How Brad Pitt transformed his career with ‘Seven’: “I just wanted to escape the cheese”
Brad Pitt has built a truly impressive filmography over nearly four decades in the movie business, and he’s accomplished that by being a man of conviction. Pitt has never been scared to turn down a role if he felt it wasn’t right for where he wanted to take his career, and that likely stemmed from him feeling cornered into making a particular kind of movie in his early years that he hated with a passion.
Indeed, Pitt said, “No thanks” to a who’s who of beloved films, all because he wanted to make something else instead. From The Shawshank Redemption to The Fountain, and from Almost Famous to The Departed, these classic scripts crossed Pitt’s desk at some point, only for him to choose Interview with the Vampire, Troy, Snatch, and The Mexican instead.
However, the biggest crossroads in Pitt’s career came in the mid-90s, when he felt a yearning to embrace his darker side on film. The industry had pegged him as a pretty boy romantic lead, thanks to his breakthrough role in Thelma & Louise and the Robert Redford period drama A River Runs Through It. He soon found himself trudging through Ed Zwick’s Legends of the Fall, a schmaltzy period romance, and he hated every minute of it. In fact, he and Zwick clashed so fiercely about Pitt’s character that chairs were thrown in anger, but neither man would back down from their positions.
After that dismal experience, Pitt was given a choice between two movies, and he knew which one he wanted to pick. Instead of agreeing to play Jim Swigert in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 – a role eventually played by Kevin Bacon – Pitt chose David Fincher’s bleak, nihilistic, serial killer thriller Seven.
In truth, it’s difficult to think of a more polar opposite film to Howard’s stirring NASA docudrama, a thrilling ode to heroism and the triumph of the human spirit in the face of a disaster. As for why he made this call, Pitt admitted to the Los Angeles Times, “I just wanted to escape the cheese. I came to find out [Fincher] had a lactose intolerance as well, so I was very happy about it.”
Amusingly, Pitt’s mum would later tell him she “just saw the nicest movie,” which she believed was “the kind of movie I think you should be making” That film was Apollo 13, but to her chagrin, her son replied, “Mum, I turned that down for Seven, and wait until you see the movie.” God only knows what she thought when she finally sat down to watch Fincher’s upsetting opus.
As previously mentioned, though, Pitt is a man of conviction and he wanted to make a movie that felt like the gritty, realistic dramas he grew up loving in the ’70s, and Seven fit that bill perfectly. “I was looking for something with more of a documentary feel, more conversational and urban like The Conversation or The French Connection,” he mused. These were precisely the touchstones Fincher used for Seven, and he and Pitt wound up striking up an extremely fruitful creative partnership. Having said that, he wasn’t sure at first if the pretty-faced Pitt had what it took to inhabit Seven’s grisly, oppressive world.
“I hadn’t originally thought of Brad,” Fincher confessed. “I’d never seen Mills as particularly accomplished, and I was concerned that Brad seemed too together. But when I met him, I thought, this guy is so likeable, he can get away with murder. He can do anything and people will forgive him for it.”
In the end, Seven was just the tonic Pitt needed at the time, as it truly helped him deviate from the mawkish roles Hollywood kept funnelling him toward. He grinned, “It’s always been a fight against the Velveeta, it really has.”
