By Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times –
LOS ANGELES — Like a mid-season coaching hire for a losing ballclub, director Bennett Miller inherited an uphill battle when he was brought in as the director of a shaky project called “Moneyball,” but he had two key players on his side — and both of them were named Brad Pitt.
With its half-dozen Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations, “Moneyball” is now viewed as a quality contender in the Oscar nomination race, but the sports-film-with-a-message was clearly a longshot project back when Miller stepped in following the summer 2009 departure of Steven Soderbergh, who had spent years developing the script.
The difference maker, says Miller, was the persistent presence of star and producer Pitt, who was an MVP on both sides of the camera.
“You work all day with Brad the actor and there’s that energy, and then we’d wrap at the end of the day and maybe half an hour later we’d get together in this little area outside his trailer and he’d be Brad the producer,” Miller said. “We would look at the next day, just go over things and maybe have a glass of wine. Sometimes it would be two or three hours of discussing and planning, and it’s pretty exhausting making a movie, but it became this ritual for us. And then early the next morning, Brad the actor is back, being on set and making things happen in a totally different way.”
And now Pitt may be swinging for the fences on Oscar night in the lead actor category. He seems to be a lock for that nomination, considering those early nods he’s already collected for his “Moneyball” work as Billy Beane, the real-life maverick general manager of the Oakland A’s who fought major league resistance to his reliance on traditionally overlooked stats in team-building. Pitt the producer may also hear his name called out in the best picture category if the upstart film makes that final cut.
“Moneyball” looks like a sports film on paper, but on closer inspection it’s a message movie about fighting an entrenched system that doesn’t recognize or reward the true value of people. That’s what drew Pitt to the project — that and his restless need to “surprise and challenge” himself by seeking out “passion projects and not doing what’s been done before just because it’s available.”
Pitt assembled an unlikely body of work for 2011. Besides “Moneyball,” he starred in Terrence Malick’s impressionistic and challenging “The Tree of Life,” a film made far from the crowd-pleasing gravity felt by most Hollywood releases. Pitt also gave voice to an existentially yearning krill (yes, as in whale food) with buddy Matt Damon in the animated film “Happy Feet 2.”
Rounding out the eclectic list, he spent much of the year running from undead extras while filming “World War Z,” an adaptation of the Max Brooks globe-trotting horror novel and the most expensive zombie movie in the history of Hollywood.
“Like I said, I like mixing it up,” Pitt said with a chuckle during an October interview on the Budapest set of “World War Z.” “You need to make it interesting for yourself to make it interesting for other people.”
In “World War Z,” due in theaters right before next Christmas, Pitt will play a United Nations fact-finder and family man who desperately races around the globe to determine the origins of a zombie pandemic that has toppled civilization in short order. The film is directed by Marc Forster (“Finding Neverland,” “Quantum of Solace”) and is similar in spirit to September’s “Contagion” (from director Soderbergh and starring Damon) with its geopolitical bent and the aspiration to deliver social messages amid the moans and screams.
For Pitt, the big sci-fi thriller also represents his strongest bid to have a big film franchise of his own, which might be viewed as the missing piece of his career jigsaw puzzle. Forster and Paramount Pictures each view “World War Z” as a trilogy that would have the grounded, gun-metal realism of, say, Damon’s Jason Bourne series tethered to the unsettling end-times vibe of AMC’s “The Walking Dead.”
Time will tell if audiences embrace that idea. Pitt knows too well that big popcorn plans don’t always pop; he learned that on “Troy,” the sprawling Bronze Age epic in 2004 that cost $175 million to make but earned anemic reviews and pulled in just $133 million in domestic box office (although it did add $350 million in foreign markets).
