Brad Pitt and The Tree of Life
'Look! It's Brad Pitt!' … the Tree of Life star in Cannes in May. Photograph: Joel Ryan/AP/Press Association Images
'You hear stories of intense actors who can't shed their character and who don't know who they are for a week or two after. I'm not that guy, man," says Brad Pitt. "My happiest moment is the day they call wrap and I'm free. I'm not looking back." Pitt finished shooting The Tree of Lifethree years ago, but now that Terrence Malick's film is finally with us, he's not just looking back, he's still performing one of the roles that came with the movie: that of the director's earthly representative. Malick is the most notorious recluse in cinema, a man of secretive working methods, absurdly extended absences (20 years elapsed between his second and third movies), and a genuine disdain for any kind of publicity or press engagement. Not even when The Tree of Life won the Palme d'Or at Cannes two months ago was he drawn out of hiding, despite being in Cannes at the time. Thus it falls to the movie world's most photographed man to speak on behalf of its least photographed.
"He's an extremely internal man," says Pitt. "A Rhodes scholar, studied philosophy, has a love of science, a love of nature, a love of God; I have great difficulty just completing a sentence. I don't feel right speaking for him but I have to take a stab at it." Pitt denies Malick is in any way aloof or enigmatic for the sake of appearances, though. "When he started making films in the 1970s, you just made films. Today there are two parts to the job: you get to make something, but it's also become incumbent on us to suddenly sell our movies and that's just not his nature. Terry's more the painter, or even the guy that's plastering the walls or laying the stone. He's just a very humble, sweet man."
In Malick's absence, though, there's a lot to explain with The Tree of Life. To say it expands on Malick's trademark themes is a woeful understatement. The introspective voiceovers, golden sunlight, tangential observations, and unearthly, spiritual pitch of his previous works are all in place, but the movie's most talked-about sequence renders the entire history of the universe, from the formation of galaxies to the evolution of dinosaurs, with heavy use of special effects. For much of the rest of the time, however, the film is a fragmented, impressionistic recollection of growing up in 1950s Texas, as recalled by the grownup Sean Penn in the present day. Pitt plays the conflicted, authoritarian patriarch of the family, Jessica Chastain the gentle, loving, mother. They are archetypal polar opposites between which Penn's character pinballs towards a cryptic ending. As Salon's critic neatly put it: "If the cosmic astronaut God-baby from the end of 2001 came back to Earth and made a movie, this would be it." But where 2001 was detached and clinical, Malick's movie plays like a beguiling, rapturous hallucination, far beyond classical cinema conventions. In terms of movie language, it's as if Malick is speaking in tongues.
"He's like an underwater diver who's waiting for the sea turtle to go by, and then he follows till he's not even near the boat any more," Pitt says of Malick's directing technique. "It was a really freeform, butterfly-net kind of way of catching moments – counterintuitive to the way we do things in Hollywood." Despite having written a hefty script, they didn't really stick to it. Instead, Malick created a few blocks of 1950s neighbourhood and practically set his actors loose on it. Explains Pitt: "On a normal set it's very loud, generators going, over 100 crew members. There was none of that on this. There's one guy with a camera on his back, no lights, and we're free to roam wherever we want to roam." Each day would start with Malick presenting the actors with a few pages of notes he'd written, often Kerouac-style, stream-of-consciousness musings (the child actors were barely told anything), then they would go and see where it took them. "He doesn't want to do what he calls 'hammer and tonging' a scene as its written," says Pitt. "He doesn't want to do more than two takes. And on the second one, he'd often throw in a dog or send in one of the kids, or just do something surprising to change the tenor of a scene. Then he'd laugh and laugh."
That's the other thing. Pitt says Malick is nothing like the ascetic monk he's often imagined to be. The 67-year-old film-maker might have once translated the works of Heidegger, but he'll sit on the porch of an evening, beer in hand. Between takes he'd play ball with the cast in the street. "This guy was an incredible athlete, it turns out," says Pitt. "And he's quite competitive. I never expected it. He's so soft spoken and so sweet and attentive to everyone on set, but get a ball in his hand and man, he's vicious."
At least Pitt had a handle on Malick's unorthodox ways, having grown up in the same part of the world: Malick grew up in Texas and Oklahoma, Pitt in Oklahoma and Missouri. The story is clearly based on Malick's own experiences, which means Pitt was, in effect, playing Malick's father, though it was never articulated to him as such. "I knew where he was coming from," Pitt says. "We talked about home a lot, we both grew up having a love of nature and science. I can't say how personal it was to him but it was personal to me as well, though not with the father figure and the family dynamic."
The father role was originally intended for Heath Ledger; Pitt, who was on hand as producer, stepped in as a replacement after Ledger's death, but he fits the part extremely well. This isn't the charming hero we're used to seeing Pitt play; he's jowly and sulky and racked with a sense of failure, a threatening and disciplinarian family presence. His sons never know if he's going to hug them or hit them – not an easy thing to communicate to the three young non-actors playing them, especially when they're thinking: "Look! It's Brad Pitt!"
"We had an incident the very first day of filming," says Pitt. "We had a scene where I was supposed to be getting on their case, and they're laughing. They weren't taking it seriously because they were having fun, you know, with a movie guy. So I had to take the eldest two off the set and say: 'This is serious. This is what we're here for, and don't come back until you're ready.' After that, they stopped looking at me as the guy they'd seen in movies."
That Pitt's real family were staying close by also presented complications. He and Angelina Jolie take it in turns to look after the family (at that stage four children; Jolie was pregnant with twins) while the other works, and they travel as a unit. But where Pitt and Jolie go, legions of paparazzi follow. For a recluse such as Malick, it's a different world – possibly his definition of hell. "It was terribly, terribly uncomfortable for him," Pitt admits, recalling the time a photographer ambushed them together at a local restaurant. Does he envy Malick's well-maintained privacy? "Sure I do! He gets to just make things. It took me a good decade of hiding in my house and not going outside to even, like, get my arms around this idea of celebrity, where suddenly people are looking for you to pick your nose or get a shot of you kissing some woman. It's a very discombobulating thing. But Angie and I have got it down pretty well. We have to hide behind some walls, but we're good."
On a theological level, Pitt and Malick were also in different worlds. As its title suggests, The Tree of Life is shot through with biblical, or at least spiritual, symbolism. It begins with a quote from the Book of Job and ends with what could be construed as some form of rapture or afterlife, with much musing on nature, grace and God in between. Would Pitt describe his own upbringing as religious? "Are you kidding me? I grew up in the fuckin' buckle of the Bible Belt!" He replies. "Terry and I, we have our areas where we meet and we have our respectful disagreements. He sees God in science and science in God, and I respect that. But this idea of an all-powerful, watching being that's controlling our moves and giving us a chance to say he's the greatest so we get into some eternal heaven – that just doesn't work for me, man. I got a real problem with it. I see the value of religion and what it offers to people as a cushion and I don't want to step on that. On the other hand, I've seen where I grew up how it becomes separatist, and I get quite aggravated and antagonistic. I see religion more as a truck stop on your way to figuring out who you are."
The Tree of Life is probably too unconventional to reach audiences in America's Christian heartland, but it would be interesting to see what they would make of it. They could find little to object to in its tone and content, but it is led by two of the country's most notorious "Hollywood liberals": Pitt and Sean Penn, both of whom seem to be red rags to the Christian right (among other causes, Pitt has campaigned for same-sex marriage, and once declared that he and Jolie would not marry until gay couples were allowed to). Alongside the biblical overtones, The Tree of Life also advances a Darwinist history of creation. The movie could give churchgoers a serious headache. But like Malick, Pitt has no time for critics of the movie – and there are many. It was both booed and applauded at Cannes.
Pitt has moved on. His and Jolie's twins were born straight after the movie had been shot – "I remember because we were thinking up names during the shoot" – then he went on to Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. He's currently shooting the action thriller World War Z. "I like extremes. A little highbrow, a little lowbrow." He talks of wanting to pursue his love of architecture, but his time working with Malick seems to have stayed with him, and not just because he's still operating as the director's media ambassador. It seems to have brought his own beliefs into sharper focus: "Watching the film, and I've seen many cuts, I'm a guy who fights the idea of heaven but what I do respect is that there is a greater power than anything we understand, and for me the film is about that. Perhaps we don't need these religious concoctions to pillow the fear of death. Just the fact that there is an unknown, and something greater, can bring a feeling of peace. That's enough for me."
• The Tree of Life is released on 8 July.
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