Interviewer
Hi Brad, welcome. Why did you want to make Moneyball?
Brad Pitt
Several reasons. I first picked up the book by Michael Lewis and was taken with these guys, who, out of necessity had to challenge the conventional wisdom of their industry. I never looked at sports from the economic standpoint. They are a team who deal with the Oakland A’s in 2002 and they are a team who had a payroll of 38 million to platoon a team and they’re playing against teams that have 120 million with another 100 million in reserves. And there is no way to have an equal fight. And so what these guys had to do was re-question baseball. Baseball knowledge. They had to take everything apart and start over again.
Interviewer
Billy Beane really loves winning, hates losing, but he can’t watch the game when his team is playing. I think that’s because there’s so many games in the season and it’s so incremental. But I think he just can’t bear the suspense of it either. Do you relate to that at all?
Brad Pitt
I do relate to that. He describes it as not wanting to make an emotional decision, that when he watches he gets too involved and he wants to be able to understand the process and the outcome of that process and then make it clear level head decision afterwards. And for me, I certainly watched the films during the editing process, certainly on the producer end over and over again, and I can distance myself from the actor up there. I know when something’s working or when it’s not working.
Interviewer
it’s a very dialogue driven film, even though there’s a lot of baseball scenes in it, but your performance, even though you’re basically sitting in a chair talking and making phone calls, your performance is very kinetic. You always seem to be moving, you know, chewing ice, eating, moving your hands, throwing something. Is it challenging to do a kinetic performance in what is basically a managerial position kind of role.
Brad Pitt
You know, Billy’s that way. As soon as the phone rings, he becomes very myopic and laser guided and he himself becomes very intense. And when you approach the scene, I guess you’re coming from the inside and the need to accomplish something and that manifests itself in certain movements and eating and the need to keep clawing till you get the answer you’re looking for.
Interviewer
So Bennett Miller, who directed Moneyball, did a documentary called The Cruise and he directed Capote, the biopic about Truman Capote that Philip Seymour Hoffman starred in. Of course, Hoffman is also in in Moneyball. But did he give you any advice about playing a real person since he’d been through that one time before?
Brad Pitt
No, we talked more about getting the book to the screen. Listen, Bennett Miller was a great asset to this film and the thing that’s usually overlooked is the tone of the film and what you see up on the screen is completely his creation and I just think he’s one of the greats. But the book is very dense. It’s dealing with economics and Saber metrics and not necessarily as you see kind of stuff at the same time there’s this story of underdogs and of value and people getting a chance, who have been overlooked and what is our own idea of success and failure? And he was able to bring these human elements to the front of the story.
Interviewer
Let’s talk about some of your other films. Let’s start with Inglorious Basterds. It’s set during World War 2 and you play Lieutenant Aldo Raine, who’s charged with putting together a team of real killers to kill the Nazis.
You know, Quentin Tarantino explained how he thinks of his dialogue writing as being like poetry or lyrics or rap. He meant that he wants there to be a rhythm to the writing and a rhythm in the way the dialogue is acted, and I was wondering, if you talked to him about that at all, if he talked to you about that and if you find his writing different from most screen writing.
Brad Pitt
Yes, it was evident on the first read, there is a cadence, and I would say a music to his dialogue and what you heard, there is exactly what I heard when I first read the script. It defines itself and you just sing along.
Interviewer
So, let’s move on to Burn After Reading, which is written and directed by the Coen brothers. And you play a kind of goofy personal trainer added gym called Hard Bodies where Frances Mcdormand’s character also works, and she’s been trying to get enough money to have some cosmetic surgery done. And you see an opportunity when you find a computer disk that’s been left behind by one of the customers in the locker room and you think the disk has top secret government information? What you don’t know is that what it really has is the first draft of a memoir by a former CIA analyst. And with that number, you plan to call the agent and blackmail him, and the agent is played by John Malkovich. It’s a really funny film. You seem to really enjoy comedy. Is that fun for you to do?
Brad Pitt
Absolutely, I enjoy it all. I want to keep mixing it up and I find it the next film is always informed by the last film you finished and would crack me up about this one. Here’s a guy who is not interested in anything beyond his own neighborhood, that has no intellectual curiosity for the world at large. And almost trapped in his suburbia lifestyle and quite happy with it and thinks things are going to go a certain way and can’t imagine they would go any other way. And when they do, he’s quite rattled by it.
Interviewer
So when you’re working with the Coen brothers, who do everything together, they write together, they direct together. How do you know who to talk to when you have a question?
Brad Pitt
They are exactly that, they do work together, they got a really lovely thing going and you talk to either one of them and they both confer with each other and they’re not precious about any of it. And you do a couple of takes and move on. One is sitting in the director’s chair and one in the in the producer’s chair, but they’re both in charge and conferring with each other, and it’s a really light kind of family atmosphere. It’s really good fun.
Interviewer
You grew up in Oklahoma and in Missouri, and your family was Southern Baptist evangelical?
Brad Pitt
Yeah, we grew up Southern Baptist and then somewhere in my high school years, my family moved more to towards the charismatic movement.
Interviewer
So, what was your Christian background like, what was the emphasis like in church? How was that reflected in your upbringing?
Brad Pitt
Well, it was Sunday school and do good and Bible study and daily prayer, but it was always something I wrestled with personally. I was very curious about the world even at a young age and I don’t know at what point I became aware that other nations and other cultures didn’t believe the same and they believed in different religions. And my question is why don’t they get to go to heaven then? And the answer was always well everyone gets a chance. Meaning at the word of God as it was described to me then. And it didn’t sit right with me. But at the same time, in times of trouble or discourse, it’s a great comfort. And it wasn’t till I left home that I really came to the conclusion it didn’t make sense to me for many other reasons than that.
Interviewer
You mentioned that there’s a certain amount of comfort that you take when you have religion in your life. Did you give up a certain amount of comfort when you evicted religion from your life?
Brad Pitt
Yeah, it’s very discombobulating for a period, but within time you get comfortable with yourself and acceptance of the unknown that we’re not going to know until that time comes, and that’s enough for me. I wrestle with this a lot even now because I don’t want to step on anyone’s religion. My family’s still very dedicated. At the same time, I take great issue with it, when it starts defining policy or ultimately becomes separatists, and that’s how I see it and it’s been the basis of our main conflicts throughout history.
Interviewer
You described coming from a home where feelings weren’t expressed. Did you have to learn the language of emotion in order to act?
Brad Pitt
I’m not sure I know how to answer that yet. I wouldn’t define this as not knowing how to express it because sometimes what we don’t say is more powerful than what we do say, and I find that in the iconic characters on screen. So, there is still communication and transfers of information.
Interviewer
And you studied journalism in college. What did you expect to become?
Brad Pitt
I wasn’t really sure. I was just investigating it for myself. They have one of the best day schools in the country.
Interviewer
This is where?
Brad Pitt
University of Missouri. And it just came to the time of graduation and all my friends were committing to jobs and I just realized I was not ready for that yet. And it just occurred to me that having always lamented that there wasn’t the possibility or career choice of being in films that I could go to it. And once I struck that little bit of discovery, I packed up my car. I didn’t graduate. I had two weeks left and I moved out to LA.
Interviewer
Why didn’t you finish the two weeks? I mean, two weeks is such a blink of an eye.
Brad Pitt
There’s a great line in. I’m blanking on Spike Jones second film with Chris Cooper.
Interviewer
Yeah, it’s this Susan Orlean adaptation.
Brad Pitt
That’s right. Yeah. Spikes film adaptation and him being into orchids prior he was if I recall right, had a career with fish. And someone asked him why he doesn’t do that anymore and he just says done with fish. And I felt that way. I just felt I was done with it.
Interviewer
You knew your mind.
Brad Pitt
Well I knew where I wanted to go. I had a direction. I always liked those moments of epiphany when you have the next destination.
Interviewer
So you go to LA. You get there. And then what?
Brad Pitt
I get there, like the cliche goes, with my beat up Dotson and I had $275 to my savings and I landed in Burbank. I and I got the paper and I found some extra agencies. And you know, the end of that week I paid my 25 bucks to join up and I was an extra.
Interviewer
In what?
Brad Pitt
It started out in industrial films and commercials, and then you work your way up. I guess the biggest film I had was Less Than Zero.
Interviewer
You were an extra in Less Than Zero?
Brad Pitt
Yeah. And I enjoyed it, man.
Interviewer
That must’ve been really fun.
Brad Pitt
Oh, it was so much fun. I just wanted to be around film and suddenly I was on film, and I was on set and watching how the guys do it.
Interviewer
So, what films do you love that made you want to be in films yourself?
Brad Pitt
I loved Saturday Night Fever when I was a kid. I couldn’t believe people talked that way. It was just whole another culture, I didn’t understand. I snuck into it. It was an R rated film and so it holds a special place. From the films on my playlist today would be Dog Day Afternoon. Cuckoo’s Nest was a huge one with me. When I would say Strange Love always cracks me up and. Apocalypse Now is another favorite.
Interviewer
So, you start getting in films and you get very famous. What was the strangest thing early on about actually not only being successful but being famous?
Brad Pitt
The strangest thing is suddenly being looked at and watched and judged in a way. I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting. You’re putting yourself in that ring, I just didn’t think that far ahead. And I found it very discombobulating. I was very, very uncomfortable with the focus.
Interviewer
So, did that make you want to be in the limelight any more or less?
Brad Pitt
No, I still wanted to crack this film thing I was in, but I was committed. I think one of the lovely things about where I grew up is it’s considered great hubris to talk about yourself, and yet, as we say it now, it’s part of the business. And I find it actually interesting and cathartic in some way. But at that time, I mean in a good ten years, I wrestled with it.
Interviewer
About how much to share about yourself?
Brad Pitt
Yeah, I was very, very protective.
Interviewer
So, you live in a world where money is so weird. I mean, you were able to sell the first pictures of the first child that Angelina Jolie gave birth to for $4.1 million to People magazine. And then you donated the money to charity, put the money to good use. But that’s just, like, so weird to get that amount of money for a photograph.
Brad Pitt
It’s bizarre.
Interviewer
It’s crazy. It’s like values go nuts. I guess what you’re trying to do is like at least try to take the values gone nuts and put the money to good use.
Brad Pitt
Well, that was my feeling. I mean, I know some of these guys who are in that stalkerazzi world and really have to separate them from the paparazzi in our industry. This is another breed. And they have their heroes who got the big scandalous shot, which just promotes more of that. Listen, it’s a very strange thing to be selling photos of something that’s very intimate and personal. And those of which you want to protect. We have to plan an escape every day to get out of the house. Kind of a Mission Impossible with decoys and that’s the life we live in. And that’s the one we asked for. But we knew there was a bounty on our head and a huge bounty. And we would understand the lengths they go to get that shot. So we figured, let’s cut it off from the beginning and instead of that money going to people I do not respect, we would make some good out of it and there’s a nice thing about our situation.
Interviewer
So did it work? Did it had people off at the path? Did it prevent you from being stalked in the way that you feared you would?
Brad Pitt
Yeah, I took that initial. The initial hit, absolutely.
Interviewer
So at least nobody else could claim that they had the first photo.
Brad Pitt
Right. And that’s where the big bounty is.
Interviewer
That’s where the big bucks are. Right. I’m really interested in hearing how the choices people make when they’re living their lives, why they do what they do, how they do what they do. At the same time I don’t really understand why everybody needs to know the intimate details of your personal life or your children’s. And I imagine you don’t really understand that either, but it’s something you probably have to think about a whole lot more than I do. Do you have any answers to that? Like, why do people feel that they need to know or that they’re entitled to know personal details like that?
Brad Pitt
Well, I actually divorced myself of it. I don’t think about it and I enjoy life much more. There’s a positive side to it, but let me put it this way and let’s see if it relates. I know when I had seen people I respected when I was first starting. Just that brush with them meant something to me. Like my day felt special.
Interviewer
Are there actors you felt that way about when you first met them?
Brad Pitt
Absolutely. Again, just being around it and like being on the set of Less Than Zero, I watched Robert Downey junior go by and I thought, yeah, that’s all right.
Interviewer
Let’s talk about Fight Club. So, your character says, how much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? Have you been in fights? I mean, you’ve had to be in fights for movies. What about real life?
Brad Pitt
Not really, not really. Not for a long time, which I am grateful to say.
Interviewer
But even when you were young, did you?
Brad Pitt
Oh, certainly in my younger days and they were always messy and scrappy and somewhat stupid.
Interviewer
So did you and Ed Norton end up hurting each other at all during the making this film.
Brad Pitt
No, I don’t think so we, I mean, we mainly just had a laugh.
Interviewer
So how many people walk up to you and say the first rule of Fight Club is not to talk about Fight Club?
Brad Pitt
No one.
Interviewer
Really, it’s one of those like famous lines, which I think I just got a couple of words wrong in, but nevertheless.
Brad Pitt
Sometimes I’ll get Tyler Durden hahaha, but nothing much more than that.
Interviewer
What do people say when they meet you?
Brad Pitt
I’m just afraid, you know, people are doing things to my soup or, you know, the restaurant or something.
Interviewer
Do you have to worry about that?
Brad Pitt
I try not to.
Interviewer
Well, thank you so much for talking with us.
Brad Pitt
Thank you very much.
