Frustration over Troy led Brad Pitt to do quality films

Hollywood superstar Brad Pitt vowed to shift to quality cinema after working on "Troy", which the actor says lacked "mystery" and revolved around him. The 55-year-old actor, in a new interview with The New York Times, said it drove him crazy that he could not "get out of the middle of the frame" of that movie.

Pitt, who has had a great year with two award-worthy roles in James Gray's "Ad Astra" and Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" and is expected to win an Oscar, however, clarified that his frustration with "Troy" was in no way a criticism of the film's director Wolfgang Petersen. "I had to do ‘Troy’ because — I guess I can say all this now — I pulled out of another movie and then had to do something for the studio,” Pitt said.

"So I was put in ‘Troy.’ It wasn’t painful, but I realized that the way that movie was being told was not how I wanted it to be. I made my own mistakes in it. What am I trying to say about ‘Troy’? I could not get out of the middle of the frame. It was driving me crazy," he added. Recalling his time spent working on David Fincher's cult classic "Se7en", the actor said he did not like that "Troy" had become a commercial thing.

"I’d become spoiled working with David Fincher. It’s no slight on Wolfgang Petersen. ‘Das Boot’ is one of the all-time great films. But somewhere in it, ‘Troy’ became a commercial kind of thing. Every shot was like, Here’s the hero! There was no mystery. So about that time I made a decision that I was only going to invest in quality stories, for lack of a better term. It was a distinct shift that led to the next decade of films," he added.

The actor's films post 2004 reflect this shift as he went on to collaborate with directors such as Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Babel”), Andrew Dominik (“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”), Joel and Ethan Coen (“Burn After Reading”), Quentin Tarantino (“Inglourious Basterds”) and Terrence Malick (“The Tree of Life”).