Brad Pitt: The Rolling Stone Interview

Brad pitt is having technical difficulties.

"I normally need my kids to do this," he mutters, as he attempts to connect my iPod into his stereo. "They're so beyond me in technology, it's hard to keep up. Our seven-year-old was searching the word 'weapons' on Google the other day and ended up on some white-supremacist site. I'm sure now we're on all kinds of watch lists."

Eventually, Pitt gives up and summons an assistant, and soon enough we're listening to Townes Van Zandt. Pitt has never heard the late, great singer-songwriter before, but he says he digs it. He's been feeling out of the loop when it comes to music these days. "Last new thing I got into was the Black Keys," he says. We're at the legendary Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, sitting in Pitt's large, heavily guarded trailer. Metropolis, Nosferatu and The Blue Angel were all shot here, along with, more recently, Tom Cruise's World War II drama, Valkyrie. Pitt has been here since September to film Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's own WWII epic, years in the making and loosely based on a Seventies grindhouse knockoff of The Dirty Dozen. In it, Pitt plays a lieutenant from Tennessee who, according to a leaked version of the script, leads a black-ops unit assigned to terrorize the enemy by scalping Nazis. Gleefully, Pitt snatches a prop from the coffee table and shows it to me. It's an ornate invitation to a movie screening from "Der Minister Propaganda — Dr. Joseph Goebbels." "All the big guys show up in this movie," he says with a grin.

Pitt, who is 44, has grown a thin mustache for his role, and his hair has been styled in a period frontal swoop. He's wearing a wide gray scarf over a gray zip-up sweater and rough-looking khaki Army pants. For the duration of the shoot, set to wrap sometime in January, Pitt and his family — Angelina Jolie, his partner of three years, and their six children — have rented a massive compound in nearby Wannsee. (It's in the same upscale neighborhood where, in a villa in 1942, senior Nazi officials came up with the plan for the Final Solution.) The property is surrounded by a wall and has three large houses, its own helicopter-landing pad and, when I visit, at least six guards. Pitt also owns a 6,500-square-foot apartment in central Berlin; a longtime architecture enthusiast (and apprentice), he's been visiting the city for years, primarily to work with the avant-garde architecture firm Graft. Their current project together, in which Pitt will be a design consultant, is a planned green, sustainable hotel in Dubai.

Despite the rarefied level of celebrity he's achieved, Pitt, as an actor, has starred in surprisingly few massive hits. There's the Ocean's Eleven series, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and then you probably have to go all the way back to Se7en, his first film with director David Fincher, in 1995. In the late Nineties, beginning with The Devil's Own and ending with the abysmally reviewed Meet Joe Black, Pitt admits this had to do with poor choices. "I got lost in the wilderness of fame a bit," he says. "There are all of these opportunities you're supposed to be taking. And I got really discombobulated." More often, though, his instinct has very deliberately pulled him in the direction of eccentric, less commercial roles, from small, scene-stealing turns in 12 Monkeys and Snatch to his quieter work in more recent films like Babel and last year's brooding, wildly underrated Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. His latest film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is his third collaboration with Fincher, after Se7en and Fight Club. Based on a deeply weird short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Benjamin Button is a fable about mortality in which the title character, played by Pitt, is born old and ages backward. The script, by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), has little of the original story's black humor, and fans of the earlier Pitt-Fincher collaborations will likely find the film sentimental. But Oscar voters will almost certainly disagree. There's already talk of a Best Actor nomination for Pitt, who turns in a subtle, impressive performance, and the visual effects are something to behold.