(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Tue 15 April 2025 21:45, UK
Brad Pitt might exude an air of impossible coolness on-screen, but behind the scenes, he’s been part of some pretty fraught productions. In fact, he’s tried to walk out on several movies over the years, with varying degrees of success. For example, he abandoned the hit film State of Play a week before shooting began due to his frustrations over script changes, leaving the production scrambling to find his replacement. Russell Crowe was brought in to replace him, and audiences were none the wiser.
One film that he didn’t manage to get out of despite his best efforts was 1994’s Legends of the Fall. His relationship with director Ed Zwick was so dysfunctional that they resorted to hurling furniture at each other. The actor had tried to pull the plug on the project but had been convinced to stay on. It was a huge hit, so everyone won in the end, even if it had been a hellish path to get there.
The same was true of the 1997 movie The Devil’s Own, though it had a larger budget, and Pitt was only convinced to stay in the project after he was threatened with a lawsuit. In the film, Harrison Ford plays a police officer who takes in an immigrant construction worker (Pitt) who turns out to be a member of the IRA who is in the US to acquire anti-aircraft missiles.
The first script that Pitt read was extremely dark and cynical. His character was a baddie, through and through, and there was no redemption. Ford’s character was a jaded, ageing cop who probably should have retired many years before. Eventually, however, Hollywood turned on the meat grinder and the story was smoothed out to make both characters noble and idealistic in one way or another. Pitt wasn’t having it. He’d spent five years waiting for the project to get greenlit and go through rewrites, and when he finally saw how different the story had become from the one he signed onto, he was furious.
He approached director Alan J Pakula and said, “This is not the film I wanted to make.” To his credit, Pitt’s major concern was that Northern Ireland was being trivialised and stereotyped in the new script. He wanted to make sure that they represented the culture and the context as faithfully as possible without actually hiring a Northern Irish actor to play his role.
The studio brought in another writer, but Pitt was still unhappy with the result. When he threatened to quit, he was threatened right back, with the studio saying that they’d sue him for a whopping $63million. He agreed to stay, claiming that it was the opportunity to work with Pakula and Ford that sealed the deal for him, not that $63m lawsuit.
Still, Pakula remembered Pitt being uneasy on the first day of shooting. “I heard he still was frightened about the script, and the studio said, ‘You can’t get out,’” the director said. Eventually, Pitt accepted his fate and gave it his all, though the movie earned tepid reviews, and many critics bemoaned the trivialisation of The Troubles.
After at least three explosive experiences on set in the ‘90s, Pitt started his own production company in 2001, Plan B Entertainment. What might have seemed like a vanity project for an actor who didn’t appreciate the collaborative nature of cinema has turned out to be one of the most successful actor-founded enterprises in Hollywood. To date, Plan B has backed three films that went on to win ‘Best Picture’ at the Oscars: The Departed, 12 Years a Slave, and Moonlight.
Related Topics
Subscribe To The Far Out Newsletter