The role Brad Pitt walked out on and almost landed him in court: “It was a fiasco”
Following the success of David Fincher’s 1999 thriller Fight Club, many fans longed for another on-screen collaboration between Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. Although a sequel to the Chuck Palahniuk adaptation was unlikely due to its stand-alone nature, the two actors almost reunited in the late 2000s for a project that seemed tailor-made for their talents.
The film is 2009’s taut political thriller State of Play, directed by Kevin Macdonald. It was adapted by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray from the celebrated 2003 series of the same name, which starred Jon Simm and David Morrissey. While the original followed a newspaper’s investigation into the death of a political researcher, centring on the relationship between Simm’s prominent journalist, Cal McCaffrey, and his old friend, MP Stephen Collins – the murdered woman’s producer – the movie transposed it for an American audience.
Influenced by 1970s political thrillers such as All the President’s Men, Macdonald’s 2009 adaptation tells the story of a journalist, Cal McAffrey—played by Russell Crowe—who probes into the suspicious death of the assistant and mistress of Ben Affleck’s Congressman, Stephen Collins. The film also stars Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren, Jason Bateman, Robin Wright, and Jeff Daniels. It was a resounding success and is an overlooked title in cinematic political intrigue.
The film could have taken a very different path. Long before it came to fruition, Pitt was set to play McAffrey and Norton as Collins. Pitt was particularly enthusiastic about collaborating with the Scottish director after seeing his 2003 documentary Touching the Void and the 2006 political drama The Last King of Scotland, which depicted the brutal regime of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. At that time, Macdonald was also in discussions with Pitt’s production company, Plan B Entertainment, for a potential future project.
Pitt officially signed on to star in State of Play in August 2007 after a script rewrite by Gilroy was finished. Famous for the great lengths he’d go to to get in character, as typified by living with the travelling community to prepare for Snatch, Pitt then visited the newsroom of The Washington Post in September to immerse himself in the world of investigative reporting. Then, all of a sudden, a week before production was set to commence in November, he left the project.
One of the producers, Eric Fellner, desperately attempted to convince the American star to remain, but he protested the changes that the studio had made to the script since he signed on, with his talent agency CAA maintaining that he never agreed to them. Up against it, Macdonald pushed filming back by a week and undertook an arduous scene-by-scene review of the script with Pitt, but by the end of the process, he told him: “I don’t think we want to make the same film”.
Not long after, Pitt telephoned the auteur and told him he was dropping out. He much preferred a draft Carnahan had written and wanted to delay filming until the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike was resolved, as it was delaying another rewrite. The studio, Universal, wasn’t having it and pressed on.
Initially, the studio wanted to sue Pitt for withdrawing from his ‘pay or play’ contract, and settlement talks soon soured the situation further. However, the actor maintained that he had firm beliefs about what the film should be like, as did Macdonald, and with the ongoing strike, they simply couldn’t find a happy medium. Adding another complexity due to the delay of production, Norton was replaced by Affleck as he had to pull out due to a scheduling conflict with Tim Blake Nelson’s obscure black comedy, Leaves of Grass.
Luckily for everyone involved, Macdonald managed to hook Russell Crowe. Although he was also working on what became Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, after working out scheduling, he was fully involved, enticed by the script and the idea of joining at the last minute, as it took him back to being a young actor, jobbing around.
While everything worked out splendidly in the end, Macdonald maintained that he had no bad feelings towards Pitt. However, his ensuing comments, in which he states Crowe and Affleck were much better suited for the roles, are tinged with a hint of bitterness.
“It’s amicable. I have no bad feelings towards him except that it was at the very last minute and that was tough on me and the studio,” he told The Guardian in 2009. “Actually, it was a fiasco. A week before shooting, I was left with this $2m set of a newspaper room; it was dressed and ready to go. I was thinking it was all going to be knocked down unless I could find another actor.”
