Brad Pitt says that his 'disappointment' with 'Troy' made him rethink his career

Brad Pitt has said that making the sword and sandals epic Troy made him reassess his acting career.

Pitt played the Greek hero Achilles in the big budget, all-star movie, which also starred Eric Bana, Diane Kruger, Orlando Bloom, Sean Bean, Rose Byrne and the late Peter O'Toole.

But he has revealed that he was contractually obliged to appear in the movie, as he'd pulled out of another project for Warner Bros.

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“It was really a turn on Troy,” he told The New York Times. “I was disappointed in it.

“[Troy] really made me think, I’m following my gut from here on out. 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. 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. 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.”

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Pitt says that after making that movie, he changed his approach to picking projects, instead opting for fewer blockbusters.

He also admits that he didn't like his performance in the Terry Gilliam movie 12 Monkeys, despite it earning him an Oscar nomination.

“I nailed the first half of 12 Monkeys,” he says. “I got the second half all wrong. That performance bothered me because there was a trap in the writing. It’s not the writing’s fault, but it was something that I couldn’t figure out. I knew in the second half of the film I was playing the gimmick of what was real in the first half — until the last scene — and it bugged the [expletive] out of me.”

Pitt is increasingly concentrating more on production with his Plan B company, with roles in Tarantino's Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and the sci-fi drama Ad Astra among his recent acting projects.