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GUARDIAN Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:00:04 GMT
Nominated for two Academy Awards, Brad Pitt's eccentric career is finally getting recognition. He talks about his love of obsessive characters, his acting highs and lows – and how he smoked himself into a doughnut
Brad Pitt pops his head through the balcony doorway and stage-whispers my name. He bounds round to shake hands and surveys the cauldron below that is Hollywood Boulevard. No fuss. No fanfare. No harried flunkies with clipboards listing the dos and don'ts. Just one of the most recognisable men on the planet in a black jumpsuit and sneakers. And me. And a bodyguard as tall as a sequoia outside the hotel room. "How ya doing?"
And then the deluge. I had heard of Pitt's lively curiosity, his passion for architecture, philanthropy, his catholic taste in reading material. I didn't know about the delivery system – a lava flow articulated in a deep, rural drawl: "Who lives there next to the hotel? How shall we arrange the chairs? Is that shorthand? You don't see that much. How does it work? Ask me anything."
If Pitt could somehow flit from place to place as easily as he does in conversation, life would be a lot simpler. In fact, mapping a route from point to point is a daily logistical conundrum. "My destinations are determined by parking lots," he says, fresh-faced, neat-goateed. Today, a warm Friday in late January, he has made the tinted-window dash from the nearby Hollywood Hills compound he shares with Angelina Jolie and their six children.
Three days before, Pitt, 48, received the third and fourth Academy Award nominations of his career, earning recognition as producer and star of Moneyball. The movie took six nominations in all, while Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, in which he also stars, went home with three.
"We're so defined by the last success or the last failure that we even start to see ourselves that way," says Pitt. "You've got these awards and there's going to be one winner and four losers, but the four losers made great films. A subtle point of Moneyball is that we're a string of successes and failures. Odds are I won't have another year like this one for a while."
Let's hope the odds preclude another production history as tortuous as that of Moneyball. Based on Michael Lewis's book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, the film recounts how baseball team Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane used unorthodox statistics to allow the struggling club to compete with the best. Steven Soberbergh left the project and it took Pitt, one of three producers, five years to get it up and running again. He is quick to praise Sony Pictures for its faith in the project. Uber-producer Scott Rudin is less circumspect. Pitt, Rudin said in a recent interview, "saved it single-handedly".
Why did he fight for it? "Well," he says, a lazy grin unfolding across his face. "I just worked on it for so damn long. I've been on that end of the experience a couple of times. The main character is a guy who's been devalued by the sport and is playing what he called an unfair game. And they go up against conventional wisdom and get called heretics in the process. At the end of the day this guy who's trying to win games is really trying to find his own values." He laughs. "Come on, man, that's good stuff."
When Pitt met Beane he discovered "a funny fucker, sharp as a knife", who shunned the limelight. "He reminded me of the characters I loved from 70s films. When I started in film I was taught that you had to have a character arc and there had to be an epiphany. As years go by I have found that to be utter bullshit. We don't really change; we evolve in degrees and what I love about these characters from the 70s like Popeye Doyle is they were the same beast at the end of the film as they were at the beginning. I do love obsessive characters. I get off on watching that."
Pitt has been in the business for 20 years now. He moved to Los Angeles from Springfield, Missouri, and paid his dues for a couple of years doing.....
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GUARDIAN Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT
Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen are already huge. Now their younger sister, acclaimed star of new thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene, may just eclipse them
At the age of 10 Elizabeth Olsen put her acting career on hold. Yes, she wanted to be an actor, but no, she didn't want to be a child actor. What kind of 10-year-old makes a sensible decision like that? "Right!" Olsen exclaims, waggling a heavily ringed hand and explaining how her ballet teacher had just banned her from the Christmas show for missing rehearsals to audition for the flicks. "When I think about it, it's ridiculous. I was a little kid. But my dad said: 'All right, Lizzie, write down the pros and cons and make your decision.'" Mr Olsen was big on work ethic – giving his girls the tools to be independent women.
To see how that panned out, consider Olsen's big sisters, twins Mary Kate and Ashley. For non-subscribers of glossies, the Olsens are kid TV stars turned fashion uber-moguls marshalling a $100m empire. Before Sundance last year no one had heard of little sister Elizabeth (Lizzie to her friends), an acting student at New York University. That all changed when her two low budget films – Silent House and Martha Marcy May Marlene – screened back-to-back on day three of the film festival. Afterwards they talked of little else: a-star-is-born, festival It-girl chatter and breathless predictions of awards glory for Martha Marcy.
Should we smell a rat? Or at least the faint whiff of manufactured hype at this rolling out of the other sister? (Or should that be "alt sister"?) No, apparently not. By the time Martha Marcy, an icily clever arthouse thriller, premieres in London, the dust has settled. General consensus: Elizabeth Olsen is the real deal (even if that Oscar nomination proved elusive).
We meet in London the day after Martha Marcy opens to a chorus of praise in America. "A genuine discovery," writes Roger Ebert. And it's true. She's a revelation as Martha, who we meet running away from a hippy-ish grow-your-own commune in rural upstate New York. At first glance the set-up looks harmless if half-arsed – a retreat for guitar-playing waifs in worn Levi's and plaid shirts. But something doesn't add up. Why do the men eat dinner before the women? Why is Martha scrambling terrified through the woods to escape? Isn't that guy in charge just too charismatic for his own good? With nowhere else to go, Martha calls her sister (Sarah Paulson) and moves into her snazzy lakeside home. Flashbacks to life on the farm ratchet up the suspense. We start clocking: this is less Waltons, more Mansons.
In person Olsen is barely recognisable. In the film her face is scrubbed of expression, frighteningly blank. ("I think my face was partially swollen everyday because I had to cry so much.") She's exceedingly pretty, with siren Michelle Pfeiffer blue eyes and luminous skin. Dressed in a slouchy sequinned silver top, skinny black trousers and vertigo-heeled ankle boots, she's a walking advert for the no-fuss glam that's made her sisters their millions.
She finds Martha's life "terrifying". "It's really strange, because when we were filming I felt so close to her, like we were one and the same: that she was so much of me, my thoughts and secrets. And then I saw the movie …" She shakes her head laughing. "I'm such a light person. That is so far away from who I am."
And it's true. Olsen is breezy, articulate and seemingly baggage-free. It's tempting to poke about for a glint of deadly ambition or a poor-me-forgotten-sister-complex. At the very least I expected her to be prickly talking about her family. But no … or at least not any more. What's obvious, though, is that she has taken the most unglamorous route into acting wherever possible. As if to say: OK, so I'll be the serious sister.
Growing up in LA, she saw acting as an unremarkable career option, and after school she moved to New York to study drama. Did she feel the need to distance herself from her sisters? "I felt it.....
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 Tar Extracted from 400 smokes
YOUTUBE
Shows "the process of extracting 7200 mgr tar from 400 cigarettes." The results may or may not surprise you, depending on your tolerance level for the dark heavy viscid substance.
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