“Strangely enough”: disco, bell-bottoms, and Brad Pitt’s greatest inspiration
Any fans of Brad Pitt, and lord knows there are enough of them, must be very excited by what he’s been up to the last few years, from slinging it round Formula One circuits in IMAX to duking it out with George Clooney in the badly grammatically titled thriller Wolfs to returning to his Once Upon a Time In Hollywood stuntman in a new movie penned by Quentin Tarantino.
Now, that last movie, which should hit Netflix in August of this year, is causing quite a stir, not just because it’s directed by Seven’s David Fincher and so should, going by history, be brilliant, but also because of the hefty salary that the streaming giant has reportedly shelled out in order to secure Pitt’s services, which is, gulp, $40m.
That’s a chunk of change for sure, twice what they’ll pay Tarantino for writing it and Fincher for directing it, but then that’s the going rate when you want to hire the man who is still, alongside Tom Cruise, the chap you go to when you want an awful lot of people to watch whatever it is you’re making.
He may now be 62 years of age but thanks to 1) his genes and 2) undeniable acting talent, Pitt has managed to stay at the top of the business for some thirty years and that doesn’t look like changing at any point in the near future, with not just the new Fincher movie but also Oceans 14 in the works, which will see him partner up with fellow ‘slightly greying but still undeniably attractive’ male actors like Matt Damon, Clooney and Andy Garcia.
It was back in 1991 that Pitt first grabbed global attention, first as the guy who took his clothes off to wash his jeans in a launderette for Levi’s and then in the Oscar-winning road-trip classic Thelma and Louise, at which point he could have leaned in to the muscular blonde haired bimbo trope but instead made a series of very savvy decisions which laid the path to his becoming the most sought-after actor in the world.
He showed immediate depth and no little confidence the following year by starring alongside one of the greatest of all time in Robert Redford in A River Runs Through It and in the next few years took on roles that would bring him critical and commercial success, including earning a Golden Globe nod for 1995’s Legends of the Fall and an Oscar nomination for Terry Gilliam’s head-spinning 12 Monkeys the year after that.
In terms of inspiration, it seems that Pitt could well have looked to another actor from a previous generation who shrugged off the idea of simply being very pleasant to look at and took several challenging roles, in the form of John Travolta, and especially his breakthrough performance from 1977.
Pitt told Total Film about the movie that influenced him to become an actor, saying, “Strangely enough, I liked Saturday Night Fever. I loved it. But it wasn’t, you know, the bad suits and the dancing, although I can do the hustle [ laughs ]. It was the idea of people… Well, I didn’t know people could live like that. This idea of a different culture. I’d seen only my corner of the world, which was Oklahoma and Missouri.”
Adding: “It occurred to me I’d always thought, ‘I wish I’d grown up in New York or LA because there’s the opportunity to go into films…’ And it just struck me one night that, well, I can just do it. So within a week I’d decided I was going to go to LA. I’d work for a couple of weeks, pocket some cash, load up the car, and go to LA! And that’s the way it went.”
A drama that’s far grittier than people who haven’t seen it would believe due to the amount of famous dancing on display, Saturday Night Fever stars Travolta as a young man who escapes the violent streets of Brooklyn at the weekends by hitting the dancefloors of New York. Backed by an iconic Bee Gees soundtrack, the film was a huge hit around the world and earned Travolta an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Actor’.
