Brad Pitt reveals the greatest movie he didn’t make: “This defining film I never got to do”
Even if you have no particular insight into the thinking behind Brad Pitt’s career, it’s obvious there was some kind of shift in the mid-2000s. Pitt’s choices post-2005 are notably different than some of the ones he was making before then. He began replacing films like Mr & Mrs Smith, Spy Game, and Meet Joe Black with projects like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Babel, and Moneyball, and it wasn’t by accident.
In fact, Pitt revealed he made a conscious decision to change his process after missing out on a movie he felt could have been defining just to facilitate a blockbuster he never wanted to make in the first place.
In 2004, Pitt tried his hand at a swords and sandals epic with Troy, and even though the film was a huge box-office success, he was left cold by it. To begin with, he was never passionate about the film. In fact, he only signed up for it because Warner Brothers had him over a barrel when he pulled out of another one of its films. In 2019, Pitt told The New York Times that he was uncomfortable throughout Troy with portraying the virtuous hero who was always front and centre of every shot. He said, “I could not get out of the middle of the frame. It was driving me crazy.”
Overall, Pitt felt he’d been spoiled by working on edgy, dangerous films with David Fincher, and a straight-down-the-line action hero role was a bad fit. He admitted, “It wasn’t painful, but I realised that the way that movie was being told was not how I wanted it to be. I made my own mistakes in it.”
Something else ate away at Pitt on the Troy set, too: he’d been railroaded into doing the film against his better judgment. He revealed, “Another interesting opportunity arose, and instead, I was talked into, ‘No, you need to be doing this other thing. You can get to your art project later.'” The frustrated star added, “When you’re trying to figure things out in your career, you get a lot of advice. People are telling you that you should be doing this, and other people are saying you should be doing that.”
On top of being pulled in different directions by the forces of art and commerce, Pitt also saw one of his dream movies go down in flames in this period. He lamented, “There was this defining film I never got to do, a Coen brothers film called To the White Sea. We had an opportunity to go, and then it was shut down.”
In truth, it’s no wonder Pitt was sad that this one got away. It was due to shoot in 2002, but budgetary concerns and nervousness over the film’s bleak material robbed the world of a potential Coen classic. Based on a classic James Dickey novel, To the White Sea would have seen Pitt star as an American B-29 gunner named Muldrow who parachutes behind enemy lines in Tokyo during the Second World War. The story would have followed his ruthless attempts to escape the city, all while flashing back to his childhood with the father who trained him to be a killer.
The double whammy of To the White Sea falling through and Pitt finding himself in a blockbuster he didn’t care about ended up having a lasting effect on him, as he resolved never again to work on something he wasn’t passionate about. He said, “That really made me think, I’m following my gut from here on out,” and added, “I made a decision that I was only going to invest in quality stories, for lack of a better term. It was a distinct shift that led to the next decade of films.”
There was a happy ending to the story, though, in that Pitt did eventually get to work with the Coens. Amusingly, though, it came in 2009’s wacky Burn After Reading, which couldn’t sound more different than To the White Sea. The directors also potentially got to make their nihilistic, harsh film, after all – 2007’s No Country For Old Men, which landed them ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ Academy Awards.
