“It was driving me crazy”: The three movies Brad Pitt hated making
The more successful any star becomes, the more leeway they have to choose projects based more on personal investment and attachment than any attempts to solidify their reputation or hit the biggest at the box office, although the three films Brad Pitt didn’t enjoy shooting were all hits at the end of the day.
For the last 30 years, he’s been a fixture of the Hollywood A-list and one of the most famous faces on the planet, all while making it clear he’s a character actor cursed with the unfairly chiselled and agelessly handsome looks of a matinee idol. It’s a tough line of work, but he’s made the best of it.
With two Academy Awards to his name – one for producing and the other for acting – Pitt is a well-established powerhouse on either side of the camera, but to get to that position, he found himself in more than a couple of situations where he was forced to suck it up and soldier on despite his disinterest in what he was doing.
Lavish gothic fantasy Interview with the Vampire earned almost $225million at the global box office, but as tends to be the case whenever two megastars are sharing the screen, a lot of the focus was placed on the simmering tension between Pitt and Tom Cruise. They’ve always had very different approaches to celebrity, but matters weren’t helped by the fact the former wasn’t enjoying himself in the slightest.
“I hated doing this movie. Hated it,” he admitted at the time of its release. “Loved watching it. Completely hated doing it.” Pitt additionally referred to “spending six months in the fucking dark” as a contributing factor to his misery, but it’s more than a touch ironic the next detestable production of his career came when he partnered up with another A-list mainstay.
He tried to extricate himself from his contract on Harrison Ford’s thriller The Devil’s Own, which he described as “the most irresponsible bit of filmmaking that I’ve ever seen”. Beset by issues behind the scenes, the end product was “the complete victim of this drowning studio head”, according to Pitt, who intimated that the only reason he didn’t quit was so that they didn’t end up getting sued.
Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy was the only blockbuster historical epic of the post-Gladiator boom that managed to out-earn Ridley Scott’s Oscar winner at the box office, but Pitt wasn’t best pleased with putting so much time and effort into his physique and performance to find himself reduced to little more than oiled-up eye candy.
Admitting to The New York Times how he was “disappointed” with the film and “it was driving me crazy” to power through against his better judgement, he “realised that the way that movie was being told was not how I wanted it to be”. He envisioned an old-school epic ripped right from the ‘Golden Age’, but it ended up becoming “a commercial kind of thing”.
Pitt was so dissatisfied he made a point of altering his strategy so that he was “only going to invest in quality stories, for lack of a better term.” From that point on, high-paying roles in glossy studio pictures were no longer on the agenda, and he was all the better for it.