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Ray Liotta Enjoyed Getting Beaten Up In ‘Killing Them Softly’
Ray Liotta, 57, has had his share of playing bad guys — even likable ones, as in 1990’s Goodfellas about the life of mobster Henry Hill — but it was a slightly different experience playing the victim, as he does in the upcoming Killing Them Softly, written and directed by Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) and also starring Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini and Sam Shepard about a heist that goes down during a mob-protected poker game.
“Usually I’m the guy running around beating people up and this time it happened to me,” Liotta said when he sat down exclusively with Uinterview to talk about Killing Them Softly. “So it’s different in that sense. I guess I’m just a guy who watches over a card game. Pretty much everyone else are murderers,” he pointed out, including costars Gandolfini and Pitt. “Brad’s a hit man, Gandolfini’s a hit man. The other two, I’m sure if they weren’t beating people up, they were killing people. So in that sense it was different.”
The names associated with Killing Them Softly had a lot to do with Liotta’s decision to sign on to the project. “I’m just working with people who I admire and happy to be in their company. But it was a chance to work with Andrew. I had met him before I’d seen a lot of his work and I dug it. I like the fact that Brad and Dede [Gardner] were the producers of it, and they’re serious about making good movies.”
Brad Pitt: The War on Drugs is ‘Nonsensical, Backwards and Inept’
Brad Pitt threw his considerable celebrity behind the documentary “The House I Live In” on Friday night at the Sundance Sunset cinemas in West Hollywood, making a surprise appearance to introduce Eugene Jarecki’s film, joke about his past drug use and tell the audience that the war on drugs is a costly failure.
“I think it’s safe to say that the drug war is nonsensical,” Pitt told TheWrap in an interview before his appearance.
“It’s a backwards, inept strategy.”
Added Jarecki, “The ‘tough on crime’ strategy failed. We created a war on drugs, which is a trillion dollars spent over 40 years, 45 million arrests, leading to nothing. Drugs are cheaper, purer, more available than ever before, and used by younger and younger people. Who can stand by that?”
A few minutes later, Pitt walked to the front of a half-filled 180-seat theater and introduced himself to a surprised audience by saying, “Hi, everybody. I’m Brad Pitt. And I’m a drug addict.”
He laughed and shook his head. “Actually, my drug days have long passed, but it’s certainly true that I could land in any city and any state and get you anything you wanted. Just give me 24 hours, and I’ll know where to find it.
“And yet we still talk about the drug war as if it’s a success.”
Brad Pitt Says Hollywood $Millions$ ‘Don’t Work Now’
It is by far and away no secret that Hollywood compensation for a certain cadre of stars have been rocketing beyond the stratosphere for some time now, but one A-lister, in the form of Brad Pitt, says that the era of paychecks reaching into the tens of millions for some may be coming to a close. Both he and his partner Angelina Jolie have topped (or nearly so) the scales for their movies in the past decade, with Pitt garnering a cool $25 million per pic. Not bad, but almost a paltry sum when compared to Tom Cruise, for instance, which Forbes listed as commanding a cool $75 million in 2012. But Pitt says he thinks that the conditions for unbelievable sums (at least for the bottom 99.7 per cent) may be heading back down to the mere stratosphere. “Yeah, that thing died,” Pitt said when asked if fellow A-listers can still easily command a $10 or so million per movie, according to BBC. “That arithmetic doesn’t really work right now…that deal’s not flying these days.” Going further on the economics of Hollywood right now, Pitt added, “”It’s a really interesting time. A lot of the studios have been challenged because of the economic downturn as well, so they’ve been betting on bigger, more tent pole kinds of things. At the same time that opens up a vacuum for really interesting new filmmakers to come in.” Pitt debuted Killing Them Softly in Cannes and is a producer on the title that will head to U.S. theaters next month. But not all films will automatically bring out the masses simply because their idols are in them. Nearly two hours of staring at Robert Pattinson sans vampirism failed to bring out the legions of people who otherwise crave to hear any tidbit possible about the latest travails of their obsession’s personal life. Cosmopolis, for instance, has only cashed in at $5.3 million worldwide so far (and only just over $700K in the U.S. – ouch). “You take the roles for the roles,” said Pitt. “And you’ve just got to balance economics like everyone does.”