“I apologise,” says Brad Pitt. “I’m bad at this today, aren’t I?” Brad Pitt, movie star extraordinaire, 48-year-old father of six, and the world’s most famous bridegroom-to-be, is sorry. Sorry that he and Andrew Dominik, the director of their latest project, Killing Them Softly, went out and hit the town the night before press interviews for the movie. Pitt sits, immaculate in a three-piece suit the colour of cream cappuccino, nursing a coffee of the same colour and – presumably – a hangover.
Fortunately, as well as alcohol, Pitt still exudes cool out of every pore. He’s also relaxed, happy to fill the allotted time with anecdotes of the evening before – but given the calibre of the film, this would actually be a waste. Killing Them Softly is a nasty, engrossing thriller that Andrew Dominik adapted from a 1974 novel, Cogan’s Trade by George V Higgins. He transported it to 2008, to the global economic meltdown during the shift in power between Bush and Obama.
Pitt plays Cogan, a hitman who tries to do his job with minimum fuss to avoid the pleas and cries of his victims. Ray Liotta and James Gandolfini complete the cast of one of the most watchable mob films since 1995’s Casino, but one that carries the underlying message that the Mafia is the darkest realisation of the American Dream; and it is as subject as anything else to the laws of economics.
This is the second collaboration between Pitt and the New Zealand-born Dominik, after they made the award- winning but commercially underrated The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford in 2007. “Only about 12 people in the world saw that movie,” claims Pitt, but it’s still one of my favourite ever films. We were in the trenches in that film and you bond in a trench, so we wanted to work with each other again.“
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