Brad Pitt and Jesse James could have been twins in superstardom, as Alison Jones discovered when she met the heartthrob actor.
 Brad Pitt and his partner Angelina Jolie, together with their "rainbow family" of four children, are used to living life pursued by a posse of photographers and journalists.
While wars and natural disasters may rage elsewhere in the world, these media hounds are ready to sate the hunger of the couple's fans and admirers, caught up by the drama and romanticism of their union and envious of their apparently glamorous lifestyle.
Look back 100 years and it is exactly the same story for one of America's first bona-fide celebrities. A man who lived a life or romance and drama, his myth perpetuated by the stories of his courage and daring that appeared in cheap novellas and newspapers.
His fans admiring his roguish heroism and the glamorous lifestyle he must he must have been funding through his crimes (when he wasn't donating the proceeds to the poor). Brad Pitt and Jesse James could have been twins in superstardom. They even came from the same state. Although Pitt was born in Oklahoma he grew up up in Springfield, Missouri, less than 200 miles from Jesse's childhood home in Kearney, Missouri. They share a southern sensibility and an enigmatic charm that draws people to them. It was almost inevitable that William Bradley Pitt would one day play America's answer to Robin Hood. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford deals, as the rather plot-revealing title indicates, with Jesse's final year, when a member of his gang finally achieved what no law man could and gunned down the most famous criminal in America. "There are aspect of the celebrity that I can understand," says Brad, promoting the film in Deauville in France as part of a whistle stop tour of the festival circuit that he was making, accompanied by Angelina. "I certainly understand being hunted, having a bounty on my head - though, fortunately, no one has pointed guns at me. "Certainly Jesse is caught by his own celebrity. He is weary of living an alias (in the famous folk song recently covered by Bruce Springsteen and sung by Nick Cave in the film, Jesse is called Mr Howard) and has really lost himself in the perpetuation of this outlaw life. "The other interesting aspect of celebrity is the case of Robert Ford, which is applicable today - the blind want for fame without any real understanding for the consequences. Seeing it as a personal validity." At 19 to Jesse's 34, Robert Ford, portrayed by Casey Affleck who, like Brad Pitt has been blessed by sufficiently good genes that he is able to convincingly play a man a decade younger, had been raised on tales of Jesse's daring. And as in the case of Mark Chapman and John Lennon, he was to kill the man he professed to most love and admire. Jesse James fought on the side of the Confederates during the Civil War. He and his brother Frank continued the struggle after the fighting was over by robbing banks, then trains and stagecoaches together with the Younger brothers. Biased newspaper coverage cast him as a symbol of Rebel defiance while the fact he stuck mostly to robbing the train safes, rather than its passengers, perpetuated his image as a man who would prey only on the rich. Like modern day stars, Jesse even had his own publicist and champion in the form of Kansas City newspaper editor John Newman Edwards. "This film is really a disassembly of a myth, one he helped to perpetuate" says Brad. "He was known as a Robin Hood character but his exploits were somewhat dubious. Our film starts at the end of all that, when he and Robert Ford come into collision and collusion." The movie begins with Frank and Jesse's final robbery. However, while the more straightforward and pragmatic Frank (Sam Shepard) is able to walk away from this and start afresh, Jesse can't. He becomes increasingly isolated, tormented by thoughts that the members of his gang, which by then includes Robert Ford and his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell), will betray him. The ending is as much written in historical stone as the sinking of the Titanic, but the film suggests that Jesse engineers his own destruction, leaving Ford with no choice but to kill or be killed. "I had a pretty good blueprint for the character from the script. It is really about keeping the reigns on this mercurial aspect that worked as a reflex to knowing or believing there was an inevitable end for him," explains Brad. Directed by Andrew Dominik, whose first movie Chopper was about the notorious Australian outlaw, and adapted from the novel by Ron Hansen. this is the type of western for which the word elegiac was coined. There are sweeping vistas and much brooding by Brad. There is also a convincing sense of reality. One gunfight, for instance, is staggering in its ineptitude as the inexperienced gunslingers manage to hit everything but their targets. It has clearly been a labour of love for the film makers, who include Brad, acting as producer under the banner of his company Plan B. There have been stories that Dominik's vision of a contemplative piece differed from that of the studio, who wanted more action, and led to a year long delay between its completion and release. "That's a good story but that is not the case. It is a very complex slow burn, 70s style of story telling with a lot of psychology," says Brad. "We were fortunate to have the time to get it in the state we thought it needed to be in. The first version was four and a half hours long and I thought it was fantastic." Erring more towards the art house than the action genre, Assassination was given a fairly limited release in the States (initially only five screens for its opening weekend). It has met with a largely favourable reception and the performances have been praised, although some critics have carped that, as a whole, it is too long and ponderous. But producer Brad, who has a reputation for favouring unconventional projects such as Babel, Seven Years in Tibet and even Fight Club, as much as he does obvious crowd pleasers like Mr and Mrs Smith and the Ocean's trilogy, believes that time will be the judge. "For me the choice or decision to take on a film is certainly not calculated as far as doing something successful or something that may only have a small audience. "It is all a crap shoot to me. I don't really bet on the horses, I just go with the story that speaks to me and which I feel strongly about and, more importantly the people that are surrounding it and that I am surrounded by. "As far as this attracting a bigger audience goes, I don't think that way. I believe that all good films find their time, whether it is the opening weekend or sometime later. Certainly it is true of some of my favourites that might relate to this one - Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, or McCabe & Mrs Miller or Days of Heaven. I found these 10 to 20 years after they were made. My main concern is quality, that is it to me. I keep it very simple." * The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is released in the UK on November 30
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