FILM IN THE BUFF

In The Dreamers Bernardo Bertolucci's exploration of sex, cinema and revolution in 1968 Paris, actor Michael Pitt was forced to shed his inhibitions. He ended up shedding a whole lot more.

In a back alley outside the swank Park City, Utah, restaurant 350 Main Street late last month, actor Michael Pitt digs through the pockets of his baggy jeans for cigarettes. He has successfully escaped the crush of the party inside, a dinner in celebration of the Sudance Film Festival premiere of Bernardo Bertolucci's latest movie, The Dreamers-only to have left his pack of smokes at the table. "Can you do me a favor and get me my cigarettes?" he pleads. "I don't want to go back in there. They're all watching me."

Pitt can be surprisingly timid for someone who goes full frontal in Bertolucci's picture, which last month was slapped with an NC-17 rating for its unvarnished sexual high jinks. "I am shy about my body," he confesses in a husky whisper the morning after the party, sitting on the patio of the Park City Marriot. (He's a bit more realxed now; his handlers have hooked him up with three packs of Marlboros.) "But that's a personality insecurity," he goes on. "I tried to put that aside for the film, because I think people should not forget the fact that we're all just fucking apes."

Pitt's body-baring turn in The Dreamers is the 22-year-old's first starring role. He plays Matthew, a naive young American who gets swept up in the cinephilia, sexual adventurousness and revolutionary spirit of Paris in 1968, eventually shacking up with a pair of warped, possibly incestuous twins (gorgeous Gallic newcomer Eva Green and French actor Louis Garrel). Though he was "plenty afraid" of exposing himself onscreen during the trio's erotic entanglements, Pitt says, "For me, the biggest fear was watching it, not necessarily doing it. I'm very nervous about how it's perceived, becasue for every [person] who understands the film, there's, like, 10,000 more who won't understand it. And then it's like you're in high school again," he adds, referring to what he thinks of as America's juvenile attitudes towards sex-which he himself can't always shake. Look for the bathroom scene in which Pitt covers his manhood with a towel. "It pissed Bernardo off," Pitt admits. "And having just watched it, it's very clear that I'm being bashful and it took me out of character."

Lounging around in the buff was hard enough, but shooting the actual sex scenes took a turn for the absurd. "It was very comedic," he recalls. "There's this little Vietnamese lady doing my makeup, covering the pimples on my butt, and the guy with the boom is hanging around, and everyone knows it's a little silly, and then you're supposed to just do the scene?"

Bertolucci has explored this explicit terrain before, but Pitt intentionally chose to avoid the director's famously racy Last Tango in Paris or research other works by the maestro for fear of being intimidated on set. He also had to overcome the anxiety of knowing that he was not Bertolucci's first choice; that was Jake Gyllenhaal. He was too sensual," Bertolucci says of Pitt. "But we did a test with Jake, and it was very, very stiff. And I understood it would have been a nightmare with somebody who every time he has to show his ankle would like to know the deep, profound reason why he has to show his naked ankle."

This gave Pitt all the more reason to prove to Bertolucci that he could pull off the performance. "It was my first leading role and I wasn't going to fuck it up," Pitt says. "Because, let's be realistic: If I wasn't doing this, I'd probably be working at a gas station."

It may sound like typical actorly "I'm just lucky to be doing this" chatter, but Pitt doesn't mince words about his troubled adolescence. Raised in a working-class New Jersey family, Pitt was once caught with some weed-and his strict father sent him to rehab, which only made matters worse. "You put 12 drug addicts in a place together and say, 'Stop doing drugs...'" He emerged with a habit, he says.

But soon enough, Pitt ditched Jersey, moving to New York City at age 16 to be an actor. "I grew up fast," he says. And with his cherubic face, pillowy lips and intense baby-blue eyes, Pitt has progressed quickly from teenybopper pinup (while playing a quarterback on Dawson's Creek) to post child for edgy alternaculture (appearing in Larry Clark's Bully and John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch). Still, there's a purity, fragility and wounded quality to Pitt-more River Phoenix than Leonardo DiCaprio, though he's been compared to both and looks uncannily Leo-like at times in The Dreamers. He'd rather act in challenging indies like Asia Argento's upcoming The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, an adaptation of JT LeRoy's novel, than be a cog in the "Hollywood machinery"-as he views his most recently completed film, M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, set for a July release. He likens doing Hollywood movies (he's also had parts in Finding Forrester and Murder by Numbers) to "working at McDonald's." Meanwhile, he's come to terms with his painful upbringing. "It was a good thing to experience; it really gave me a slap in the face," he says, nothing that at one point he had an epiphany: "This isn't a movie, there is no fucking soundtrack; this is your life and it's a serious thing."

At the heart of The Dreamers is this very conflict between cinema and real life, between the insular world, where the film-obsessed Matthew and the twins sequester themselves and engage in an esclating series of sexual games, and the hard outside reality, where the revolutionary struggle is genuine and violent. "If there's any teenagers trying to get in because they think it's a sex movie," Pitt says, "they're hopefully going to be forced to look at the movie in an adult way."

During a Q&A session following the film's premiere at Sundance, Pitt noted that the risque nature of the material-both sexual and political-was what originally drew him in. "I knew it was going to be something that people hadn't seen before," he said. "And it could possibly help change this immaturity we have towards sex and politics. It's a big deal that this film is going out NC-17. It should pave the way for young filmmakers who want to keep their vision. (Applause from crowd.)

While Pitt's own participation in recent anti-war protests has been limited ("I did a peace walk in New York, and I felt uncomfortable and a little fake," he admits), the actor believes social change can be brought about through more intimate means. "Okay, 'An orgasm is better than a bomb' may sound like a funny statement," he says, referring to Bertolucci's official remarks after the film's rating was conferred. "But I think that a lot of things can be solved by being naked, by being vulnerable and by connecting with people."