Brad Pitt: The Rolling Stone Interview

In person, Pitt is warm and funny, but is also, at least while he's being interviewed, an extremely fidgety guy. He paces. He musses his hair. He tears little pieces of dried apricot into smaller pieces before popping them into his mouth. He rubs his knee so intensely it brings to mind Lennie from Of Mice and Men petting a rabbit. All of this might have to do with the fact that, despite his repeatedly proven talents as an actor, Pitt remains, for a large number of people, a creature primarily of tabloid fascination. Did he cheat on his ex-wife with his current partner? Will they have another biological child? What war-ravaged destination might they visit next? Does the mustache make him look hot or porn-y? (I can only speak to the final question, and the answer is clearly porn-y.) The day before my first interview with Pitt, even The New York Times had figured out a way to put Jolie's picture on the front page: by running a story about how masterfully she manipulates the press.

Our interview takes place over two days, first on the set and then at Pitt's compound in Wannsee, in a nondescript house where some of his security guys live. Pitt says he's been enjoying Berlin. Tarantino stages a weekly movie night, and the other night, Pitt took his oldest son, Maddox, to see The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Maddox loved it. "I have this fantasy of my older days, painting or sculpting or making things," Pitt says. "I have this fantasy of a bike trip to Chile. I have this fantasy of flying into Morocco. But right now, more and more, it's about getting the work done and getting home to family. I have an adventure every morning, getting up."

Benjamin Button is your third film with Fincher. Going back to Fight Club, though, I found a quote where he talks about how you're actually sort of similar to your character, Tyler Durden.
In that I don't bathe?

He didn't mention that specifically. He said, "It's probably a character closer to Brad in real life than most people would be comfortable knowing."
[Pitt laughs]

"There is a childlike sense of anarchy....He is kind of a shit-stirrer and one of those people who is 'Huh? Is that the current thinking? I don't really buy that.'"
Well, that probably comes from growing up in a religious community. I just found it so stifling, my religion. I know it's very comforting for other people.

Did you go to church every Sunday?
Yeah. And it was too much of what you shouldn't be doing instead of what you could be doing. I get enraged when people start telling other people how to live their lives. It drives me mental. This Prop. 8 thing just drives me mental.

Where were you on election night?
Chicago. I went down to Grant Park, because I was doing Oprah the next day. I walked home from the park to the hotel, which was a half-hour walk. And I could walk freely — no one was interested in me at that point. People were weeping and hugging. The sense of elation in the streets — it was great. That was such a turnaround for us. We captured the original definition of America again.

Do you think Fight Club could have been made after September 11th?
No. Certainly not that ending. We debated it then. There's a line we stuck in, about the buildings being evacuated.

Some critics just didn't get that film.
Did you see the DVD that Fincher put out? He put all the negative reviews in the booklet. Some London critic said, "Not only is it anti-capitalistic, but it's anti-society and anti-God." We were like, "We didn't realize it was that good!"

Benjamin Button and Fight Club actually deal with similar themes: having a finite amount of time in life, and what we should do with it. But they come to such radically different conclusions. In Fight Club, the response to mortality is nihilism, anarchy —
[Laughs] That was a Nineties conclusion. Now we have an Aughts conclusion. I actually never thought of what you just said. But it's probably true.

It's just, Benjamin Button feels very positive, but you could easily come away from that story feeling very bleak.
Yeah, I think it's open to . . . it's your choice. I find Benjamin is about those universal things we all share — that 95 percent that makes us all the same, wherever we are in the world. Our loves, our hopes, but also the loss that we all walk around with and hide very well, and the ultimate notion that we're all expendable. To me, it's a counterstatement to this divisive period we've been in, where we focused on the two, three, four, five percent of ways in which we're different.