By STEPHANIE DOHANEY
MICHAEL PITT
“Will people here mind if I piss in the street?” asks Michael Pitt. Michael is standing on the pavement outside a second-hand guitar shop in London on a muggy Saturday afternoon in June. The short answer, Mike, is, yes, they do tend to mind. Like everywhere.
At 23, Michael Pitt’s been around a bit. He is from New Jersey; he’s lived in Paris (where he took the lead in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers), Toronto, and he’s recently been hanging out in Milan. He dresses in torn black clothes and carries an old backpack with $ + Love = 666 scrawled on it. With his soft pouty lips and rosy cheeks, he’d make a fine dissolute Bolshevik.
Pitt has the kind of face you’ve seen before but can’t figure out where. Passersby don’t recognise him but as soon as he stops they study him with curiosity. Some think they know him – from the movies or TV (Pitt played Michelle Williams’ toy-boyfriend in Dawson’s Creek.) They think they know somebody who looks like him. He’s almost famous, almost a celebrity, and he’s rightly anxious about what it’ll be like if he gets there. He defers and demurs, tunes in and blanks out. He’s a master of the non sequitur and the philosophical non-descript. “Things change but they don’t change,” he says.
He can’t or won’t describe the emotional and intellectual edge of the world he inhabits. But it doesn’t look like fun. “I’m in purgatory right now,” he concedes. “Everything kinda seems like a distraction. Like a way to kill time.” The only parts of his tale he likes to divulge, he’ll abruptly disavow with the next breath. Not that he likes to talk about himself much.
He’s the kind of actor who’s always on duty, one who is performing one part or studying for the next. Today, he’s wearing dirty clothes, jeans held together by a few remaining seams like arteries. He hides his long blonde hair beneath a black woolly hat. He’s got a bandage on his hand and there are playful lacerations on his arms. He has a milk-fed American physique that makes it possible to be fleshy without being fat. He hasn’t had a bath in a few days. He wears a baby blue hospital bracelet around his wrist.
Pitt has a strained relationship with himself. He may seek attention – or at least the kind of attention he likes – but it makes him uncomfortable. It’s a classic dilemma – to desire that which makes you sick. In a small coffee shop on Shaftesbury Avenue he tells Another Magazine he can’t understand why people are curious about him, want to place him in magazines. He protests that he doesn’t want the attention (“This is so fake, why are you interested in me?”) but he’s intently curious to know the impression he makes. He’s an actor, and actors needs an audience or there’s no point to it. And when he gets it, when he’s on, he lights up.
Attention fills him out. Pitt may not, as he maintains, be any more interesting than the waitress making sandwiches behind the counter – perhaps demonstrably less – but unlike him she hasn’t chosen to put herself in front of the camera. “It’s all superficial.” So where’s the injustice? “There’s no injustice. It’s just silly and disappointing. I’m not that special. There are lots of untalented actors working, and a lot of talented ones who are not. Acting is not that hard. It’s not brain surgery.”
So if you are not talented and not special, what are we doing here? Why do you do interviews?
“I don’t fucking know. A lot of people who aren’t in my position would probably think that I’m spoiled and immature...” Michael later explains that he agreed to do this interview after reading a feature in the last issue about the poet and musician Anno Birkin. He’s a big fan of Birkin, who was killed in a car accident while touring with his band Kicks Joy Darkness, in 2001 aged just 20.
He gently disparages the actors’ trade (as Marlon Brando once said, actors are no more than dishonest entertainers, frauds, pretenders and liars) yet he’s worked hard to get to where he is. Through acting, he says, “I found clarity in small moments, and I wanted more of that. I didn’t get into it for fame and fortune.”
At the moment he’s immersing himself in music. He sings on a cover of “Hey Joe” on The Dreamers soundtrack and carries a blue 72 Fender Mustang with a strap made out of yellow crime scene and gaffer tape. He carries it in a beat-up case, and he strums it wherever he goes. His band, Pagoda, plays out in dives like the Pyramid on Avenue A. In his hotel suite, he plays a song he recently recorded in Milan. It has lyrics about white trash who don’t fit in.
“I’m a walking cliché,” he demurs. He closes his eyes. Since he recently finished Last Days, a film directed by Gus Van Sant about the Seattle grunge scene, it’s likely Pitt is channelling Kurt Cobain, still somewhat in character, still wrapped in the cloak of another’s mythology.
Over the past few years, film directors have cast Pitt to play his part in their films, many of them known for venerating the moment between childhood and adulthood when self-absorption still wears well. Van Sant (who cast Pitt in Finding Forrester), Larry Clark (who cast him as an aimless stoner in the teen-murder caper Bully) and JT Leroy (the author of two novels about transsexual truck stop hookers living in picturesque debasement) are within the close circle. Pitt says he doesn’t have a girlfriend but it’s well known that he has been seeing Asia Argento, the actress and director of Leroy’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.
His first role was as Tommy in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the rock opera film that acutely captured the gender-bending promise of glam rock. That caught the attention of Clark and Van Sant. As the story goes, Pitt couldn’t get into the audition for Bully. So he called Gus and got Larry’s number. “I went to his house and said ‘shoot me, shoot me’.” So Clarke did and gave Pitt the part of the aimless stoner-killer Donny. “It was the first time I felt at home,” says Pitt.
Pitt smokes Marlboro reds. Intensely. He drinks coffee black. He sleeps four hours a night, he says, no more. He wears the mantle of studied disaffection, the same one that teenage boys pass down from generation to generation. And he wears it well: queens want to turn him, or at least rent him; women want to mother him, and girls want to be corrupted by him.
Pitt knows he’s on the cultural conveyor, and people want to know if he’s worth reading more into; if he can sustain a story other than his own, if his own story has another chapter? In many ways his answer came with The Dreamers, pulling off as he did the wide-eyed young intellectual. His Matthew, an American naïf who falls for the sensuality and culture of revolutionary Paris, surprised many and set his career in a new direction.
But Pitt’s ambivalence is understandable. Hollywood wants to turn him in to a romantic rebel hunk. “When they wave so much money in front of you, it’s hard to resist,” he concedes, “I do a lot of things, and I’d do them whether I was being paid or not. I do them for me. Right now I just want to do things that challenge me.” Michael Pitt is in the cult of one, in the cult of me. And he’s good at it, the pose of indifference. “Acting just ain’t that hard.”
So what’s doing your head in?
“I’m just kinda bleeding right now. I’m walking the dead walk.”
Can you act happy?
“I don’t really feel like pretending. I usually regret it when I do.”
He shrugs and we leave it at that.