by As one of Hollywood’s most celebrated actors and producers, Brad Pitt has contended with his status as a sex symbol for nearly four decades. Of course, this title is no dismal state of affairs. Still, when one’s such a devout movie fanatic, it can, as Pitt discovered, become difficult to evade the gossip mags and feature more prominently in broadsheet reviews.
Since the late 1980s, Pitt has delved into a dignified and discerning screen career that few have concurrently rivalled. His filmography includes highlight collaborations with top-flight directors, including David Fincher, Guy Ritchie, Steven Soderbergh, Steve McQueen, Adam McKay, Ridley Scott and Quentin Tarantino.
As a master of his craft, Pitt has developed his own acting methods over the years. Although he’s not a method actor per se, his physical approach saw him climb mountains before shooting Seven Years in Tibet, learn to box for Fight Club and sword fight for Troy.
In a 2019 interview with PBS, Pitt revealed how he keeps his character fresh and manages to store lines in his head for each project. The host asked the Ad Astra actor whether, looking back on his career, there were any lines that stuck with him. “Could be funny; could be important… anything,” he probed.
“Oh my god,” Pitt began, racking his brains. “I’m so bad at that. I kind of like delete the files when I finish the film, and it just reboots for the next one.”
“People still come up to me and yell, ‘What’s in the box?” he laughed, recalling the iconic and intense closing scene from David Fincher’s 1995 psychological thriller, Se7en.
Returning to his thoughts, Pitt found it difficult to pinpoint a singular line that has stuck with him. Instead, one line seems to linger from each passing movie on which he centred his characters.
“I don’t have any one that means anything to me, but I think of the poetry in [The Assassination of] Jesse James [by the Coward Robert Ford]. There was a line, it said, ‘Look at my mean hands and my red face, and I wonder about that man that went so wrong.’ I just thought it was beautiful, so I always hear that.”
“It’s funny, with each film, I have one line from the script that I hold on to throughout the film because I hear the character in the one line,” Pitt explained.
“It helps me hear the character,” he added, revealing that he thinks about this one pivotal line every day. “I reset the day,” Pitt said. “That line keeps me from drifting out of gear into some other character.”
Watch the trailer for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford below. Brad Pitt once named the movie as a personal favourite from his filmography.
