“It was pretty dank”: How Brad Pitt revived one of France’s most iconic recording studios
A run of successful movies through the 1990s and beyond attests to the acting talent of Brad Pitt. Beyond this central vocation, he also pursues a career in production. In 2001, he co-founded Plan B Entertainment with Brad Grey, Kristin Hahn and Jennifer Aniston and has since won several awards for his contributions, including an Academy Award for 12 Years A Slave.
Such success in the acting and production realms leaves very little time for relaxing and unwinding. However, Pitt is an exceedingly driven and restless individual. When he’s not working on movies, he busies himself with personal hobbies, such as guitar dabbling and sculpture. The latter Pitt picked up alongside his close friend Nick Cave in 2017 under the mentorship of Thomas Houseago.
In 2018, while working on the Quentin Tarantino movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Pitt spent a lot of time with his co-star Leonardo DiCaprio. The pair realised a shared passion for pottery and made many an ornate pot in Pitt’s home studio.
Assuming Pitt keeps up appearances in his various hobbies, his life must be jam-packed with to-do lists and social engagements. This agenda reached stratospheric proportions in 2021 when the actor decided to reopen the iconic French recording studio, Studio Miraval. In a joint enterprise with Emmy-winning producer Damien Quintard, Pitt restored the studio, which once offered its services to The Cure, AC/DC, The Cranberries, Muse and Pink Floyd, among others.
The French pianist Jacques Loussier founded Miraval Studios in 1977 in part of his residence, the wine estate Château Miraval in Correns. He began to rent out the studio rooms to recording acts, rapidly building up a reputation for his high-profile clientele. In 1998, Loussier sold the château to businessman Tom Bove, who kept the studio open until the mid-2000s, with Muse’s Black Holes and Revelations being one of its final exports.
In 2011, Bove resold the estate to Brad Pitt and his then-wife Angelina Jolie, who left the studio in a dormant state during their final years of marriage. Following his divorce from Jolie, which was finalised in 2019, Pitt turned his attention back to the château and his lifelong passion for music.
“It was pretty dank in here,” Pitt told Billboard during an exclusive tour of the studios in 2022. “It smelt like the ‘70s or baby the ‘80s, to be fair. It hadn’t been touched since then, so it needed a cuddle.” If a cuddle from Pitt means spending several million dollars on a complete re-decoration job and shiny new mod cons, I wouldn’t mind the actor giving my home a hug.
In the video below, you can see the studio following Pitt’s restoration. The gleaming white interiors give the space a modern aesthetic akin to those seen in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Meanwhile, with Quintard’s guidance, Pitt has kitted the studios out with a cutting-edge console with hybrid analogue and digital capabilities, a Dolby Atmos recording and speaker system and a studio set-up fit for film and television projects.
Over the past couple of years, several artists have visited Miraval Studios to record new material. Most notably, Travis Scott visited to record tracks for his 2023 album Utopia.
