Michael Pitt: Nearly Nirvana

Michael Pitt tells Roger Clarke that being an actor isn't so bad when you can play a certain rock star for Gus Van Sant

It's not that he's ungracious, merely confused and discomfited. Those who interviewed him for his biggest role to date, in Bertolucci's The Dreamers, had to get used to him fielding questions while lying on the floor. Others who met him on Cannes or New York junkets recently found him wired, fidgety and chain-smoking all the way through their allotted time.

Perhaps his laid-back demeanour can be attributed to the fact that he's in the Czech spa town of Karlovy Vary for its annual film festival, a distinguished but low-key event. He'd got up early, had a massage in one of the local spas, and then taken a walk in the pine woods that stretch up the hillside to clear his head.

"I like the forest," he says in his soft New Jersey drawl. Just as well, as lived in the woods while making Last Days, the third of a trilogy of films by Gus Van Sant that began with Gerry (2002) and continued with Elephant (2003) ("They're each about death," Van Sant has said).

Last Days is, loosely, about Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of the rock group Nirvana. "I had a house in the middle of the woods," Pitt recalls. "I stayed alone the whole time, and I tried always to be battling with the things I thought the character was battling with - seclusion, drug addiction, severe chronic depression and suicidal tendencies."

The result is a striking performance that is impossible to forget. It's creepy and lingering, and as potent as a draught of deadly nightshade. Pitt, locks of yellow hair hanging over his face for much of the film, mumbles incoherently as he stumbles about his dilapidated mansion and nearby woodland gardens, performing small tasks, making macaroni cheese, answering the phone and not saying anything, trying to play songs on his guitar and slipping further into drug abuse.

Many have complained that the film just isn't right, and not what they expected. Connoisseurs of standard Hollywood rock'n'roll movies who have gone to see the film without reading up on it, expecting junkie chic and cool music-biz scenes, have been infuriated by this languid, mysterious descent into the deathly and distempered.

One cinemagoer even upbraided Van Sant for allowing Pitt to play guitar with the wrong hand - Cobain was left-handed ("Have they tried to play left-handed?" Pitt asks). They all know that Van Sant knew Cobain. They know Cobain was considering doing a Van Sant film in the last months of his life, and that Cobain lobbied Van Sant to get a friend a part in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. They know Van Sant discussed the movie with Courtney Love, and screened it for Nirvana's bassist Krist Novoselic.

Still, Van Sant has taken a line and everyone is sticking to it. "It wasn't a biopic," Pitt insists. "It wasn't based on times and dates. I realised in Cannes, because I was talking about this so much, that it's not a film about Kurt, it's a film for Kurt. And I've mentioned that to Gus recently."

Pitt has described how he was a latch-key kid in a "lower working-class family", ran away to New York aged 15 and lived in a Chinatown squat with artists and poets before ending up in a stage production and, finally, the anodyne TV series Dawson's Creek, which he hated.

He's a classic product of downtown culture. It's not surprising, then, that he should be attracted to alt.culture icons such as Larry Clark (Pitt worked with him in Bully) and Van Sant (a friend of William Burroughs), because they still evoke "outsider" culture in a mainstream America that has turned against the idea.

It's also been suggested that another misfit and outsider, River Phoenix, is an inspiration for the film, and that the Blake figure is in some ways an amalgam of Cobain and the young actor who overdosed on speedballs in LA in the middle of filming Dark Blood. After the deaths of Phoenix and Cobain - within six months of each other, in October 1993 and April 1994 respectively - commentators asked whether the suicide of Cobain or the accidental death of Phoenix would have a more profound influence.

It soon became clear that Cobain was the man with the lasting hold on the loyalties of disaffected youth. But for Van Sant, Phoenix's death had a powerful and lasting effect. He wrote the novel Pink in 1997 to exorcise the fitful ghost of Phoenix, who had lit up My Own Private Idaho. I met Van Sant when he was promoting Good Will Hunting years later, and we talked only of Phoenix.

Pitt never talked with Van Sant about Phoenix during filming, but he says: "When I was a kid, I really looked up to River. He might have had something to do with why I became an actor." When I ask where he was at the time of Phoenix's death, he inadvertently starts talking about Cobain. "I wasn't a fan when the whole thing was going on. I was in sixth grade, and one day everyone was dressed in black, saying, 'Kurt Cobain died today!' It really struck me, because this was a school where people were into rap and R&B."

The musical aspect of the Blake figure in Last Days tilts its interpretation back towards Cobain. The music in the film is not Nirvana music: much of it is original material by Pitt and his band Pagoda, who performed a set at Cannes this year. Pagoda are something of a preoccupation with the actor right now, and he's recording an album that should be ready soon. "People don't go out of their way to tell me I suck," he says. "Eventually what I want to be doing is directing, but music is a younger beast and I want to tackle that now. I can direct when I'm 60 if I want to."

One inevitable question thrown up by Last Days is - how accurate can Pitt be about drug use? "I researched it," he says. "I have friends who have been in situations... It was something I could re-create. Initially, I had the bright idea that I was going to do the whole film drunk or something, which thank God I didn't. I was probably the cleanest I've ever been for that film. I didn't drink beer."

He says he deplores the glamorisation of drugs in films, although Trainspotting galvanised him as a youth. "Whenever there's a junkie played, you have a shot of the needle and the arm... What is this, romance? Or Requiem for a Dream, another movie I love: it has this shock thing. Look how I can shock you." In fact, the most illicit substance on view in the movie is macaroni cheese made with far too much milk, which is apparently the way Cobain used to make it.

Does Pitt think suicide is selfish? "I see why people think it is, and sometimes I do. And sometimes I don't think it's selfish. I'm probably an atheist, though I was raised a Catholic - and that whole religion is based on the first suicide, in many ways."

Pitt has spent the past few years steering clear of big Hollywood films, wary even of identifying what offers there have been. "Because I look up to Kurt and River Phoenix, I've been forewarned, and a lot of the decisions I've made in my career are to counteract my fame." He tells with a shudder how he was chased by schoolchildren in New York after Dawson's Creek. Fame makes him nervous. Filming in Paris with Bertolucci for The Dreamers, he was disturbed when people called him "sir". It seemed surreal and fake. What did people want from him?

"You grow up in anenvironment where most people think of you as trash, and then you get to this other place where people who normally wouldn't talk to you want something out of you. I could have made decisions to be more known. I'm pretty broke now, but I'm sure I could have had a couple of million dollars."

Pitt talks about filming Last Days with a kind of raptness and hero-worship of Van Sant, whom he thinks is "the best American film-maker we have". The improvisation techniques they developed seemed liberating to the actor. The first day's shooting was just a trudge into the Oregon woods for himself, Van Sant, the cameraman Harry Savides and a couple of focus pullers. "We had a 12-page script and it was just a map," Pitt says. "Gus would kind of orchestrate everyone's ideas. Now when I get a script..." His voice fades away, and he grimaces eloquently.

'Last Days' is released on 2 September