The movie Brad Pitt hated by the time he finished making it: “20 pages of dogshit”
Not just a commercial darling but a critical one, too, Hollywood hunk Brad Pitt is widely considered to be one of the most iconic movie stars of all time. While his personal life has become a bone of contention, Pitt’s position as one of the most impactful actors in modern memory is undeniable. Cited by Quentin Tarantino as the “last great movie star”, Pitt’s undoubtedly up on the Mount Rushmore of modern movies.
Often avoiding the allure of blockbuster filmmaking, Pitt has teamed up with some of the finest filmmakers of contemporary cinema, finding great success with the likes of Steven Soderbergh, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Terrence Malick, Spike Jonze, David Fincher, Terry Gilliam and Adam McKay.
Although he enjoyed an early career on the small screen and in a variety of independent film roles, featuring in The Dark Side of the Sun and Cutting Class in the late 1980s, true success wouldn’t come for the young actor until 1991 when he worked with Ridley Scott on the feminist masterpiece, Thelma & Louise. Taking a great deal of the headlines for the Oscar-winning movie, thanks to his stunning appearance as the heartthrob JD, Pitt steadily rose in prominence throughout the remainder of the 1990s.
Quentin Tarantino and Tony Scott would be the next to give the actor a leg-up, hiring his services for the 1993 movie True Romance with Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette. 28 years later, Pitt and Tarantino would once again join forces for arguably the director’s greatest ever feature film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a role which would finally earn the actor an Academy Award for his contributions to acting.
Having a completely immaculate career is the stuff of legend. Very few performers have managed to create a resume without a single blemish. Like any actor, however, Pitt’s career has been spiked with moments of great success and quagmires of inconsistency, and the American icon is critical of one film in particular.
According to a copy of New York magazine from 1997, Pitt bitterly recalled his time in the 1997 movie The Devil’s Own, co-starring Harrison Ford and Natascha McElhone. Enraged at his time on the set of the film, he states that the movie was “the most irresponsible bit of filmmaking, if you can even call it that, that I’ve ever seen”.
The cop-drama follows a police officer who uncovers the real identity of his house guest Rory (Pitt), with the young man being an IRA terrorist in hiding. Fuming at how the movie played out, the actor told the publication, “We had a great script, but it got tossed”. The truth is, while Pitt would certainly have been interested in pushing himself artistically, the chance to create a whole movie on the fly was enough to leave him wildly disheartened: “I couldn’t believe it. We had 20 pages of dogshit. To have to make something up as you go along-Jesus, what pressure! I don’t know why anyone would want to continue making that movie”.
A quick PR job forced Pitt to retract some of his statements, but by then, the damage had already been done, and the world became aware of the production nightmare that was the 1997 movie. With a script being written during production, the team often had to work day-by-day, almost making things up and they went along as the tension between Ford, Pitt and director Alan J Pakula steadily grew.
Ford and Pitt would leave their on-set issues bubbling for some time. Ford, in a recent conversation with Esquire, disclosed that the Hollywood pair had a “complicated” rift, stating that they had “different ideas” about the movie’s script. “Brad developed the script. Then they offered me the part. I saved my comments about the character and the construction of the thing,” Ford explained.
At the core of their dispute was the film’s dichotomy of good and evil. “Brad had this complicated character, and I wanted a complication on my side so that it wasn’t just a good-and-evil battle,” Ford elaborated. This certainly shows the issues Pitt faced and why, with this notion, he would become one of more nuanced actors in the leading man category.
