How Brad Pitt became Thom Yorke’s biggest career regret: “We really think you should do this”
Brad Pitt’s position as one of the most imposing cultural figures in Hollywood is impossible to deny. The actor has the ability to not only draw a crowd but also shape an audience and define a generation. Bursting up onto the pedestal of iconography in the 1990s after a series of high-profile performances, Pitt is now woven into the tapestry of culture.
Recently, Quentin Tarantino was full of praise for his leading man, Pitt. “I noticed it when we were doing Inglorious Basterds,” the director recalled. “When Brad was in the shot, I didn’t feel like I was looking through the viewfinder of the camera. I felt like I was watching a movie. Just his presence in the four walls of the frame created that impression.”
The Pulp Fiction director named Pitt “one of the last remaining big-screen movie stars,” alongside Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Steve McQueen, which is some acclaim. “He suggests an older-style movie star,” Tarantino continued. “It’s just a different breed of man. And frankly, I don’t think you can describe exactly what that is because it’s like describing starshine,” he concluded.
However, beyond the gloss of stardom that he carries like a prototype of the perfect movie star, there is a depth of emotion that is reflected in his music tastes. “What is so important about Radiohead is that they are the [Franz] Kafka and the [Samuel] Beckett of our generation,” the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood star told Rolling Stone regarding the literary ways of one of his favourite bands. The actor is a devoted fan of the cultural legends of the 1990s, perhaps finding a kinship with the alt-rock group.
Pitt then glowingly added: “Thom Yorke and the rest of Radiohead are precisely that. What comes out in them I don’t think is anything they could actually articulate, but I would certainly say that it’s that which we all know is true somewhere when we’re in our deepest sleep. That is their importance.”
Thus, they were a fitting band to soundtrack a film that follows the weird, obfuscated world of sleep, or lack thereof. When Fight Club was in the works ahead of its ground-breaking 1999 release, Pitt and his co-star Edward Norton urged Yorke to provide the soundtrack. It would be a missed opportunity for the Radiohead man, who would later regret not accepting the chance to work on the mammoth picture.
David Fincher’s 1999 film is a cinematic achievement of the highest order, and the iconic role of Pitt’s Tyler Durden, the schizophrenic alter ego of the narrator, which Edward Norton portrays, has a huge part to play in that. Pitt knew that he was part of something special even though the film wasn’t initially well-received by critics. He said, “I’d had that feeling on Se7en. I had it on True Romance — that feeling when you know it’s right. So I know the feeling now. And it happened on Fight Club.”
“Things sort of come into my office, but they haven’t really got to me,” Yorke told BBC 6 Music about past soundtrack offers. “The one I remember is one from years ago after we’d finished OK Computer and I was completely gaga. They asked me to do Fight Club. They sent me the script and Ed and Brad Pitt wrote to me and said ‘We really think you should do this’. I went ‘Nah, I can’t’. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t have been able to do it then, but every time I see the film I go ‘Oh’,” he regretfully stated.
The star has since gone on to work with Norton on Motherless in Brooklyn recently and graced the silver screen with his singular sounds on films like Suspiria and Children of Men. However, the star passed up on Fight Club because of the pressure that such a project entailed, and we are left wondering what if, as is he.
