Brad Pitt (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” “Ad Astra”) and Adam Sandler (“Uncut Gems”) sat down for a chat for “Variety Studio: Actors on Actors.”
As has become a tradition for Variety’s Actors on Actors conversations, two superstars realize they have even more in common than celebrity. The careers of Brad Pitt and Adam Sandler ran on parallel tracks after they arrived in Hollywood in the late 1980s, emerging among the last generation of A-list superstars in the ’90s through wildly different genres of film. Sandler made hits of raucous comedies like “Happy Gilmore” and “The Waterboy,” while Pitt burnished a character-actor reputation with turns in “12 Monkeys” and “Fight Club.” This past year, Pitt was as melancholic as he’s ever been in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” while Sandler was characteristically outsized in the New York freakout “Uncut Gems.” And yet, during a lengthy exchange, they keep stumbling over what unites them as artists.
“What I love when we started were cables everywhere, and massive lights,” Pitt tells Sandler, reminiscing about their early days in movies. “You’d be sweating all the time, and big-ass cameras that were super loud. Now it’s getting down to, we’re almost sitting in our own room in the dark. It’s a whole ’nother thing.”
• x001 Variety
• x002 Set 252
• x003 Variety: Actors on Actors
“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is such a rabbit hole of references, themes and moods that 40 minutes is hardly sufficient to scramble down it. But a small audience in a Hollywood theater was happy to have that much time Saturday with the rare reassembling of Quentin Tarantino, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie for a post-screening discussion about the year’s most rewardingly episodic epic. (The chat was also live-streamed to 18 other screens around North America.)
The Q&A had Tarantino holding the home-field advantage as a conversationalist, taking place at his own beloved repertory house, the New Beverly. Invited guild members were on hand along with 50 members of Tarantino’s public, who were recognizable as the ones asleep under coats and blankets before the screening started, some having waited outside much of the night for the early a.m. dispersal of free tickets. They were rewarded with a discussion that packed a lot into those 40 minutes, like the legacy of Luke Perry; the influences on the movie of “Billy Jack,” Travis Bickle, Edd “Kookie” Byrnes and cumulus clouds; and what horrors might have transpired if a smartphone had dared interrupt the director’s 1969 fever dream.
• x006 November 02 – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (special screening) – Los Angeles, CA
It’s been 20 years since David Fincher’s cult classic Fight Club first exploded onto screens. The film, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel of the same name, repelled and excited audiences in equal measure when it was released, changing the optics of how political cinema could or should be – with the first worries of copycat rebels emerging from the gutters. Today, Fight Club boasts a loyal and fervent fanbase still full of praise, discomfort, conspiracy theories and fascination for the iconic relic of modern cinema.
Exclusively for Empire, David Fincher opened his personal photography archives in the 2020 Preview Issue, leafing through his memories on-set, and sharing insights on many of the film’s key ingredients – from the setting of Project Mayhem’s headquarters, to his stellar leading trio of Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter, to the mechanics of successfully shooting Edward Norton’s cheek off. Here’s a sneak preview of the feature, in which Fincher explains why the dynamic of his three stars, as the story’s mismatched trio of lonely and dangerous sociopaths, worked so well – with photos from Fincher’s own collection.
Fight Club archive material courtesy of David Fincher. Black and white photography by Merrick Morton. Special thanks to Ceán Chaffin and Andrea McKee.
• x003 Empire (UK, December 2019)
• x048 Candids 2019
• x014 September 24 – Lunch of Breitling watches – Los Angeles, CA
• x027 August 29 – Ad Astra (photo call) – Venice, Italy
• x002 August 29 – Ad Astra (portrait) – Venice, Italy
• x016 September 12 – Ad Astra (premiere) – Tokyo, Japan
• x007 September 16 – Ad Astra (screening) – Washington DC, WA
• x009 September 18 – Ad Astra (press conference) – Los Angeles, CA
• x047 August 12 – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – Mexico City, Mexico
• x041 August 29 – Ad Astra – Venice, Italy
PS. For all the september news, check the SB Forum please.
Realized I forgot to add this little treat!
Things escalate quickly when Jimmy bumps into Brad Pitt at a restaurant, and they begin to send complimentary food and drinks each other’s way.
• x001 September 19 – Jimmy Fallon
Brad Pitt doesn’t do a lot of commercials. Remember the ill-fated Chanel ad, which some referred to as “the smell of disaster” back in 2012?
With that campaign now but a distant memory, French bank Boursorama and agency Buzzman have got the superstar actor back in front of an ad world camera with one caveat: he doesn’t actually speak in the film. Whether Pitt on mute is for comedic effect or the actor simply playing it safe, we don’t actually know – but the concept makes for a fun piece of ad work with Pitt a pleasure to watch.
At first, you might think there is a problem with your audio, but no, while the rest of the world around him is abuzz, some even asking about the camera following him around, Pitt is completely muted during the one-minute spot.
• x006 Boursorama – Promo 2019
• x019 Photoshoots
• x012 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Stills & Promotional Photoshoots)
• x020 Television (The Today Show, Ellen, Good Morning America & Jimmy Kimmel)
• x010 Magazines (Covers 2019)
• x018 Ad Astra (Behind the Scenes, Promo & Stills)
• x006 September 16 – Space Operations Center at NASA Headquarters – Washington, WA
• x007 September 16 – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
PS. He sure has been busy and with that – keeping me and other BP fansites busy. But I am enjoying these updates. More soon!
Ellen recently welcomed kid reporter Jaden Jefferson to the show, and not only did he impress her with his skills, he awed another guest on the episode… Brad Pitt! The Hollywood icon even requested to sit down with Jaden for a very special interview! – September 20, 2019.
Brad Pitt doesn’t give interviews often, and when he does, they tend to happen in strange and impromptu places. Like this poolhouse, on a property that belongs to neither of us, not too far outside Pasadena. By necessity and inclination, Pitt likes to present a moving target, and so he spends a lot of time passing through spaces like this one, spaces that are convenient to something else he’s doing and that once he leaves, he’ll likely never see again. He’s Brad Pitt, though: With him comes an atmosphere, his own weather, a heightened kind of reality that involves everyone in the vicinity looking directly at him until he’s gone. Despite that—or, maybe at this point, because of it—he’s learned to be comfortable, at ease, just about anywhere. Anyway, picture a room we’re both strangers to. That’s where Brad Pitt and I talk.
• x013 GQ
“Faster alone, further together,” Brad Pitt murmured. Over his left shoulder hung Mars, reddish-brown and heartbreakingly small, while to his right, the much grander Jupiter was lit up like a disco ball.
We were seated opposite each other on the lowest level of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, inhabiting a closed-off exhibition called “Depths of Space,” mulling stoic men. Pitt has played his fair share of them in the movies, including two characters just this year: Cliff Booth, the bemused stunt man who sauntered through the summer hit “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” and Roy McBride, an astronaut shuttled to lonelier, ever more remote outposts of the galaxy in the coming “Ad Astra.”
Movie stars have their specialties, and while Pitt has proved that he can play a motormouth in films like “12 Monkeys” and “Snatch,” he’s at his most alluring when he’s holding something in reserve. It feels like you’re watching a man who says no more than he needs to, which is a major feat for someone who has starred in two films from the notoriously loquacious Quentin Tarantino.
“I grew up with that be-capable, be-strong, don’t-show-weakness thing,” Pitt told me. He was raised in Springfield, Mo., the eldest of three children, his father the owner of a trucking company. Now, at 55, he’s reached a point where he sees his dad in every performance he gives. “In some ways, I’m copying him,” Pitt said. “He had grown up in extreme hardship and poverty, always dead set on giving me a better life than he had — and he did it. But he came from that stoic ilk.”
• x004 New York Times