BP Gallery Archives • Page 29 of 114 •

New York Times

BP Gallery / BP Press / magazines
December 11, 2019

As the stuntman Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” Brad Pitt laid down a performance of vintage Hollywood dudeness. His character is equally at ease being a human security blanket for his B-list-actor boss, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, as he is subduing murderous Manson family members while tripping on acid. In James Gray’s “Ad Astra,” Pitt used the same tools he wielded so deftly in Tarantino’s film — laconic cool; understated emotion — to build an entirely different version of masculinity. In it, he’s Roy McBride, an astronaut on an interplanetary mission to find his absentee (in multiple senses of the word) father. But McBride’s imperturbability is rooted in repression and hurt, nothing like Booth’s so-it-goes acceptance. “The two characters could be connected,” Pitt says, “in the sense that you have to go through an evolution to get to a place of comfort. You have to go through profound internal hardships.”

Brad Pitt and Adam Sandler Have an Unlikely Movie Bromance

BP Gallery / BP Press / photoshoots
November 12, 2019

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.”

Once Upon an Epic Panel at the New Beverly: Tarantino, DiCaprio, Pitt and Robbie Reunite to Talk ‘Hollywood’

BP Gallery / Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
November 12, 2019

“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.

David Fincher Opens His Personal Fight Club Archive – Exclusive

BP Gallery / Fight Club
November 2, 2019

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.