Pitt's film undertakes celebrity, fandom

There was a moment last month, after the premiere of

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

at the Toronto International Film Festival, when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie looked like they were going to be swallowed by the crowd. Literally.

Their getaway limo was ringed by squawking, bawling fans, faces pressed to the car window, flashbulbs flaring, cell-phone cameras going crazy, the streets jammed, traffic at a standstill. It was like something out of, well, a movie.

It's not what the Springfield, Mo., kid bargained for when he did a couple of musicals on the Kickapoo High School auditorium stage and thought maybe he'd try out some of this acting stuff.

A lesser soul might say, Enough of this, I don't want to be Brad Pitt - that Brad Pitt - anymore.

"If I did, then I should get out," says Pitt, 43 now, the grinnin' movie star, the Us magazine cover boy, People's Sexiest Man Alive (twice), the adoptive and natural dad of Maddox, Zahara and the rest of that paparazzi-plagued Jolie brood.

"But if at some point you ever find yourself saying, 'Whatever happened to that guy?' well, you know," he says, pausing for a couple of contemplative beats, on the phone from New York the other day.

"But it certainly doesn't come with a handbook - all of this. You don't realize that that's the deal you're making, but at the same point, it speaks to [the fact] that the films are working. So it's a double-edged sword."

The latest film, the aforementioned, Andrew Dominik-directed Jesse James, opens tomorrow at the United Artists RiverView Plaza, the Bridge Cinema de Lux, and the Showcase at the Ritz Center in Voorhees. A lopin', poetic oater about the last days of the legendary outlaw, the movie - with a creepily compelling Casey Affleck in the role of Robert Ford, a groupie-turned-compadre who winds up killing his one-time hero - speaks to the nature of fandom and celebrity. Jesse James, in his day, was a pulp-magazine and dime-store-novel star. His name sold newspapers.

"Yeah, I was surprised to see how much tabloid journalism was alive and kicking at that time," Pitt says. "It just tells me that not much has really changed, there's just more of it - there's just more of everything today."

In The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, adapted from the novel by Ron Hansen, Pitt plays the bank looter and train robber, as a family man (Mary-Louise Parker is his missus). His brother, Frank (Sam Shepard), has hung up his hat, and Jesse, in 1881 Missouri, is thinking about retiring, too. Feared and admired, he was a morally troublesome figure, a Robin Hood to some, a six-shootin' sociopath to others.

"I didn't know anything about Jesse James, other than the legend," says Pitt about the guy he would end up playing. (Other movie Jesse Jameses over the years: Tyrone Power, Robert Duvall, Kris Kristofferson. And James Dean played Jesse James in the '50s reenactment TV series You Are There.) "Truthfully, I mean, it didn't have much interest beyond the fact that I grew up in the same area, his stomping ground. It wasn't until I got into Ron Hansen's book. . . . That really humanized this man for me, and I was in."

Director Dominik is an Australian whose raw, violent Chopper introduced Pitt's Troy costar, Eric Bana, to the world. Dominik, Pitt reports, also did second-unit work on Terrence Malick's The New World - a telling association because The Assassination of Jesse James is imbued with the unhurried, cinematically mesmerizing aesthetic that is a Malick hallmark.

"Absolutely, Terry was an influence," Pitt confirms. "[Malick's] Days of Heaven is a film Andrew loves and I love as well. . . . We talked a lot about the meditative quality of Terry's films - that it's the totality of the viewing, more than any one scene."

At 2 hours, 40 minutes, with a pace that's not exactly galloping, Pitt concedes that The Assassination of Jesse James' "totality of viewing" is unlikely to rack up Spider-Man totals at the box office.

"I come from this standpoint: that good films will find their time, they have their day," he says. "And it's true for me that most of my favorite films I found well after they were released in theaters. And that's how I believed that this film would operate, and I've got to say I'm really surprised to see the nice response it's getting."

Pitt is midway through his work on the Coen brothers' New York-set spy thing, Burn After Reading, right now. (His Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen associate George Clooney also stars.) Pitt has The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which he shot with Cate Blanchett for Fight Club's David Fincher, in the can. And he'll be starting State of Play, a political thriller adapted from the BBC series, in November. His Fight Club buddy Edward Norton is in that, along with Helen Mirren and Robin Wright Penn.

Pitt's production company, Plan B, has a whole slate of projects in the works, but after State of Play, Pitt's not sure what his next acting gig will be.

In the meantime, at least one person thinks Pitt has done the best work of his career in The Assassination of Jesse James.

"People will come see this movie because they know that Brad consistently gives good performances, and they want to see him," says Casey Affleck, in a separate interview during the festival in Toronto. "They won't be disappointed by that, for sure, because I think this is his finest hour. This is my favorite performance of his. It's a very vulnerable and deep, great performance."