Late last year, just in time—as his bank balance was showing some wear and tear, along with his nerves—he got the gig most actors would kill for: starring opposite Steve Buscemi in the HBO pilotBoardwalk Empire, about bootleggers in Prohibition-era Atlantic City, with a teleplay bySopranos writer Terence Winter and directed by none other than Martin Scorsese. He had to do a reading with Mr. Scorsese at a hotel room in the city. “I was pretty nervous, I’ll be honest. But then when we were working, I was less nervous,” he said. Filming begins June 12, which sped up Mr. Pitt’s plans for his band, Pagoda. For the past month or so, he’s been pretty much living between a Williamsburg recording studio and a nearby production studio, where he’s editing footage he shot of the band. He noted that in roughly 10 years of living in Brooklyn, he’d been able to successfully avoid Williamsburg for the most part, which, he said, feels more like a college campus than New York. (He was surprised to hear that he and his fiancée, the musician and model Jamie Bochert, who has modeled for Dolce & Gabana, Francois Nars and Marc Jacobs, are talked about as something of a Williamsburg power couple.) Onstage, Mr. Pitt is a total chameleon—if it’s a mellow mood, he can be extremely mellow. Last time they did a show in London, he hurled his guitar across the room. About a year ago, Mr. Pitt went to Jordan to do research for a movie project that he wound up not doing—he says it was a “mutual thing.” Nevertheless, in researching the role, Mr. Pitt spent time with American troops and made some visits to the Iraq border. He’s hoping to communicate some of what he saw there in the music video. “In the little bit of time I was in the Middle East, it was 10,000 times worse than I thought it would be,” he said. “I had a pretty intense experience there. I don’t want to talk too much about it. It’s a lot worse than people think. “You’re taking a kid,” he continued, “either a child from the ghetto or a young working-class kid or a kid from Idaho—you know, basically guys who need money, who need some direction, who know how to run machinery or have certain skills, and they put ’em in the middle of a fuckin’ Muslim country and they don’t train ’em, they don’t give em the proper gear, they put ’em in a situation where it’s impossible—there’s nothing to win, there’s nothing there, you’re not fighting anyone. “We have a track on the record, and it’s called ‘War Zone,’ and it’s based on that experience—and I wanted to show some war victims, photos, because I saw this thing that Kid Rock did that was sponsored by the National Guard; it’s like propaganda. And it’s impossible to get photos.” But he met Bill Thomas, a freelance photographer who is lending images to Mr. Pitt’s video. We headed to No More Productions, where Mr. Pitt showed me one of the clips, for the song “Blood Crosses.” “Empty room my oldest friend,” Mr. Pitt’s mouth can be seen singing into a microphone. “Broken toys, old car parks.” A swooping chord progression, and then chorus: “Why am I, I am why, I.” Later over cappuccinos, I asked him about the Steven Meisel photo shoot he did with Ms. Bochert forVogue Italia a few months back. “Oh, that’s for Jamie,” he said. The lids of his puffy eyes seemed to widen with excitement. “That’s my love.” Suddenly, his speech was as light as a dandelion bumping along on a summer breeze. They met at a bar in the East Village five years ago; he was drinking, she was pouring; her first day on the job. They were both just coming out of relationships. They tried to go slow at first, he said, but it was hopeless. They’ve been living together in Bushwick for four years. She cooks. Under the name Frances Wolf, she’s recording an album; she and Mr. Pitt have jammed with Patti Smith, to whom Ms. Bochert bears a certain resemblance. “She’s my fiancée; we’ve been engaged for a long time now,” Mr. Pitt said. “She’s planning the wedding. We’re fighting over the wedding, basically. She wants something really big, I want something really small. “She’s my other half,” he continued. “She’s a musician, right? Wonderful musician. And she pays her bills doing print work, as a model, and, you know, she’s lucky to be able to do that—even though she fuckin’ hates the business, we both hate it. It makes the music industry and the film industry and every industry look like a walk in the park. And when it comes down to it, she’s able to make money and not work in a bar and put it into her music and sustain.” He paused. “A couple years before, maybe I would have been judgmental towards it,” he said. “But in a lot of respects, it helps, it’s a paying gig.”
(Source: observer.com)
