The “awful” Brad Pitt performance that broke his director’s heart: “My entire world had collapsed”
Almost every director in Hollywood would kill for the chance to have Brad Pitt play the lead role in their movie, but sometimes, you’d better be careful what you wish for.
As one of the industry’s most in-demand stars and one of its longest-tenured A-listers, Pitt has been able to pick and choose his parts for the better part of the last three decades. Obviously, that hasn’t always been the case, but even before he was a household name, everyone knew he was destined for the top.
The first movie that brought him to mainstream awareness was Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise, and before the Academy Award-winning classic had even been released, the buzz was building. Striking before the iron was even hot, writer and director Tom DiCillo swooped in and cast Pitt as the title character in his 1991 debut, Johnny Suede.
Once Thelma & Louise had turned him into an overnight heartthrob and sex symbol, DiCillo was understandably concerned that he might back out, especially when the actor’s representatives were hinting that the story of a bouffant-haired wannabe rock star may not be in his best interests.
“His agents were at the point where they were saying, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t do Johnny Suede?’ When Thelma & Louise comes out, you’re going to be so big!” the filmmaker recalled to Stephen Lowenstein. “So, I would say this about Brad: once he committed to the film, he committed 100%. He did things I would never have expected in terms of his commitment.”
That makes it sound like a dream collaboration waiting to happen, and DiCillo was operating that mindset until Pitt started acting, and it all went tits up. “The sense of exhilaration was beyond belief,” he said. “Day two: it was literally as if my entire world had collapsed. It was the first scene with Johnny doing dialogue, and it was awful. I suddenly realised that Brad had this whole concept of the character wrong.”
The instruction he’d given his leading man was that Johnny “thinks and behaves like a child,” by which he meant someone who struggled to pay attention to anything for more than a couple of seconds. Unfortunately, “Brad had taken the note the wrong way” and decided to play the part as “infantile, slow, like a baby.” Not that he blamed him, though, with DiCillo accepting responsibility for the mixup.
“I realise now in retrospect that I probably could have been clearer to him, spent more time explaining what I was thinking about to help him,” he offered. “Again, I didn’t find this out until the end of the film.” It was too late by then, with the director left with no choice but to make the best he could of a performance that had been completely misinterpreted from his original intentions.
DiCillo “never expected Johnny to come off as a dimwit, but he does,” he regrettably added. “To me, that’s a critical oversight.” Not that many people found out, since Johnny Suede barely played in theatres and made a paltry $90,000 at the box office, which wouldn’t have been enough to provide a silver lining for the central turn that shattered the filmmaker’s heart.
