. Certainly he is in this crisis but it’s more – he says “I want what all men want but I want it more.” It’s the extremes he goes to that I was really drawn to. He makes these discoveries, and it’s not until Priam – when he does these awful things and Priam comes along that he understands his own humanity.
Q: Do you wish that no one knew your name some days?
Pitt: I believe you make your day, it’s all perception. This is the life I built for myself so I have to accept it within those confines and it’s up to me. I can get irritated.
Q: People describe you as so level headed, and reporters who have interviewed you over the years have said that you haven’t changed since you got so popular.
Pitt: I appreciate that. It comes from looking at the bigger picture.
Q: Is it also your Midwest roots?
Pitt: Definitley. But there’s also a false humility that comes with that, that we learn to adopt. It doesn’t necessarily lead to the questions, and I’ve always been a questioner.
Q: There’s all this talk about how you worked out physically, but how did you mentally get into the role?
Pitt: That’s much more important to me. Physicality is important visually, but truly it’s just what we do. We change our hair, we change our dialect. You put on what you put on to find the character. But to me this is such an internal part. An isolated character. In Malta I got an old stone house next to a horse corrall (which didn’t smell so nice) with no AC. I lived a monastic life out there. It sounds crazy, but for a part like this it gives you that extra percentage, that tone of loneliness. So much of acting is merely tone, it’s not saying the lines, it’s the tone.
Q: You were injured on this film?
Pitt: In a bout of stupid irony I tweaked my Achilles tendon. Which is bizarre.
Q: How did it happen?
Pitt: Wear and tear, doing the fight scenes in the sand. It was near the end, all we had left to shoot was the fight scene with Hector and Achilles, and it just went.
Q: So you had to delay the scene.
Pitt: That and a hurricane wiped out our set. It wasn’t our week.
Q: What was it like working with Peter O’Toole?
Pitt: Working with Peter O’Toole was for me a milestone in some way and a highlight, although highlight doesn’t do it justice. It’s going to be on my greatest hits reel of experiences. Peter O’Toole was just - I can’t even begin to describe what a lovely, lovely, hilarious man he is. Very eloquent. I went to meet him one afternoon and we were just going to hang out for a couple of hours. I had to leave at 4AM, I was too tired. He was still going! He’s just a delight, a delicious man.
Then in what I perceive as one of the great scenes in literature, and to get to do it with Peter O’Toole – that’s a pleasure.
Q: Would you and Jennifer Aniston ever do something together?
Pitt: We would. You know, you look through history when couples decide to work together – the odds aren’t with us!
Q: You had a while without new films. Was that choice?
Pitt: It was part choice. Time goes by and you suddenly realize two years went by. I was also working on a couple of projects that didn’t work out.
Q: How did you knock out Eric Bana?
Pitt: Which time?
Q: He only said once!
Pitt: We trained for so long to the point where it becomes second nature, which is good because then we can play the part. We made a deal with each other – we were just going to go for it. Did he tell you the money thing? We decided that for slight infractions it would be fifty bucks, and for major hits, one of us clobbers the other, it would be a hundred bucks.
Q: How much did you end up paying?
Pitt: 750.
Q: You paid him?
Pitt: Yeah, I paid him! And I paid myself 200, because I hit myself a few times.
Q: Can you tell us about the experience of wearing that skirt?
Pitt: There’s really not too much to it, it turns out!
Q: What were you wearing under it?
Pitt: Well, in the day they would be freeballin’. Which is a bit odd, because everything up top is protected with heavy armor but the vitals are hanging in the wind. That’s a kill shot to me. I don’t understand that.
Q: Are you sick of hearing the words Golden Boy?
Pitt: I was going for Golden Boy in this movie, this is one where it works.
Q: Can you talk about working with Angelina Jolie on Mr and Mrs Smith?
Pitt: Yeah, I’ll be curious to see how it works. But it’s great fun because it melds all these different genres of action, black comedy, romance. It’s one big giant metaphor for marriage where these husband and wife who are in doldrums are hired to hit each other. They have been keeping the big secret from each other that they’re superspies.
Q: Are you appalled by the tabloid headlines about you and Angelina?
Pitt: You know I get it. It fits into a lot of archetypes. But at this point we just stay away from it all, because we’ve seen it come and go. But I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen someone as misperceived as Jolie. She’s a really decent person, and really dedicated to her UN work. Very dedicated to her child. I was really surprised – I even had my own perceptions. She’s surprisingly level headed and bright and just decent.
Q: You’ve been away for two years – is it time to reestablish Brad Pitt as a box office draw?
Pitt: That’s really not the thinking. I had other things going on but I missed the movies, so now I’m back in. We started Ocean's on Monday and that’s just great fun. They started two weeks ago, I joined them Monday in Chicago.
Q: What was it like rejoining that cast?
Pitt: Great fun. Right back in, right in where we left off. Great to hang with the lads and Soderbergh. All the boys in a room, and it started going.
Q: Did you have any advice to Orlando Bloom?
Pitt: Yeah, I told him to keep his pants on.
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