Brad Pitt

Speaker: Chcuk Rolando (Standard American accent)

In terms of his personal life, the last few months haven’t been good for Brad Pitt. His wife, Angelina Jolie, has filed for divorce and the couple are involved in a messy custody battle over their six children. In terms of his professional life, things have been better. He has made the film Allied, which was directed by Robert Zemeckis. It’s set in the Second World War and stars Pitt as a Canadian intelligence officer who is sent on a mission to North Africa. There he meets and falls in love with a French Resistance agent played by Marion Cotillard, but it gets complicated. The screenplay was by Steven Knight, as Brad Pitt explains:

Brad Pitt (Standard American accent)

He actually told me this story years ago. It was loosely based on an event in his family lineage and it sounded like a good story and I wanted to get back into... or try old school kind of romantic thriller, and here we are.

WHO CAN YOU TRUST?

As the film progresses, it emerges that Marion Cotillard’s character could in fact be a double agent:

Brad Pitt

Well, that’s the whole game of the script that Steven wrote. It’s... you’re constantly playing with what’s real, what’s not, your trust, trust in the mission, trust in your love, trust in your instincts, and that’s the chess game we play throughout the film.

CASABLANCA

And Brad Pitt clearly enjoyed working with Robert Zemeckis, a director whose track record includes movies like Back to the Future, Forrest Gump and Cast Away:

Brad Pitt

Bob is one of the greats, one of the all-time greats, and especially for this one because we were trying to – or his vision for it was to shoot it like in the direction of the old classics like Casablanca where they shot most of it on the sound stage, but using all the new technology we have today, so you don’t know if we’re on location or not, a lot of times we’re just sitting in cars with the old screen going behind us.

And Brad Pitt says he also enjoyed working with Marion Cotillard:

Brad Pitt

She’s one of France’s national treasures, she’s an international treasure. She’s... works as hard as anyone that I’ve ever worked with and she’s a great partner ‘cause she had a lot of heavy lifting to do on this film.