Brad Pitt and Oscar-winner Jessica Chastain admittedly lost themselves in their characters during an intense fight scene. And the film’s director thought it was too compelling to leave off the feature.
Chastain and Pitt both collaborated on the coming-of-age film Tree of Life directed by Terrence Malick. The pair played a married couple in the film, taking care of their three young children when tragedy strikes their family. In a resurfaced interview with CBS News, Chastain shared that she’d been attached to the project for a very long time. Back then, everyone she knew couldn’t stop talking about Chastain playing the Fight Club star‘s wife. But some didn’t believe it because of her movie’s long film delay.
“Then I get Tree of Life opposite Brad Pitt. I mean, is there a bigger movie star? And everyone’s telling, ‘Yeah, Jessica’s playing Brad Pitt’s wife. They’re married in this film, and it’s with Terrence Malick,’” Chastain said. “Years are going by. Nothing’s coming out. So at one point my mom called me up laughing. She goes, ‘Everyone thinks we’re lying!’ It’s like, ‘What are you doing in L.A.? Because none of your movies are coming out.’ But then I had the last laugh.”
Eventually, Tree of Life would see production. And while acting opposite of Pitt, a scene required the two actors to simulate a heated argument. But they’d gotten so immersed into their characters that they surprised themselves.
“And at one point, I don’t know why, what on earth possessed me, but I grabbed the pepper and rubbed it on his face and said, ‘How do you like it!’ And then he grabbed me and all of the sudden we’re like fighting and struggling and when you see, you can see that we both look shocked because it was absolutely real,” Chastain once told Collider. “It wasn’t like Terry said, ‘I want to create a physical violence between the two.’ It’s not even in the script that anything like that happens.”
Tree of Life was a much quieter project than the commercial hits Pitt was known to star in. The Malick picture also dressed the actor down considerably, downplaying his good looks to fit the strict father he was playing. But the three young actors who portrayed his children in the movie couldn’t get over the fact that they were working with him. Eventually, Pitt had to pull them aside and discipline them in real life.
“We had an incident the very first day of filming,” Pitt once told The Guardian. “We had a scene where I was supposed to be getting on their case, and they’re laughing. They weren’t taking it seriously because they were having fun, you know, with a movie guy. So I had to take the eldest two off the set and say: ‘This is serious. This is what we’re here for, and don’t come back until you’re ready.’ After that, they stopped looking at me as the guy they’d seen in movies.”
But Pitt’s celebrity also caused problems for Malick behind-the scenes. The filmmaker shied away from being in the spotlight. As Pitt described, Malick enjoyed the luxury of showing up, making his film, and going home afterwards. He even avoided promoting his films himself if he could help it. So Malick wasn’t used to the kind of attention that followed Pitt everywhere he went.
“It was terribly, terribly uncomfortable for him,” Pitt recalled.
Pitt was nothing less than impressed by the ability Chastain showed when they collaborated. He predicted that his Tree of Life co-star was an actor to look out for in the future. Given her success, he wasn’t too far off the mark.
“We’re going to see great things from her. She’s a great find,” Pitt once told Associated Press (via Huffpost). “She just walked into this thing, and she was throwing punches with me on par and dealing with the unwieldiness of going off-script and working with non-actors. Man, I really relied on her. It takes great talent to keep that focus, and there’s real charm and beauty, and she’s really bright, this woman. So I think she’s capable of a lot of things that we’ve yet to see.”