Readers of Cinema notebooks, go your own way: Frédéric Mitterrand has always been wary of the cold intellectualism of a certain French critical school. To pedantic analyses, he prefers fantasy and humor. Bradthe funny essay he devotes to Brad Pitt, both passionate and mocking, thus follows in the wake of Roland Barthes and the Marilyn by Norman Mailer.
It is not because Mitterrand sees in Brad Pitt (whom he only calls “Brad”) a modern mythology, that he puts him on a pedestal. Because this Brad turns out to be mysterious and paradoxical. A curious and ambitious actor, he is also an excellent producer – for twenty years, with his company Plan B, he has financed around forty films (by Scorsese, Terrence Malick, James Gray, Andrew Dominik and many others). But this shrewd man keeps a Missouri redneck side and collects in parallel faults of taste. His sentimental life is also a way of the cross. Because of his chronic depression? In the end, we know very little about him, and Mitterrand sheds light on the man who is perhaps the last true icon made by Hollywood.
L’Express: When did you fall in love with Brad Pitt?
Frederic Mitterrand I found it great from Thelma and Louise, in 1991, where he plays a hitchhiker. We see reappearing James Dean, a whole imaginary of cinema that I really liked. When Brad passes in front of Thelma’s husband and he has this erotic gesture which means that he fucked his wife and that it was very good… It’s one of the images that mark. Brad perfectly embodies the seductive and spineless thug, the bastard, the one we all dream of!
What movie confirmed to you that Brad was not a flash in the pan?
That of Robert Redford, And in the middle flows a river. Brad is a stunning beauty there. He spends his time fighting in slums, he wanted to darken his character even more, but Redford stopped him. It’s a very good film. I love all the fly-fishing passages: it’s rare in contemporary American cinema to have this kind of dreamlike escapades.
When would you date the peak of his aura?
When you read a new Modiano, like friendly ink a few years ago, we sometimes find the magic of his best books. I felt that when I saw Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood by Tarantino. Brad is as handsome there as he was when he started. It’s the Brad we loved. And it’s rare not to be disappointed by someone thirty years later! DiCaprio next door has no interest: he has become fat and ugly, his seduction has faded. But to be honest, I’ve never been sensitive to DiCaprio, even in titanic…
You talk about the beauty of Brad: why does he love destroying himself so much? In The Army of the Twelve Monkeys, fight club, Snap and other movies…
It’s fascinating. Brad is aware of his beauty, he constantly complains about it, he tears it down, then he comes back to it. It must be said that in the first ten years of his career he was always filmed shirtless, he must have been fed up!
You say Brad read Philip Roth in college. Could this Apollo hide an intellectual?
I’m not sure that Brad is very smart, or that he has good taste. He named his daughter Shiloh Nouvel in homage to Jean Nouvel, who isn’t a genius after all… And did you know that Brad practices sculpture, like his old friend Nick Cave? Well they are ugly, his sculptures! He does not have much talent as an artist, nor as an architect. He massacred Miraval all the same, this marvelous 17th century country house which he bought in the Var. There must be some lovely period wrought iron there, alas the photos you can see of the interior are not that great. I like Brad, but he’s very American, anyway…
You take advantage of your book to tackle the Cinema notebooks. What did they do to you?
The Hollywood that made me dream is that of the 1950s and 1960s, that of Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood and Lana Turner, the melodies, the bad color CinemaScope – even if everything was not always in color or in Scope. This cinema was vilified in the Notebooks. I was reading them at the time and I realized that those boring Marxists were wrong: they descended from films that had incredible romantic power, like As long as there will be men. Teen, it made me want to scream!
You don’t save any great critics of this school?
Person. Ah yes, Eric Rohmer, because he was very cultured. And François Truffaut, because he was nice.
And Serge Daney?
Him, I knew him well. We had very pleasant relations: we were chasing the same boy at the Cannes Film Festival, that had brought us closer! On the other hand, his texts fall from my hands. Analyzes of a terrible dryness. It’s certainly very interesting, but it bores me. Daney was a Protestant, a priest – a hypocritical priest. I am not a serious boy for my part, I am not an intellectual. The people of Notebooks consider me to be a smoker – well, now they’re dead… I’m not completely stupid, but I live in fantasy. I’m a good you know, I was reading Cinemonde…
Does Brad also live in the fantasy?
I feel that he is imbued with a similar nostalgia… For example when, via his company Plan B, he produces Blonde hair, the adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ book on Marilyn, the sacrificed star. Or when it turns in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
Or more recently in babylona film about an extinct golden age.
Yes, except that babylon objectively, it failed. It’s extraordinarily staged, the first half hour is thrilling with the huge orgy, but after… In Valentino, Ken Russell’s film, orgies are better! The scene at the snobs where Margot Robbie vomits is appalling. As for the scene with the monsters, it has no interest, it doesn’t mean anything.
What does Brad have more than the other actors of his generation, Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp or Keanu Reeves?
Keanu Reeves is fine, but Brad is more diverse, he can go from Terrence Malick to Tarantino, play a crazy general who goes to Afghanistan (war machine) or a baseball coach (The Strategist). I really like Matt Damon, especially in The Talented Mr Ripley. He too constantly changes his appearance: sometimes handsome, sometimes redneck American. Tom Cruise next to them has a very narrow palette…
Tom Cruise and Brad starred together in Interview with a Vampirewhere the first makes the second a vampire…
I’m sure that, mounted on his heels, Tom Cruise was jealous of Brad. There’s this scene where Cruise bites Brad, it’s like a love scene. Brad hated doing that scene, and the movie in general – even though it did well and was good for him. There are actors Brad didn’t enjoy working with, like Harrison Ford on Close Enemies. I think Brad’s innocent Missouri guy side gets them all in trouble, all of them career-obsessed beasts with terrifying agents and abominable publicists…
You don’t like Tom Cruise, and neither do you like Angelina Jolie…
She is a character… When I was Minister of Culture and she was filming The Tourist in Paris, claiming my duties, I dragged myself from my office to the Place Colette, to present the wishes of a humble French minister to the great American star. We spent an hour together. It happens to be in my book Cannes festival, published in 2007, I imagine that Brad comes to find me at night – like what an old disease! I told Angelina about it and told her I hoped it hadn’t come back to Brad. His reaction really upset me. She replied that Brad didn’t read and that nothing mattered to him, as if he were inconsistent. Jean-Jacques Annaud claims that Angelina is very intelligent, wonderful – I don’t think so. In his movie Seaview, everything is narcissistic and ugly, and Brad is badly filmed, he is ugly as a redneck. Angelina Jolie is not uninteresting, but she is crazy about herself, she is an unsympathetic version of Arielle Dombasle. Poor Brad was bored with Jennifer Aniston, who looks like Doris Day. He wanted to live something else, and his desire for family and children was too strong… His story with Angelina is moving. He desperately believed that this marriage was going to work. But she drove him crazy. She pissed him off so much that he started drinking again and ended up giving Maddox a donut. Here we find his penchant for self-destruction.
American actors Angelina Jolie (l) and Brad Pitt, June 13, 2014 in London
© / afp.com/Carl COURT
Are you referring to his depressive episodes?
Brad is inhabited by despair. It’s not just my idiosyncrasy, I don’t project anything onto him, I’m sure. He sometimes spends a month with his friend David Fincher, sleeping on a tatami without talking to anyone. It’s weird, isn’t it? And you know the Chanel ad where he poses with a goatee and dirty hair? Unbelievable that Chanel accepted that. Brad must have been very bad at that time…
Brad has managed for thirty years to avoid old-fashionedness. Does she catch up with him today?
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood marked the end of something. Brad is going to be 60 and he knows it. Last year he did Bullet Train, which is great fun. But he can’t limit his career to entertainment! It would be the sign that he was abandoning himself for good to despair. I think he’s missing what happened to Burt Lancaster with Visconti at the time of the Cheetah : a great European filmmaker who comes to get him with a great book, and takes him as a hero. Brad could for example turn in an adaptation of a novel of Kundera, a work on the rise and the decline of our culture. Can he? I’m not sure of it. But he often comes to Europe. Perhaps he is looking unconsciously… For me, the ideal would be to put Brad in the hands of Paolo Sorrentino.
It’s crazy when you think about it, that Lancaster shot for Visconti…
Lancaster came from afar, like Brad: originally this boy did trapeze in his underpants in circuses, and one day he finds himself playing the prince of Salina under the camera of Visconti, whose father was a duke… A particular alchemy ! And after CheetahVisconti took it in Violence and Passion, this bad movie where Lancaster plays the role of Mario Praz. We could not pronounce the name of Mario Praz, it was said that it brought bad luck. I had visited his apartment in Rome, a real candy box for fags… But all that takes us away from Brad!
Brad, by Frederic Mitterrand. XO, 326 p., €20.90 (in bookshops on April 13).