Brad Pitt Interview For The Rousing ‘Moneyball’

Based on a true story, Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, whose unorthodox approach to fielding a team had a major impact on the game, discarding baseball’s conventional wisdom. Forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget, Beane will have to outsmart the richer clubs. The onetime jock teams with Ivy League grad Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) in an unlikely partnership, recruiting bargain players that the scouts call flawed, but all of whom have an ability to get on base, score runs, and win games. It’s more than baseball, it’s a revolution – one that challenges old school traditions and puts Beane in the crosshairs of those who say he’s tearing out the heart and soul of the game. Alongside Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, ‘Moneyball’ stars Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Stephen Bishop, Kathryn Morris, and Chris Pratt. ‘Moneyball’ is released in cinemas September 23rd in the US, and November 4th in the UK. The film is based on Michael Lewis’ book ’Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.’ Check out what Brad Pitt had to say about the film below.

What is your own background with Baseball? And now with having played Billy Beane, do you find yourself paying more attention to the Oakland A’s?

Brad Pitt: Yes I do actually (laughs). My relationship with baseball was cantankerous at best. I had a crap arm, I thought I could hit until these guys laughed at the way I was swinging. It ended with eighteen stitches under the eye from a pop fly during high noon. So it was not my gift, let me just say, not my gift (laughs). The Oakland A’s were really gracious to us, letting us in, opening doors for us. Mainly we just had laughs, understanding the camaraderie that happens behind the game, it was really something nice to see and be apart of.

The film is extremely probing, these men questioning the general consensus.

Brad Pitt: Definitely. I thought ‘Moneyball’ was a contemporary story, one of our time. I thought there were bigger universal themes that went far beyond the playing field – which is what I was most interested in. In some ways the film still holds the romance of the sport, and then on the other hand it’s anti-conventional – compared to previous baseball films. What these guys did I have great respect for, I had never looked at baseball, or sports, from a stand point as a fan in terms of economics, in terms that it’s not a level playing field. My feeling is that the best team wins, but these guys had to start asking new questions, they had to attack conventional wisdom, in doing so that’s a tough wall to get over. But they had to by necessity in order to survive, they knew they couldn’t fight the other guys fight, they couldn’t compete in that way. I think that takes incredible realism, incredible smarts to figure your way out of that box. I have great respect for that, I have great respect for what Billy Beane and these guys achieved, it changed the way we look at things. I think that’s one of the big points of the story.

Were these themes what interested you….

Brad Pitt: Yeah, I really got taken by Michael Lewis’ book, I saw an unconventional story, yet again of our time, something that connected. I saw something in Billy that related to the characters I loved for 70’s films – these guys who were in pursuit of something, they would not let it go at any cost. They were the same animal at the start of the film as they were at the end of the film, but the world around them changed, shifted a degree or two. I was taken by this idea of value, how we place value, what is success, what is failure? With the film ‘Moneyball,’ does it speak, does it say something that is still something to say in ten or twenty years? How do we place value, how do we decide what’s success, what’s failure, how do we take that on ourselves by our own definition? In this story we have an understanding that sometimes failure can be impetuous for the next move, or going at the same thing from a different angle, with a new outlook. Even private successes, I value and respect them more, this movie speaks to that.

I found the computer statistics and conference calls, things of that manner, incredibly entertaining. How hard was that to crack? Normally they’re not seen as the most interesting things.

Brad Pitt: I felt a great fire to achieve that, we all did. What was most difficult was really to get the concepts of what these guys were doing, there was so much information to try to shoe-horn into a scene, we had to try to make it palatable for the audience. Jonah Hill and I wrestled with that until the very end of shooting. It took a lot of shots at it, and a lot of people getting their fingerprints on it, to try to hammer out what it would be.