BRAD PITT IN "VANITY FAIR" NOVEMBER 2001 “I know that this image, the world’s definition of Brad Pitt, is just an image, because he just feels like a normal guy. But to the world he’s still a cover boy for People, the Sexiest Man Alive." Contributing editor Peter Biskind believes that such films such as Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11, starring Brad Pitt, are “exactly the kinds of movies people want to see in today’s climate. You don’t want to watch CNN all day, and Ocean’s 11 is perfect escapism.” The author of Easy Rider, Raging Bulls, about Hollywood in the 70s, and the former executive editor of Premiere magazine, Biskind has interviewed countless celebrities in his career. Meeting Pitt, he says, was a highlight. “Celebrities, like everybody else, are different from one another,” Biskind says. “There are celebrities who are dickheads and celebrities who are and smart and informed and charming and self-deprecating. I would put Pitt in the latter category.” Brad Pitt shies away from traditional leading-man roles. In the upcoming remake of the Rat Pack movie Ocean’s 11 he’s George Clooney’s sidekick, and in Spy Game, with Robert Redford, he’s often unrecognizable. Yet his indie sensibility hasn’t dimmed his stardom (or lowered his salary). In the fortress like studio where Pitt does architectural design and photography, and where his wife Jennifer Aniston, paints and sculpts, the 37-year old actor talks to Peter Biskind about fighting the celebrity trap and honing the fine art of Hollywood mischief-making. One day Brad Pitt was standing on line waiting to buy a hot dog at Pink’s, the shabby if venerable fast-food shack on La Brea, in Los Angeles. Suddenly a van pulled up and a guy inside yelled, “Yo, Brad Pitt! Yo, man, gimme your autograph.” Pitt turned away, trying to ignore him, but the dude was not easily discouraged, shouting, “C’mon, man, don’t be like that. Give me your fuckin’ autograph. C’mon, man – is that how it is?” Suddenly, six or so shirtless guys, heads covered by black hoods, leapt from the van and jumped on Pitt, who, bleating like a stuck pig, begged for mercy in piteous tones unbefitting a $20 million-a-picture movie star, especially one who kicked ass in Fight Club and Snatch. But his weeping and wailing fell on deaf years. The assailants threw him into the van and sped off. It was all staged, of course, and filmed for Jackass, the now cancelled cult show on MTV in which the cast, presided over by host Johnny Knoxville, would be set on fire, get hit by cars, and play other stupid pet tricks on themselves. Pitt was the only celebrity to join the fun, and his trick was so realistic that one of Pink’s cooks hurdled the counter and chased the van down the street. Looking back a few months later, Pitt shakes his head as if he still can’t believe it. “These guys” – the Jackass producers – “are in a league of their own,” he says, grinning. “I laugh my ass off watching the thing. It was outta hand, outta hand.” How many other movie stars would stage their own abduction? Few have as little reverence for their public profile, few have so disdained the care and feeding of their own stardom, few are as dismissive of their genetic good fortune. Brad Pitt, in other words, is way too cool to be Brad Pitt. People magazine’s obsession with him – naming him the Sexiest Man Alive twice, giving his marriage to Jennifer Aniston the royal-wedding treatment – just embarrasses him. “He was sort of a hormonal neutron bomb in Thelma & Louise,” says David Fincher, a close friend who directed him in Seven and Fight Club, referring to the breakout role that introduced Pitt and his washboard abs to the world’s moviegoers. “He doesn’t want people going, ‘I love you with your shirt off.’ Who wants to hear that? It’s like, ‘You were such a cute baby!’” In a way, Pitt has become the prisoner of his own image, and he’s doing his damnedest to escape. Just look at the parts he has been choosing. He doesn’t do conventional action pictures, doesn’t do giddy romantic comedies opposite Meg Ryan or Sandra Bullock, and hasn’t done any high-toned Oscar-grabbing epics since Meet Joe Black in 1998. At first, he says, his agents “were frustrated with me, but now they know me well enough, it doesn’t surprise them. I enjoy action pictures, a little escape, but I don’t want to spend six months of my life doing one and then come back the next year for dubbing and then push the thing.” He doesn’t even like to play leading men, preferring character roles to feed his inner Dustin Hoffman. He continues, “I certainly felt the pressure, when I was younger, to play the kind of man who gets the girls, has all the answers, never makes mistakes, and defuses the bomb in 10 seconds.” But not anymore. In last year’s Snatch, Guy Ritchie’s remake of his own Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Pitt played sixth, seventh, and eighth fiddle to a gaggle of British actors virtually unknown to American audiences, and in his handful of scenes, when the blue eyes and the impish grin jumped off the screen, it was despite his best efforts to obscure his face with grime and schmutz. In last March’s The Mexican, he contented himself with half a plot (Julia Roberts and James Gandolfini ran off with the rest), playing a none-too-bright small-time loser, Velcro for misfortune, and once again buried himself in dirt. It’s not hard to imagine Pitt as the avatar of the Hollywood branch of Dogma 95, the Danish gun-and-run film collective responsible for The Celebration. “He doesn’t care what he looks like, doesn’t care what people think about the part,” says Steven Soderbergh, who directed Pitt in the upcoming Ocean’s 11. “I don’t think there’s anybody of that stature who even comes close to taking the risks that he’s taken. He’s absolutely fearless.” His two new films, though certainly mainstream Hollywood fare, don’t entirely deviate from the recent pattern. Ocean’s 11, due out at Christmas, is another ensemble piece; Pitt plays George Clooney’s sidekick, the Dean Martin role in the Rat Pack original. In Tony Scott’s Spy Game, out in November, he works opposite Robert Redford, but it’s Redford’s movie, and Pitt’s character although closer to classic leading-manhood than he’s allowed himself to get since Meet Joe Black, is angry and disillusioned and, worse, beaten half to death, spending a good swatch of his screen time lying senseless, covered with blood, virtually – again – unrecognizable. What’s going on here? Actually, you don’t have to be Freud to figure it out. Thelma & Louise was released in 1991, so Pitt, now 37, has had a whole decade to ponder the up and downsides of celebrity. Even though he made his own bed – nobody has to be coaxed into taking his short off that many times – he can perhaps be excused for concluding it’s lumpier that he imagined. Not that he’s complaining. Says Julia Roberts, a close friend who is also in Ocean’s 11, “He’s a boy with a dream who became a man living that dream, and isn’t going to bitch about it.” But Matt Damon, another of his Ocean’s 11 co-stars, recalls watching Hard Copy or some such show seven years ago, and at the end of it, along came a segment called “Pitt Stop.” “They said, ‘Today Brad Pitt, like, went and bought a gallon of ice-cream. And a pizza,’ and I remember thinking, What the fuck? Do they do that everyday? Say what this fucking poor guy did? He had nothing to do with it. Brad got caught in this thing where it was way beyond his control. You see a lot of people desperately trying to get press, and you see him desperately trying not to.” Since his marriage to Aniston – which he refers to as “the merger” – the scrutiny has only gotten worse. People, which is to Pitt what Boswell was to Dr. Johnson, logged every detail of the ceremony in its “luminaries in love” spread. He’s become a celebrity nova with his own personal stalker and a wolf pack of “razzis,” as he calls them, snapping at his heels. A Google search turns up almost 320,000 Pitt references. (Tom Hanks, by way of comparison, notches only 184,000.) Pitt’s celebrity has a kind of purity to it, which is a polite way of saying that it has not always been backed up by big numbers at the box office the way you see with Hanks or Tom Cruise, whose presence alone guarantees that virtually anything not directed by Stanley Kubrick will make money. Pitt has never had a hit where he’s had to carry the picture, and when his films have scored he’s had plenty of help, as was the case with Seven (1995, opposite Morgan Freeman and Gwyneth Paltrow), Interview with a Vampire (1994, opposite Cruise), and 12 Monkeys (for which Pitt received a 1995 Oscar nomination for best supporting actor, opposite Bruce Willis). Several of Pitt’s films have even been notorious flops, like the trifecta of Seven Years in Tibet (1997), Meet Joe Black, and the Mexican. Not that he hasn’t made a lot of good movies or turned in a string of fine performances, such as his chillingly convincing serial killer in Kalifornia (1993) or his unsettling portrayal of Edward Norton’s Nietzschean alter ego in Fight Club (1999). But usually a star of Pitt’s wattage starts to flicker if he doesn’t light up the box office. Not in this case. His just-shy-of-Harrison-Ford-size salary seems immune to financial downturns, the way the stock market used to be. Moreover, there are others whose DNA has been similarly blessed who have much less to show for it. So what is the source of his appeal? Soderbergh compares Pitt to Steve McQueen, and that seems right: on top of Pitt’s looks, it’s the McQueen air of not-so-studied negligence that’s so attractive, the what-me-worry nonchalance, the centeredness, the at-homeness in his own skin. “I don’t think he gets credit for being as good as he is,” says Soderbergh. “In terms of movie-star performances, I thought he was as good in Snatch as McQueen ever was. It was a really star performance in the best sense of the word, absolutely riveting and charismatic, funny. If another actor had given that performance who didn’t look like Brad, it would have been talked about much more. I found him in Ocean’s 11 to be a really terrific actor, with really good instincts, a really good sense of timing, and an ease that I don’t think you can fake. "He’s a very secure person,” Soderbergh adds. “He would be exactly the same person whether stardom had happened to him or not. He just is who he is, just one of the coolest people on the planet.” On a sunny afternoon in Los Angeles at the end of August, Pitt is wearing jeans, a faded red long-sleeved T-shirt, and a color-stippled knit cap that comes down over his ears and conceals his signature spiky blond hair. He is tall and lean, and not nearly so pumped up as he was, say, in Fight Club; he has the build more of a rangy tight end than of a middleweight. He also looks tired and needs a shave. He’s been doing pictures back-to-back for months on end, and just two nights ago was in Canada doing reshoots for Spy Game. Yesterday, back in L.A., he was finishing last-minute shots for Ocean’s 11. “I’ve been overextended lately,” he sighs. “I’ve lost that quality of life, as they say.” The man who abducted himself sits chain-smoking Marlboro Lights in his sparsely furnished studio, a workplace he designed and renovated in the Hollywood Hills. The back of his hand is covered with an abstractly enigmatic tattoo left over from Ocean’s 11 (“I have no idea what it’s suppose to be”), and he looks like he’d rather be anywhere but here. He’s a good sport, though, and gropes for an explanation of why he agreed to appear on Jackass: “The thing I love about Jackass is these guys just throw themselves out there and let the videotape run, and what will be, will be. You can get so controlled in this business. Once you get to a certain plateau, you feel like there’s something to protect, or at least that’s the sickness. I’ll tell you what – in the last few years I’ve just kind of given up all control. And it’s such a relief, such a relief.” He pauses. “That’s a lie, actually, I was joking.” He hasn’t really given up control. He can’t afford to. Pitt sees a lot of movies, thinks about them, and has an educated and – given his position at the top of the A-actor heap – surprisingly dark, subversive taste. He’s a big Todd Solondz fan, and is high on Gummo, a little-seen, but highly original, corrosive Polaroid of small-town American life by Harmony Korine, best known as the writer of Kids, and someone from whom we will undoubtedly hear more. Pitt talks about how much he’d like to work with Alexander Payne, who made Election, and Wes Anderson, the director of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. His instincts are right, but the question is: Is it too late? Is he too big, too famous, too much the creation of his fans, who won’t be happy if he doesn’t take off his shirt? Look what happened to The Mexican, which was a low budget indie film until Pitt got hold of it. Aware of the risk, he was reluctant to sign on, because he knew a star of his magnitude might capsize the picture, but when Roberts came on board he thought she could deflect the glare, and he overcame his doubts. During the production, they tried to remain true to the project’s roots. “Our approach to the thing was run and gun, gonzo, raw and loose, stick up a light and go, killing everything precious about making a film,” he explains. He wanted to give it the casual feel of Wes Anderson’s first film, Bottle Rocket. In fact, The Mexican had a lot of promise – a good script, a talented director, and an all-star cast – but that’s often a recipe for trouble. The premise proved to be way too ambitious, a shotgun wedding of Rashomon and one of those never-funny-enough caper films such as Beat the Devil, and the finished film was far too long at 123 minutes. But the coup de grace was delivered by the pairing of Pitt and Roberts, which set up expectations that the film could never satisfy. “My and Julia’s baggage threw it off somehow,” Pitt reflects. “It’s not an indie anymore, it’s not pushed like a small movie. I don’t know how to get around that.” For Pitt, the problem now is that there may be no way to get around it. He recognizes that however much he admires Solondz, for example, his “baggage” may just be too cumbersome for him to ever work with the director. And the same may be true for the other filmmakers on his list. “I know that this image, the world’s definition of Brad Pitt, is just an image, because I just feel like a normal guy,” he says. But to the world he’s still a cover boy for People, the Sexiest Man Alive." Sipping a Starbucks coffee that has materialized out of nowhere, delivered by one of several shadowy assistants who appear and disappear, Pitt continues: “My week consists …five days out of the seven I’ve got at least three cars of paparazzi on me that I’ve got to either lose or whatever.” His voice is soft, barely audible. “The thing with our marriage is that there was an opening in the Hollywood-couple slot, and unfortunately we've fallen into it. Which I don't like very much. I don’t like throwing us in this box. It doesn't leave us room to be human, to make our mistakes and have our struggles, because that will just be another story, a whole new other life for the rags.” The media microscope has become so oppressive, he sometimes feels as if he were under house arrest, a virtual prisoner in his own home. “That’s why we all end up hiding and creating communes or compounds, because it’s work when you go out there in public. You can’t just go to the doctor, sit in a waiting room, and read a magazine. You can’t go to the airport and wait for your flight, because you get mauled. So there are these little shortcuts. Which on one hand are a necessity because there’s such an intensive focus on what you’re trying to create that you cannot go out and get your Mennen Speed Stick or your toothpaste.” “But on the other hand,” he goes on, “it’s just a huge trap. We are treated as special. We get away with things that other people can’t. And you start to believe the lie that you are special, that you’re better than other people. You start demanding that kind of treatment. Most of the time I fight it because I know I’m going to older and it’s going to go away, but at times I succumb to it. I’ve got a couple of friends that might as well be family, and I’ve caught myself just ordering one of them to do something because you get accustomed to people doing things for you…It’s the money and the power, it just crushes everything.” >>>TO THE PART TWO OF BRAD PITT IN "VANITY FAIR">>> or BACK TO THE BRAD PITT 100% PICS SITE