Indiewire points us to the Brad Pitt story in Interview Magazine. Pitt is interviewed by Guy Ritchie. Here are some choice quotes:
“Well, what Andrew wanted to do with this film was interesting: He wanted to talk about America—and America as a business—but he wanted to hide it within this low-end crime drama. We in America have some grand ideals—and some very strong ideals—but a lot of times, those ideals are used for marketing.
“In a way, [Killing Them Softly is] a call for responsible capitalism. But Andrew wanted to juxtapose that idea with the financial crisis and effects of that because there’s an interesting psychology at play in terms of who we are and what we do when given too much room. It started out in the ’90s, under Clinton, with the good intentions of ‘Everyone should own a house and have a shot at the American dream.’ So you open up doors to make that possible by giving people these loans. Then, Bush comes in and deregulates everything, so there’s no one at the helm, and it becomes easier to take advantage of it because there’s no accountability. And then you know what happened from there—a lot of people got hurt. But it also says something about the nature of greed and what can happen when we don’t look beyond that. At the end of the day, what it says is that we can’t trust ourselves, that we need some governing body. I mean, people knew where things were heading–clearly, we got to the point where banks were actually betting against the very people they were giving these loans to.
“…And, by the way, most people’s daily lives are just about surviving. Their lives are about making the weekly nothing and taking the kids out on a Sunday. Most people don’t have time to really study the issues. And the media could help us, but there’s capitalistic interest in the media outlets as well,..the Internet has done a wonderful thing for us. But democracy doesn’t work unless people are well informed, and I don’t know that we are. People just don’t have the time.”
