The one movie Brad Pitt never wants to talk about: “I am not going to make the same mistake again”
Brad Pitt has been at the top of his game for decades, starring in some of the most highly rated and culturally impactful movies ever to grace the box office.
Aside from that, he’s also impossibly handsome, has enjoyed romances with some of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelorettes, and has more money than anyone would know what to do with, but there has to be a chink in his armour somewhere.
We could always poke around in some of his worst output to make ourselves feel better. Despite all the glory he’s achieved over the years, Pitt isn’t immune to the odd stinker, and according to Rotten Tomatoes, his worst movie is Cool World, a nightmarish live-action/cartoon hybrid that the star very nearly avoided. In the eyes of Letterboxd, it’s Cutting Class, a comedy-horror that’s so unfunny, it’s scary.
Empire magazine tried to get to the bottom of this same question in 1997, during an interview with Pitt, where they outright asked him what he thought his own worst movie was. Despite the fact that both Cool World and Cutting Class had both come out by this point, he opted for something else, albeit indirectly.
“I have just got myself into a load of trouble over remarks I made about The Devil’s Own,” he said, “I am not going to make the same mistake again. Sorry”.
Released in 1997, The Devil’s Own is an action thriller from legendary director and producer Alan J Pakula, in which Pitt stars as Frank Maguire, a soldier in the Provisional IRA whose trip to the United States to procure weapons brings him into conflict with an Irish-American police officer (Harrison Ford), which, as you can imagine, complicates things just a little bit.
Most people thought the film was just OK, with a majority of reviews including words like ‘passable’ and ‘average’, unless they were talking about Pitt’s Irish accent, which was routinely slaughtered. The most coverage the movie got was when Princess Diana took an underage Prince Harry to see it and apparently used her royal connections to bend cinema rules.
On the other hand, Pitt apparently hated the movie from the moment he saw it, and the “remarks” he is referring to might have come from a conversation he had with Newsweek that was supposed to promote the film. “We had no script,” he said, “Well, we had a great script, but it got tossed for various reasons.
To have to make something up as you go along, Jesus, what pressure! It was ridiculous. It was the most irresponsible bit of filmmaking, if you can even call it that, that I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t believe it.” You can understand why his press team might have been a bit more cautious the next time he gave an interview.
In later years, Pitt would walk back some of these criticisms and admit to liking the movie, but he still wasn’t impressed with the script issues; whether he truly believes this or was being threatened by a particularly aggressive PR manager remains a mystery.
