The director Brad Pitt is dying to work with: “I think he’s just damn brilliant”
You don’t get to gross $9billion worldwide and win an Oscar without doing something right. Just ask Brad Pitt. The chiselled superstar has been in some truly monumental movies, from the biggest blockbusters to the most beloved indie flicks. Some of his greatest box office successes include Troy, Mr and Mrs Smith, and World War Z, while his most critically acclaimed work ranges from 12 Years a Slave to Moneyball.
Navigating the length and breadth of the Hollywood ocean has brought Pitt into contact with some of the greatest directors of all time. He’s worked with Quentin Tarantino twice, once on Inglorious Basterds and then again on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. His collaboration with Terry Gilliam, 12 Monkeys, delivered him his first Oscar nomination, which must have been a relief considering how much work he put into it. Ridley Scott, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, Robert Redford, the Coen brothers: his list of famous friends goes on and on and on.
However, there are still filmmakers that Pitt hasn’t worked with, and one of them is pretty big and pretty important to the man himself. Speaking to Travis and Jason Kelce on their podcast New Heights, the screen legend revealed that he was beyond keen to work with Paul Thomas Anderson.
“I’m a huge PTA fan,” he said, using the director’s snazzy nickname. “I think he’s just damn brilliant”.
Anderson, who adopted the ‘Thomas’ middle name to avoid confusion with Paul W S Anderson, began his career at around the same time as his famous admirer. The Dirk Diggler Story, his first short film that would serve as the basis for Boogie Nights, came out in 1988. The same year, Pitt made his first leading appearance in an American-Yugoslav co-production called The Dark Side of the Sun. He’d technically made his big screen debut the year before with a series of background roles, but none of those were credited.
As with many directors, Anderson has a few actors he regularly collaborates with. He made five films with the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, the most out of anyone. Even following Hoffman’s death in 2014, he continued that legacy by casting his son Cooper in his film Licorice Pizza. In second place is John C Reilly, who’s appeared in four PTA joints. He had a role in the filmmaker’s debut feature, Hard Eight, and also played roles in hits such as Magnolia and the aforementioned Boogie Nights.
That being said, Anderson does like to challenge himself by working with a variety of stars. He famously spotted the potential of Adam Sandler and cast him in Punch-Drunk Love, the movie that changed many people’s opinion on the funnyman. For his latest picture, One Battle After Another, he cast Leonardo DiCaprio as a man striving to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Getting Leo to admit he’s old enough to bear offspring is nothing short of a minor miracle, so there is every chance Pitt might get the call one day.
Given the weight that Pitt commands in Hollywood, you’d have to imagine that all it would take is one phone call to Anderson’s secretary to make a team-up happen. With both men still very much at the top of their game, it’s worth keeping an eye on this developing situation.
