Brad Pitt hated making Troy

Brad Pitt tore his actual Achilles tendon making Troy. Before filming even began, he trained for a year. He quit smoking. He lived in Malta, in what he described as a monastic existence. He gave this film everything that he had, but also, he never wanted to make it. You see, Brad Pitt pulled out of another Warner Brothers project and he owed the studio a film. Troy was the debt that he had to pay. And that's the context for everything that's going to follow in this video. A man obligated to be in a film, who then committed to it more completely than almost any other role of his entire career. And when it came out, he was still disappointed in the movie. And that story is more interesting to me than anything in the film itself. The preparation for Troy was extraordinary. Pitt had been assigned to the role. Now, he could have shown up and just played an action hero. But instead, he spent a year transforming. He trained with a personal trainer, nutritionist, a yoga coach, and a martial arts instructor. He quit smoking. And he built a way of moving that was specific to the character. Less like a soldier and more like a dancer. We're really adamant about us learning the fights and doing them ourselves so we could pull the camera back and you could see it unfold. You could see the strategy. You could see that you're going for a kill shot every time. There's nothing superfluous. Troy also filmed across two main locations. The first was Malta, where the ancient streets and grand square of Troy were constructed inside of Fort Ricassoli, a 17th century military compound on the island. That's where the interiors of the city were built. The Trojan horse was assembled and a large portion of the film was shot. Then production packed up and moved to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico for the beach battles and the large scale warfare sequences. Rather than fly in for filming and fly home, Pitt moved to Malta at the start of the shoot and stayed for the duration. And the reason for that is this. Achilles is isolated by his own nature. A man operating on a different plane from everyone around him. Incapable of ordinary human warmth. Existing only in the extremes of glory and grief. And to play that convincingly, you need to actually feel it. That's what Pitt felt by living in Malta by himself. Completely isolated from everyone and everything. Now before Pitt made his move and started training, he had to figure out one thing. Who was going to play Hector? See Achilles only works if Hector works. The duel between them is what the film exists to stage. And Achilles needs someone opposite him, who can make you feel the does. Someone so clearly the moral center of the film that when Achilles defeats him, the audience feels the loss even while rooting for it. Now Pitt had seen Eric Bana in the Australian film Chopper, where he gave a terrifying, deeply specific performance that most people in Hollywood hadn't encountered. But Pitt had. He went to director Wolfgang Peterson and pushed for Bana specifically. Now this instinct that Brad Pitt had was right. Bana brought something to Hector. It's a quiet authority that made every scene he was in feel significant. The film has a lot of spectacle and Bana's Hector is its soul. And Pitt found him. Now by the time production had moved to Mexico for the beach battles, the physical toll on Brad Pitt was building. Months of fighting on sand in the extreme heat. The accumulated wear of training that had started a year before cameras even rolled. And then his Achilles tendon gave out. It's one of the great ironies in cinema history. The man playing Achilles, whose mythological weakness is his steel, was taken out by his own. So production had to stop for several weeks while he recovered. Now when Brad Pitt came back, there was only one sequence left to shoot. And coincidentally it's the most important one. The production had built a massive gate set on the Mexican coast specifically for the Hector and Achilles duel. Then Hurricane Marty hit while Pitt was still recovering. The set was destroyed. The production had to rebuild it from scratch. Cause this scene is not an optional one. Now Pitt and Bana made a decision. No stunt doubles. The entire duel would be performed by the two actors themselves. They shot for six days. And before the first day, they made a bet. $50 for every light accidental hit. And $100 for every hard one. By the time those six days had wrapped, Brad Pitt owed Eric Bana $750. And Bana owed him nothing. By the time we get to the Achilles Hector fight, which to me is something, I think it's one of the great showdowns. And it unfolds slowly and it's almost balletic until of course you almost forget that someone's got to go. Eric Bana, after filming had wrapped, did an interview with Empire Magazine where he said this about filming Troy. He said, Troy could make $50 and I wouldn't regret it. He meant it as a He got to play Hector. He got to do that duel for real against Brad Pitt. Whatever the reviews said, it didn't matter. That film was worth it. Troy made $497 million worldwide. By almost any standard that is a commercial success. But Brad Pitt was not satisfied and has never pretended otherwise. The disappointment was not about the box office. It was about what the film became versus what he had hoped it could be. He sat down with the New York Times years later and he said this. It was really a turn on Troy. I was disappointed in it. I could not get out of the middle of the frame. It was driving me crazy. I'd become spoiled working with David Fincher. But somewhere in it, Troy became a commercial kind of thing. Every shot was like, here's the hero. There was no mystery. Now what came after Troy tells its own story too. Brad Pitt created Plan B, his own production company. And he started backing movies like 12 Years a Slave, Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk. He went to Tarantino, to James Gray, two directors of Something Specific to Say. He described that shift in that same interview. He said, it was about that time that I made a decision and I was only going to invest in quality stories for lack of a better term. It was a distinct shift that led to the next decade of films for me. But then there's Peter O'Toole. You know, Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O'Toole. One of England's great theater and film actors. In the middle of all that disappointment, all that frustration about hero shots, and the commercial machinery grinding away at the film he wanted to make, there was one scene. Pre-empt, coming to Achilles' tent in the dark to beg for his son's body. An aging king on his knees in front of the man who ended his son's life. It was Peter O'Toole and Brad Pitt in a tent while a war sits outside. But Peter O'Toole himself, beyond the legend, he's a true force. Brad Pitt described later in an interview that working with Peter O'Toole was a milestone for him. He followed that up with explaining that most actors would call it a highlight, but that wouldn't describe it properly. It's a milestone, not a highlight. A highlight is something you enjoyed. A milestone is something that marks where you were and changes where you go. In a film where Brad Pitt was disappointed that he was forced to make, that he gave a year of his life to, and still came away frustrated. That one scene with Peter O'Toole was different. It was what he came to do. It was what acting is supposed to feel like. Yes, he tore his Achilles tendon on the film. He quit smoking for it. Lived alone in Malta. He paid $750 in accidental hits over six days of a real fight with a man that he cast himself. And when it was over, he told the world it wasn't what he wanted it to be. But he also said that tent scene with O'Toole was a milestone. And the way he said it suggests that somewhere in the frustration and the year he gave to a film he was forced to make, that one night in that tent might have been worth all of it. And that is why the story of Brad Pitt and Troy is so fascinating to me. To see someone so frustrated in their own art, but to take away something so big from it, that has inspired the films that he has backed leading to today. It's an amazing story. And it's inspirational, if anything. But what do you think? What do you think of Troy? What do you think of Brad Pitt in the role? Let me know in the comments. And don't forget to like and subscribe for more deep dives into the movies that we love.