After appearing at a private screening of his production company’s “Moonlight” on Monday, film star Brad Pitt made his first true public appearance Wednesday at a fan event in Los Angeles for his upcoming movie “Allied.”
In a Facebook video from the Regency Village Theatre in Los Angeles, interviewer Dave Karger asks Pitt, 52, who recently separated from his actress wife Angelina Jolie, if his hands hurt from signing autographs for numerous fans along the red carpet. “No,” the star replies, “It’s really sweet; everyone’s been really kind out here. And it’s really nice to have all the support,” he said, not specifying if he was referring to the film or to himself personally.
Pitt, who in addition to the World War II romantic spy-drama “Allied” has starred in “Fury” (2014) and “Inglourious Basterds” (2009), conceded, “I do seem to end up in a World War II film as of late. I didn’t know much about the espionage world and what it took to get behind enemy lines and to plant your characters there, so that was real interesting.” He said he had had a meeting with the film’s writer, Steven Knight, a few years ago, “and he began to tell me the story before he’d written it and it was based on members of his family. And so cut to so many years later, here we are, so it’s nice to see this thing come full circle.”
He said his co-star Marion Cotillard had called his French accent in the film “not so good,” adding genially, “I had to work at it really, really hard just to get that far.” His favorite locations in director Robert Zemeckis’ war movie, he said, “actually were things we did on set because it was a throwback to the old ’40s films where you used to be in a stationary car and you’d see a rear projection [shot out the back window] and when you were sitting on a sand dune, you don’t know if we’re in a tent or if we’re actually in the Sahara. So that was the most fun to me, to approach this film like the old ’40s films but using the new technology.”
After Jolie filed for divorce on Sept. 19, Pitt canceled a Sept. 28 appearance at the Los Angeles premiere of Terrence Malick’s documentary “Voyage of Life,” for which he narrated one of the film’s two versions.
“Allied” opens Nov. 23.
