Brad Pitt and Edward Berger to team up for a feature based on Tim Winston’s novel: Here’s what we know

Add another project to your list alongside Heart of the Beast, as Brad Pitt is teaming up with Edward Berger, who directed two back-to-back oscar-winning films — All Quiet on the Western Front in 2022 and Conclave last year — for a film. The actor has been up there on the Oscars stage four times for 12 Monkeys (1995), Moneyball (2011), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). He won the last one.

The film’s name isn’t announced yet, but let’s call it The Riders because it’s based on The Riders, a Booker Prize shortlister by Tim Winton, published in 1994. It’s a story about a husband who comes to Ireland, with his wife and daughter about to join him later. But now he misses the former — literally — and only the daughter arrives at the airport he’s come to receive them from. Now father and daughter need to find her.

Berger will be adapting a film from a book for the fourth time with his collaboration with Brad Pitt, after his 2022 and 2024 Oscar stunners alongside his upcoming film The Ballad of a Small Player, starring Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton.

Who is producing the film?

Investitures 2024: Ridley Scott and Mary Earps Among Recipients - Source: Getty

The news comes from Deadline, where the entertainment publication mentions Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions, Edward Berger’s Nine Hours, and Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment.

Scott Free Productions has films like Gladiator (2000), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), The A-Team (2010), and more to its name. Its upcoming projects include Echo Valley, Trap House, and more.

Berger’s Nine Hours banner, which he recently set up, had a deal with Fremantle, a content distributor. According to the agreement, Fremantle will house all the Nine Hours projects for the next two years. That happened in February 2023; we don’t know if the agreement was renewed.

For the third production partner, Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment also worked on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford with Scott Free Productions. In 2013, it also produced the Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, and more.

Do we know the story of the upcoming Brad Pitt film?

German premiere of the feature film "Bullet Train - Source: Getty

We don’t know the story of the film, but we do know the original story from the Tim Winton novel. It revolves around Fred Scully, the story’s lead, whom Brad Pitt will be playing.

It begins with what appears to be a peaceful life the Scully family is looking forward to — they are about to shift to a cottage in Ireland. He is at an airport to receive his wife and daughter when things take a sudden turn and go down in flames for the man. His wife goes missing, and he comes close to insanity.

When we saw Pitt in 1999 alongside Edward Norton in David Fincher’s Fight Club, he portrayed a character who manipulated Norton’s unnamed narrator. This will be an interesting one. Something like that happened with one of Pitt’s characters in Seven (1995). Though reminiscent of Seven in tone, this story appears to take a different emotional direction.