The movie that almost broke Brad Pitt: “This one’s going to kill me”
In moviemaking, everyone enters a project with the best intentions. After all, nobody involved in any film wants to make a bad movie. However, with the best will in the world, sometimes things just go bad. Movies are enormous productions with hundreds and thousands of moving parts, and from time to time, mistakes are made, and bad decisions follow. Brad Pitt is painfully aware of this horrible scenario because he was caught up in one of these disastrous productions in the early 2010s.
In fact, the experience was so intolerable that he once admitted that he thought it would kill him to finish the hellish movie – but he felt he had to place an enormous bet on his creative instincts.
By the time Pitt met with Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof in June 2012, he had already shot an entire movie that he, his production company Plan B, and Paramount Pictures weren’t entirely happy with. Between July and November 2011, the film was shot in Malta, Cornwall, South London, Glasgow, and Budapest on a budget of $125million. Once footage was assembled, though, it became clear that the film’s third act didn’t work – but Pitt didn’t want either of the two previous writers to re-work it. Instead, he wanted a fresh set of eyes unburdened by what had come before.
Lindelof cast an eye over everything and concluded that there were two options: either re-write the existing ending – a large-scale battle in Russia – to give it more purpose, stakes, and logic, or scrap the entire thing and write a whole new ending. To Lindelof’s surprise, Pitt and his team wanted to take option two, which would entail extensive reshoots and a substantial increase in the budget. Amazingly, Pitt sold Paramount on the reshoots because he wanted World War Z to be a great film – not simply one that came and went because the filmmakers hadn’t put everything they could into making it work.
Pitt’s artistic impulse was admirable, although it did mean committing himself to more stress and exhaustion on a movie shoot that had been incredibly difficult from day one. Lindelof brought on yet another writer – Drew Goddard – to help him script the new ending, and the reshoots ballooned the budget to $190million. Perhaps worse than this, though, was the fact Pitt had to go back to work with director Marc Forster, a man with whom it was rumoured he’d stopped speaking during the original production.
At this point, the star was at his wit’s end. When his good friend George Clooney visited him in London during the reshoots, he claimed Pitt stabbed a knife into a restaurant table in frustration before drinking a lot of vodka and moaning, “This one’s going to kill me, man.”
However, Clooney admired Pitt’s conviction to continue through the flames as long as it meant coming out with a great movie on the other side. “It was a huge reshoot, and Brad was putting it on his shoulders,” Clooney told Esquire. “He picked it up and put it on his shoulders and took it away from all the people who were screwing it up. Carried it over the finish line. Got it made into a film that was well-reviewed, and made a lot of money. ”
Goddard agreed, telling Creative Scriptwriting, “To me, the big lesson of World War Z was that Paramount, Plan B and Brad Pitt simply said, ‘Let’s take the time to make this movie the best version of the movie before we put it on the screen for audience.’ That doesn’t happen a lot.” He concluded, “I came away from it thinking, ‘Why don’t we do this on more movies?'”
