...continued...
He said these days he felt like he was sometimes watching the movies he loved just vanish from the consciousness. “I love a slow, contemplative film—I grew up on the drive-in and whatever movies we could see, and that's where we had three television channels. So I look at youth today, and they absorb so much information and seem to like it more in quick bursts and don't have necessarily the palate to sit two hours for a film. They would rather watch a series for a quick bit, and then they can follow another one if they want to or move on to something else. So I'm very curious. I'm no longer shocked now when I ask a 20-year-old, ‘Have you seen The Godfather?’ And they say no. ‘Have you seen Cuckoo's Nest?’ No. And I wonder if they ever will. So that's where I go, ‘Ooh, is there a future to film? What will survive?’ ”
For years now Pitt has had a go-to analogy when people ask him about fame. (People do this all the time.) He describes it “as being that lone gazelle out on the plain. And the tigers, you know, they're in there. They're in the grass. And you've lost the herd. You're not connected to the herd anymore. And it's that. It is that loss of privacy. And being hunted.”
I've always loved this analogy. The honesty of it, the way that it—in its blunt mix of loneliness and fear and the feeling of being perpetually observed—captures what must be something close to the truth, without being particularly self-pitying or angry. He's lost the herd. It is what it is.
I asked if he felt any kinship with the astronaut he played in Ad Astra: another guy split off from humankind, gone places that can only be rendered to the rest of us by way of fables and metaphors.
“Well, that makes it sound much more noble than it is,” Pitt said.
But it shares that quality of, no one really understands, and you can't reliably bridge the gap.
“Until you see that other gazelle.” DiCaprio, maybe. He doesn't say exactly.
But how many gazelles are there in this world, really? Like, five?
“Yeah. No, it's odd.”
He was shaping up his hair again, running his fingers through it until it framed his face in a deeply familiar way. He looked like…Brad Pitt. There is only one of him.
“But it has its perks too,” he said.
Zach Baron is GQ's senior staff writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2019 issue with the title "Brad Pitt Is Still Searching
Source: https://www.gq.com/story/brad-pitt-cover-profile-october-2019
He said these days he felt like he was sometimes watching the movies he loved just vanish from the consciousness. “I love a slow, contemplative film—I grew up on the drive-in and whatever movies we could see, and that's where we had three television channels. So I look at youth today, and they absorb so much information and seem to like it more in quick bursts and don't have necessarily the palate to sit two hours for a film. They would rather watch a series for a quick bit, and then they can follow another one if they want to or move on to something else. So I'm very curious. I'm no longer shocked now when I ask a 20-year-old, ‘Have you seen The Godfather?’ And they say no. ‘Have you seen Cuckoo's Nest?’ No. And I wonder if they ever will. So that's where I go, ‘Ooh, is there a future to film? What will survive?’ ”
For years now Pitt has had a go-to analogy when people ask him about fame. (People do this all the time.) He describes it “as being that lone gazelle out on the plain. And the tigers, you know, they're in there. They're in the grass. And you've lost the herd. You're not connected to the herd anymore. And it's that. It is that loss of privacy. And being hunted.”
I've always loved this analogy. The honesty of it, the way that it—in its blunt mix of loneliness and fear and the feeling of being perpetually observed—captures what must be something close to the truth, without being particularly self-pitying or angry. He's lost the herd. It is what it is.
I asked if he felt any kinship with the astronaut he played in Ad Astra: another guy split off from humankind, gone places that can only be rendered to the rest of us by way of fables and metaphors.
“Well, that makes it sound much more noble than it is,” Pitt said.
But it shares that quality of, no one really understands, and you can't reliably bridge the gap.
“Until you see that other gazelle.” DiCaprio, maybe. He doesn't say exactly.
But how many gazelles are there in this world, really? Like, five?
“Yeah. No, it's odd.”
He was shaping up his hair again, running his fingers through it until it framed his face in a deeply familiar way. He looked like…Brad Pitt. There is only one of him.
“But it has its perks too,” he said.
Zach Baron is GQ's senior staff writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2019 issue with the title "Brad Pitt Is Still Searching
Source: https://www.gq.com/story/brad-pitt-cover-profile-october-2019
