Brad Pitt, like many of us, likely won’t look back at 2016 as the finest of years. On a career level, “Moonlight,” which his company Plan B produced, might have won Best Picture, but starring vehicle “Allied” was a rare commercially-aimed box office disappointment for the star. And on a personal level, Pitt split with wife Angelina Jolie amidst a mire of bad publicity that included an FBI investigation (no charges were pressed in the end).
Pitt’s back in a few weeks with David Michod’s Netflix movie “War Machine,” and to mark that, he’s broken his press silence with a long interview with GQ Style. It’s a fascinating piece, rather sad and disarmingly raw, with more than one revelation to it — Pitt credits the music of Frank Ocean with getting him through the break-up, saying “I find this young man so special… I can’t find a bad [song]”, and reveals that he stayed on David Fincher’s floor after splitting with Jolie.
There’s not a ton of discussion of Pitt’s work on the whole, but the intriguing snippet that Pitt lets out is that he has a favorite of his movies. And Pitt, it turns out, has great taste in his own work. The actor’s been in his share of classics — “True Romance,” ‘Seven,” “12 Monkeys,” “Fight Club,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” “The Tree Of Life,” “Moneyball,” “12 Years A Slave” — but he doesn’t name any of them as his favorite. Instead, he goes for the 2001 Gore Verbinski crime comedy “The Mexican.”
Kidding. He picks out the film that we’d probably call his best too. When asked about when acting is still exciting for him, Pitt responds “I would say more in comedic stuff, where you’re taking gambles. I can turn out the hits over and over and I just—my favorite movie is the worst-performing film of anything I’ve done, ‘The Assassination of Jesse James.’ If I believe something is worthy, then I know it will be worthy in time to come.”
We agree: Andrew Dominik’s Western might be the best American movie of the last 10 years (though we’re coming up on the 10th anniversary), and it’s heartening to see Pitt sees that even amidst some stiff competition. Read the whole piece over at GQ Style for more: it’s well worth a look, and “War Machine” hits Netflix on May 26th.