Brad Pitt’s acclaimed film Fury is his third war movie in five years
HE’S done action, romance, drama and sci-fi — but if war is hell, then why does Brad Pitt keep going back for more? Let him explain.
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WAR, as the saying goes, may be hell ... but there’s something about it that keeps luring Brad Pitt back to the battlefront.
More than two decades after his breakout role as the hunky JD in Thelma and Louise, Pitt’s career has spanned drama, comedy, sci-fi, action, thriller and romance. Now he’s made three war movies in the past five years — and it’s little wonder he keeps going back.
First off was Inglourious Basterds, his acclaimed collaboration with master director Quentin Tarantino. Next up was 2013’s World War Z, the zombie thriller that defied negative buzz to become his most successful movie ever. And now comes Fury, the gritty World War II tank drama which topped the US box office last week and has earned Pitt some of the strongest reviews of his career. Wildly different though each of those films may be, Pitt says they are united by what they say about the human condition.
“They’re all very unique stories but there’s something very compelling about films where you’re forced to the brink and dealing with killing and death on a daily basis,” Pitt says. “You learn a lot about human nature when you’re dealing with issues of basic survival and trying to protect people close to you.”
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Pitt and his Fury castmates, including Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena and John Bernthal, heard first-hand of the horrors of war from real WW II veterans. Pitt, playing veteran tank commander Sgt Don “Wardaddy” Collier, and his co-stars were also put through a brutal boot camp — although he’s at pains to point out they were “tourists” compared to what real soldiers are forced to endure.
“We were full-on, up at five in the morning, two hours of PTs, schooling, grunt work, obstacles until late evening, cold rations, sleeping in the rain,” he says. “And somebody’s gotta do point guard, changing on the hour. It was designed to break us down, to get a taste of the little hardships, but then also to build us up when we were at our lowest, morale-wise.”
As half of arguably Hollywood’s most powerful couple with Angelina Jolie and with a combined fortune in the hundreds of millions of dollars, Pitt, who turned 50 last December, certainly doesn’t need money or exposure these days, but he does have deeper reasons for making such films.
“The key for me is to do stories that I find personally interesting and meaningful and which make me feel that I’m going to leave something behind which will make me proud and make my children proud,” Pitt says.
He and Jolie married in August in a private ceremony held on the grounds of their sprawling estate on the French Riviera, Chateau Miraval, in which their six children served as ushers and bridesmaids. The Jolie-Pitt clan includes three adopted children (Maddox, 13, from Cambodia; Pax, 10, from Vietnam; Zahara, nine, Ethiopia) and three biological children (Shiloh, 8, and six-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne).
“I would like to show some of my films to my children which I can point to and say, ‘Your daddy made this!’,” Pitt continues. “I need to throw myself into projects that are personal and have something to say about the world in a lasting way.”
As such, Pitt has become an astute producer, pushing box office hits Moneyball and Kick-Ass through the Hollywood machine alongside movies with a message such as this year’s Best Picture Oscar winner 12 Years a Slave and the upcoming US civil rights drama Selma.
“Being a producer means you can look for stories that are meaningful to you and be part of their evolution from day one until the day the film is finished,” he says. “I’ve spent a lot of my life on a film set and I’ve learnt a lot about how this business works and what kinds of elements enable you to make good films as opposed to bad ones.
“I still enjoy acting but I like spending more time at home with our family and that’s something you can’t always do if you’re spending three or four months away on a film set. As a producer, I get to work out of my home, I get to make the kids their breakfast, drive them to school and be there for dinner.”
Pitt and Jolie both work hard to put family first: as a rule, they try not to be away making movies at the same time. Though their “base camp” is Los Angeles, Pitt says the family leads a nomadic existence and that they particularly love spending time in southern France as they have more privacy there and can move more freely.
The family has developed strategies for dealing with paparazzi: Pitt says he hasn’t seen the lobby of a hotel in years and that his kids think of the ducking and weaving as a “constant adventure”.
“Angie and I do everything we can to carve out some semblance of normalcy for them. It’s not unusual for the kids to be covered in paint. We have mud fights. It’s chaos from morning until the lights go out ... and sometimes after that. I love playing around at night with the older ones or sitting down and reading books with Mad. It’s the most satisfying feeling in the world.”
Right now, Pitt and Jolie are combining business with pleasure for the first time since 2005’s Mr & Mrs Smith. They’re co-stars and co-producers of the By the Sea, currently filming in Malta. The drama also marks Jolie’s third film as director, hot on the heels of Unbroken, which opens in January and was shot earlier this year in Queensland and New South Wales. Unbroken is also partly set in WWII, but Pitt laughs off any notion that it and Fury are somehow in competition.
Looking back over his 50 years, Pitt points to his decision to leave university just weeks before graduating as a pivotal point. Having majored in journalism, he realised he didn’t want to work in that field and relocated from Missouri to Los Angeles with just $300 in his pocket.
“You never forget that moment in your life where you decide to change directions and follow your instincts,” he says. “I was thinking that the life I thought I wanted for myself was all wrong. I didn’t want to look for a job at some newspaper or find something just to pass the time. I knew I had to get out and do something different with my life. I had this idea to go to try acting and see where that would take me.”
As for the milestone birthday itself?
“There’s a sense of liberation to turning 50,” he muses. “You feel freed to focus only on meaningful things because you become much more aware of time. You’ve gone through different stages and cleared away the stuff that slows you down. As a father, I also have a sense of responsibility to my children and wanting to give them a beautiful life. Things are much clearer.”
FURY OPENS TODAY
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