I’m walking down the corridor of the hotel on the Venice Lido with my head down, surrounded by cluttered papers with a few questions and the day’s memo, when suddenly Brad Pitt appears. The American star comes out of the opposite corridor. He, too, walks quickly, head thrown back while sipping a Coca-Cola. It’s not a meeting, it’s a clash. In front of the lift, to which the two opposite corridors lead, to the legendary second floor of the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido, seat of the Film Festival. It’s legendary because there’s the Sala degli Stucchi that Sergio Leone used in one of the most exciting scenes of Once Upon a Time in America, where Robert De Niro rents the entire restaurant to be alone with the girl he was staying at As a boy, actress Elizabeth McGovern dreamed of loving him in turn, but for her as a teenager it was just a dream as she thought he was just a mugger.
In short, the conflict between Brad Pitt and the writer is inevitable. We fall to the ground, the worst is mine, he’s taller, more athletic, more of everything. And while we’re both lying on the floor in disbelief, his six bodyguards, six wardrobes, start insulting and blaming each other for what happened to their famous client. They were relaxed and thought that nothing could happen in front of the elevator of such a prestigious hotel. The six wardrobes scream and at some point there is almost a fight. The actor and I look at each other and start laughing. He says, let’s take a selfie, but I don’t have my phone with me. So I give him mine, he takes it, lowers himself a bit to get the same height as me and captures that moment, far removed from all reality and all logic of a film festival that up until the 1970s you could face the actors , but today everything is locked down.
When Brad Pitt notices that his pants are stained with Coca-Cola, I explain to him that in an hour I will have a meeting with him and four other journalists from international newspapers about his film Ad Astra. He surprises me, breaks all protocols and says, “Friend, take me to the room, I have to change and in the meantime let’s start talking.” All right. Thanks. The rhythms of a festival are so urgent and brutal that I don’t realize what a gift it is to me. We enter his suite, he takes off his greyish t-shirt (all muscles are there) and pants in front of me, opens the closet, chooses another pair, takes off the hat he is wearing, puts his boots back on , lifts the shutter, opens the minibar, hands me a can of Coke and uncorks another for him, sits down and hands me a hand to do the same, stretches his legs across the table. He says to me: “Ask me what you want.”
She has the same stunning beauty, wearing long sideburns and an unknown number of bracelets, necklaces and rings. I watch it and think, after Angelina Jolie’s divorce and the collapse of the picture of the perfect family, how many were willing to bet Brad Pitt’s fame would rise? An unimaginable complicity arose at one of the usual plastered meetings with the actors, we look like two schoolmates. Of course I ask him about his beginnings. And he: “But I’m a miracle worker.”
What? “As a boy, I left Missouri and rode my motorcycle to Los Angeles. I had $2-300 in my pocket. I didn’t know anyone, I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was going to do. I’m a miracle worker who won the lottery.” Well folks, that’s another article. I call the editor-in-chief and tell him, “Look, this is a big deal.” The day after Corriere’s front-page headline: “Brad Pitt: Miraculously I Won the Lottery.” The biggest surprise should yet to come. The meeting with the actor took place in 2019, Me Too was born two years earlier, in 2017 the New York Times accused the Hollywood ogre Harvey Weinstein, the powerful US film producer, of sexual harassment.
But the awareness wasn’t quite there yet, that from that moment, in terms of respect and women’s rights, from cinema to other fields of work, there was no going back and things were going to change. Brad Pitt, the symbol of the seductive man, then 55 years old, told me that the machismo in and around Hollywood was unbearable. He begged me not to make it a crusade, but to return his thoughts gently. We chose the words together. In the article, Brad Pitt says, “Today they still call me a sex symbol and that bothers me.”
He says it was the right time for him to play the character Roy in Ad Astra, an astronaut: “Because he’s a fragile hero.” I ask him how he’s dealt with his astronaut’s loneliness when he is embarked on the pain of a divorce. He replies, “An actor has to tap into that feeling, he has to be honest, vulnerable, open and not try to be sympathetic or unpopular.” And he returns to the machismo from which he, the irresistible heartthrob of Thelma & Louise, wants to distance light years: “American men are prisoners of certain plans that must be overcome, they are too used to creating barriers and denying pain.” , too bad. In this film, I started with one question: is there a possibility of a better relationship with the people we love and with ourselves?
Directed by an intellectual director like James Gray, this story features archetypes, references, quotes from films and novels, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Moby Dick. “It’s true, I was fascinated by an intimate story set in infinite space. The presumed-dead astronaut’s father was a parent who abandoned him as a child and his absence has left my Roy, who continues to adore him, a… lonely individual unable to express his feelings.” He pauses and grabs my wrist in search of a deeper understanding: “Man, believe me, that has been my biggest challenge as an actor, expressing emotion while I’m alone, in space, with no love life. How many sci-fi movies really touch our souls? “I’m not a Star Wars guy.”
Here we are closer to Solaris. “I agree, but it’s the kind of special effects-dominated film where you’re hanging from wires ten meters off the ground.” But his most adventurous journey was the one he took as a boy on a motorcycle from Missouri to pursue his American dream in Hollywood. “I was born in a windy Midwestern town and wandered among the palm trees of California in search of happiness.” Speech slips on the missing Oscar statuette, he tells me that “every year talented people take it and others don’t take it with equal talent.” Many of my friends won. I’m still happy»; he tells me he’s not a cinephile like Quentin Tarantino, “I used to go to the drive-thru as a young man, now when I watch a movie on TV I turn on a comedy, I can’t handle tragedy, but I am grew up with the great independent cinema of the 70s, in which there is neither good nor bad, but a complex humanity.”
After an hour I am in the planned meeting with the other four foreign colleagues. The film’s publicist has a sheet with the names of the authors. “Valerio, you can go.” Brad Pitt looks at me and winks. My article incredibly unscheduledly ignored all of this, but I did hint at something. It started like this: “Before Brad Pitt is gobbled up by his bodyguards, he finally looks free as an out-of-quota student, with an easygoing, cheeky face, ready to share a Coca-Cola.” That’s how I met among the Stars of the Universe a Hollywood star.