To Die For

In one sense, you could say Brad Pitt landed the role of a lifetime in “Meet Joe Black.” He got a chance to play Death.

“Listen, when it came to playing Death, it was a little bit of a mystery to me, still is,” Pitt said with a sly laugh from the set of the film, which opens Friday. “I mean, how do you ‘play’ Death? You can’t do any research, can you?”

Keeping Death real was just one challenge director Martin Brest faced in bringing “Joe Black” to life. The film, a remake of the 1934 romantic comedy “Death Takes a Holiday,” stars Pitt as Death, who comes down to Earth, takes over the body of a young New York City attorney, befriends a media mogul named Bill Parrish (Anthony Hopkins) and soon finds himself enmeshed in a lot of earthly things--from peanut butter to corporate takeovers to Susan (Claire Forlani), Parrish’s doctor-daughter.

It’s an educational experience for Joe, and how he ultimately uses his worldly knowledge is a big part of what this three-hour movie is all about. Sort of.

Actually, as Brest or anyone else associated with the project will tell you, it’s not a film that lends itself to a one-line pitch. It’s part romance, part drama, part spiritual journey--with some black comedy tossed in for good measure. It’s sort of a fantasy but it’s executed in a realistic way. There’s not one main character but several, and each undergoes a change of heart in light of Joe Black’s visit. And as far as theme goes, well, the movie is as much about Life as it is about Death.

“I wanted a film that even grown-ups would buy into completely, intelligent grown-ups--and not just because they were suspending disbelief but because we won them over emotionally,” Brest said. “One of the challenges was to keep [Death’s] credentials alive while never having him summon up a thunderstorm, or have a tree shed its leaves, or something. . . . We have none of that. No magic.”

If all this sounds complex, it is. And it goes a long way to understanding what makes Brest tick as a filmmaker. He’s only done five films in the last 20 years but they include two box-office hits--”Beverly Hills Cop” (1984) and “Midnight Run” (1988)--and the critically acclaimed “Scent of a Woman” (1992), which earned Brest an Oscar nomination for best director.

He’s known as an easygoing director, with a wry sense of humor, but he is notorious for shooting a lot of takes and meticulous in his attention to detail. To bring “Joe Black” to the screen, Brest went through three screenwriters and countless drafts until knocking it into final shape with his friend and collaborator, two-time Oscar winner Bo Goldman, who also wrote “Scent of a Woman.”

But it’s just that kind of passionate intensity that attracts talent like Pitt and Hopkins.

“He’s the Obsess-ator. That’s what I call him. I would hate to go shopping with the guy,” Pitt said while shooting the film last fall. “He’s got something that’s so fine-tuned. He’s like a conductor, directing an orchestra. He brings up the strings, holds them, then cuts them off like that, and boom! In comes the bass drum. He is so precise with the tuning, with the flight the story will take. He’s a maestro.”

Those feelings are shared by Hopkins, who has picked up three Oscar nominations for best actor in the last seven years and won for “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991).He said the script took on serious subjects in a dramatic way that offered a range of well-rounded, complex characters, especially Bill Parrish, the kindhearted media mogul who suddenly finds himself faced with a lot of decisions and little time to make them.

“The reason I did this is Bo Goldman’s script, which is a beautifully crafted script,” Hopkins said. “It’s the sort of script where all the scenes are interconnected. It’s a daring kind of premise--how does Death borrow a body? It’s interesting and it’s also funny.”

The film also gave Pitt and Hopkins a chance to work together again--they got on well in “Legends of the Fall” (1994) and have admired each other since.

“I’m lucky because I get to work with all these young guys like Brad,” Hopkins said. “He’s really giving a hell of a performance in this. It’s different from anything he’s done. I think he’s a wonderful actor. I even wrote him a fan letter after ‘Seven’ and ’12 Monkeys.’ ”

“He’s being kind,” said Pitt, when told of Hopkins’ adulation for him. “Tony’s the heavyweight. I’ve got decades to go before I figure out where he’s coming from [as an actor]. He is one of our very best.

“I saw [Hopkins] just whip out things take after take--he’s too quick for me,” Pitt added. “What I really love about Tony, he never falls into the sympathy traps. He always seems to skirt those mines and come off more true to life, more compelling. He’s not afraid to show the haunted side. There’s a great strength in there that he has, that I’d love to get a piece of some time.”

Influenced by ‘Death Takes a Holiday’

In one way or another, Brest, 47, has been working on “Joe Black” for more than 20 years. He was just a director in training at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles when he first saw “Death Takes a Holiday” and became intrigued with the notion of Death taking a human form to explore life on Earth. What would that be like--for Death, for those he met? And how could you make it believable? He mulled those ideas over, then began to work on a script in the early 1980s. Ten years later, he solved it.

“When you make a movie about Death coming down to see what’s going on, that’s a pretty big . . . what’s the right word? Responsibility,” Brest said. “You have to find away to explore that material without being sophomoric, without being depressing, without being heavy-handed.”

To anchor his fantasy, Brest grounded his film in what he calls “people in a room talking with each other.” He brought in a supporting cast of seasoned actors with New York theater experience--including Marcia Gay Harden, who plays Allison, Parrish’s older daughter; Jeffrey Tambor, who plays her husband, Quince; and Jake Weber, who plays Drew, young shark on the move, engaged to Susan.

Brest then centered his story around Pitt, who has the challenge of playing what amounted to not one character but two: a young attorney and Death.

“Marty wanted the young guy completely unaffected and pretty straightforward in his speech, and no beating around the bush,” Pitt said. “He just wanted someone who was honest and has no qualms with laying it on the line, saying what he feels, who he is, showing everything.

“As for Death,” Pitt said, “it was kind of laid out like, he does his job, and he’s not so omnipotent. What was important was to always keep him thinking, discovering, that was the goal anyway. And that would pretty much define who he was and where he’s been.”

The role of Joe Black is the latest in a series of offbeat characters for Pitt. He played a crazed ecologist in the futuristic thriller “12 Monkeys” (1995), which earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor; an IRA terrorist in “The Devil’s Own” (1996); then climbed mountains in “Seven Years in Tibet” (1997) as Heinrich Harrer, the former Nazi mountain climber who underwent a spiritual change when exposed to Buddhism in Tibet.

“It’s just madness, simple straightforward madness,” Pitt said about his role choices. “I actually get into trouble when I pick something too early. I’m better when something feels right at the time and I go do it. Because I find sometimes, if I pick too early, by the time it comes around, I no longer feel the same way I first felt and can’t bring the same thing to the project.

“I wish I was more calculating, but it’s pretty much feeling around in the dark, getting a hold of something, and saying, ‘Ah, that feels right.’ ”

An A-List Director Doesn’t Miss a Beat

Outside Manhattan, on the elaborate set of Parrish Communications corporate headquarters, Brest sat quietly in a canvas chair, wearing a baseball cap and a barn coat, chomping on an unlit cigar. He looked more like a suburban dad at his son’s first Little League game than a top director. But as the day wore on, it was clear that Brest doesn’t miss a beat.

They had been shooting a simple scene: Parrish (Hopkins) arrives at his office to get some bad news: A board meeting has been called without his approval.

The action was pretty straightforward: Parrish comes out of the elevator and walks down the hallway. He’s joined by his trusted son-in-law Quince (Tambor), who informs him of the secretly called board meeting.

It looked fine the first time they shot the scene, and after the third or fourth take nothing seemed different. They did a few more, then Brest got up from his canvas chair. He walked over to say a few words with Tambor, then a few with Hopkins, and then sat back down.

They shot again and bingo: What had been a relatively simple scene was transformed into a subtle dramatization of personal growth. Parrish walks in, gets the bad news, takes a folder from his secretary, then tosses it aside and strides into the boardroom. The subtext was suddenly clear: Parrish had become a knight, ready to do battle to save his castle.

“Marty is great to work with,” said Hopkins, who has worked with a range of A-list directors, including Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone and Jonathan Demme. “He’s got great enthusiasm, and he’s a wonderful teacher, and he’s very, very pleasant. But he obsesses--[he’s] obsessed with perfection!

“We had some close encounters a few times [on the set] because he likes to do a lot of takes,” Hopkins added. “I do four or five at most, give or take two or three, and that’s it. But if you let him, he’ll do 25, 30.”

To build the world where this fantasy took place, Brest retained production designer Dante Ferretti (“Kundun,” “Casino”). They spent nearly a month flying up and down the East Coast, and venturing as far west as Grosse Pointe, Mich., scouting locales for Parrish’s country home before settling on a 75-acre estate in Warwick, R.I. It was the former home of U.S. Sen. Nelson Aldrich, which was built in 1896 and conjured up visions of Versailles.

But most of the sets--everything from the boardrooms of Parrish’s media corporation to his swank Fifth Avenue penthouse--were built inside armories in the New York metropolitan area.

In Perretti’s mind, the challenge was to create a world that was very real and believable--and yet unexpected and fantastical. To do that, Perretti drew on his extensive experience (six films) with the late Federico Fellini, who mastered the knack of launching a story in reality, moving into fantasy, then returning back to reality, with a different view on the world.

“I put a little of him and a little of him-in-myself into this film,” Perretti said about the influence of Fellini. “The challenge was to make something spectacular, but not too over the edge. I think I did something very special, but it is inside the story. Like a dream.”

That blend of fantasy and reality also set the tone for Emmanuel Lubezki, the young cinematographer from Mexico, who, at 33, has racked up an impressive body of work--including “The Little Princess” (1995), for which he earned an Oscar nomination.

To achieve the right effect, Lubezki subtly lit Pitt as Death to evoke a sense of awe, mystery and a touch of the supernatural--but he did it in a way that will be hard for the audience to pinpoint.

“We didn’t want to light him in a way that took you out of the movie with an aura or something,” Lubezki said. “But he always has something--a little extra light somewhere, something that makes him a stranger, something that makes him not part of this world.”