The Unbearable Bradness of Being

Me: Do you physically draw stuff up?

Pitt: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm in a frenzy. I want to build cities! I'm quite mad with it.

Me: So what would Bradville be like?

Pitt: It wouldn't be called Bradville. I'll tell you that right now.

Me: I know. What does this fantasy city look like?

Pitt: Seriously? A plethora...listen, I've been drawing for the last decade. Chairs to cities. Most of it's crap — some of it's really good.

Me: Do you show it to people?

Pitt: Not really. Because there'll be a time when I do it. [There are other, connected, half-formulated ambitions. He says that he'd like to have a chair museum "based on the craftsmen and design aesthetics."]

Pitt has an observation he choose to share. "I've noticed," he says, "that if I was ever in a chaotic relationship, I was always into very linear thinking, very proportion-divided-off, very strict, almost like Frank Lloyd Wright, in a sense. In this relationship thing I'm in now, I find myself going more toward the whimsical, this free-flowing, free-form architecture. I respond more to cleanness and a modern perspective. Instead of darkness now I go more light. Light rooms."

Me: So your taste in architecture reflects your spirit at the time?

Pitt: Yeah, absolutely. Because if you look at Frank Lloyd Wright, he had a terrible family life. Chaotic. Horrendous. He couldn't get it together. And out of that, I feel, came this strict perspective where things are very orderly.

Me: If your taste in architecture reflects your emotional state, does the way that you act do, too?

Pitt: Absolutely. One hundred percent. Like the rainbow trout: You pull'em out of water, and if they're out of their element too long, they start losing their rainbow stripes. Same thing.

Me: [A little confused] So what's your equivalent of being out of water?

Pitt: That's doing something other than what you are. [Pause] Right?

Me: Does that mean you become a worse actor when you're personally unhappy?

Pitt: No, it's just a different slant on the world, you know. [Reconsiders this] Me, particularly, I think I become worse. [Dwells a moment longer] I don't go for that whole argument that you have to be miserable to create great art. Listen, I'll put on a Doors record any day on a road trip, but you can't maintain it, that's the problem. Jim Morrison couldn't maintain it.

On this road trip, Pitt and Aniston have been listening to Everlast and Lenny Kravitz and dipping their toes into Corner-shop. Sometimes they turn on the TV. "The other night," Pitt says, "we were flicking channels and we saw Amigos." They have to check into hotels under assumed names. In Portugal, they are the Vegases; Pitt is Ross Vegas. "I love when they call up: 'Something for the Vegases,'" he says. Pitt has also been Abe Froman ("The sausage king of Chicago...a Ferris Bueller reference"), Lance Boyle ("a little disgusting") and Bryce Pilaf ("one of my personal favorites. As in rice pilaf").

Back home in Los Angeles, Pitt has a stalker. She was arrested in his house. You've probably seen her on TV or read interviews with her.

Me: It must be weird to have a stalker who does more interviews than you do.

Pitt: That's the way of the world, you know. That's the way of the world.

Me: It must creep the shit out of you, someone getting into your house and sleeping in your bed.

Pitt: I would think so. But who wants to hear me complain? What's the point? I don't have a say. It doesn't surprise me. It doesn't alarm me, either. It's gross, and it's what I expect.

Before Pitt and Aniston reached Portugal, they visited the great cities of Andalusia in southern Spain. In Granada, the paparazzi found them at the Alhambra, the grand Moorish palace, and they agreed to pose together for five minutes if they were then left alone. "Then they'd fuck off," Pitt says, "and you'd find them in the bushes half an hour later,because they've got to get that pic with us picking our nose or scratching our sweaty crack." The attention was bearable until they reached Seville, where there was such a scrabble of people around them that they had to give up. To avoid further attention, they headed off in a car at four in the morning (this is what money and fame get you: to do a little sightseeing, you have to wake up in the middle of the night). In Portugal, so far, they remain undetected. Early tomorrow, they will take a private plane to Morocco.

These Spanish photos of Pitt and Aniston will soon appear all over the American tabloids, alongside the latest rumors about the couple. They are forever about to be married — never nearly true, Pitt insists. "It's just a weekly barrage," he says. "You know, they have a perception of Jen from the show and they take her character as being man-needy, and so they present her that way, chasing, and that I don't want to get..." — he lets this thought hang -

"...and they create this whole scenario, and then they say we're getting married, and because I did a movie about Tibet and because she's Greek, we're going to have a Tibetan-slash-Greek wedding, and we're going to ride yaks into the sunset."

Me: I'd just assumed that was all true.

Pitt: Yeah. And that I'm hung like a yeti.

Pitt tells me this: "... I used to have this dream where everyone was using my toothbrush, and I'd come in and either someone I didn't know was in the process of using my toothbrush or someone I knew let someone use my toothbrush. And then a couple of years ago I started having a dream that someone used my toothbrush — this is such a, who's that guy, Richard Bach dream — but that ..." — he laughs — "... I had all these other toothbrushes at my disposal and I didn't know I had them. Dissect that one."

The truth is, I am embarrassed to.

Me: Before I jump in, do you have any theories what it's about?

Pitt: Yeah, oh, that one's pretty blatant, isn't it? That was pretty much a fame dream, wasn't it?

Me: [Nervously] I think I'm right in saying that Freud thought, in dream analysis, that things to do with teeth tend to be about sex....

Pitt: Freud was pretty awesome, because he brought it into the mainstream, psychoanalysis, but I think he was off, a lot of his theories....

Me: Yes, but I believe the classic teeth-falling-out dream is supposed to be fear of sexual dysfunction.

Pitt: Really? But again, this is with toothbrushes.

Me: Yes. But...it makes it a very strange dream.

Pitt: [Pauses. I presume he is thinking through the dream. We will be discussing it no more.]All right. I'll take your definition and we'll let it sit there.

Recently, Pitt says, he's been having comedy dreams. Sometimes he laughs in his sleep. Pitt tells me that he is happy. And then, almost as soon as he has told me this, he begins to worry about it. (It doesn't take much to get him worried.) His imagination begins rolling away with itself, scaring him as it goes. "I just saw a dreadful title," he says. " 'Brad Pitt Talks About His Happiness.' Listen, man, it's all up and down. It's all up and down."

I nod vaguely, wondering why he's saying this, but then he says something strange and interesting.

"You're talking to a guy," Pitt begins, "who's always had this kind of congenital sadness. I don't know where it came from. I don't know what it is — the state of the world, the state of yourself. I don't know. I had a very easy childhood, deprived of nothing per se, so, you know..." — and, not knowing, I wait, and he shrugs — "... I mean, turn on the news, man."