Brad Pitt is calling from France, where he's living with Angelina Jolie and
their adopted kids, Maddox and Zahara, to talk about a project close to his
heart. No, not impending fatherhood, or his upcoming movie about Jesse James.
Instead, the 42-year-old superstar is pumped about a PBS documentary, Rx for
Survival-The Heroes, which profiles people who have found solutions to world
medical crises. "We wanted a celebrity who had done work on global health and
poverty issues," says senior producer Lisa Mirowitz of her search for a
narrator. "He was down-to-earth, patient and very educated about these topics."
We couldn't agree more.
You're a $20-million-a-picture superstar. Why stop to do this
project? The ultimate reason, of course, is that everybody matters
equally. There's a great imbalance when you see so many people dying-especially
kids-from mosquito bites or diarrhea. It tells me more should be done. And the
main reason is that these kinds of issues don't seem to make our print and
airtime. We're not getting this information. And our society has great ingenuity
and great empathy and we could create more change.
So America's not doing enough to combat global poverty and
disease? I'm not saying that. I'm saying we don't know enough. It's
just not on our front page. What I like about the series is not only does it
make the humanitarian argument, but it also makes the self-interest
argument-that we should be paying attention to global health because diseases
can certainly spread. We're all sitting in the same petri dish...hold on...one
of my kids' toys is going off... OK, I got it.
The documentary is about humanitarian heroes. Who are your
heroes? The survivors. The people who are fighting every day under
horrible circumstances to provide for their families.
Was there a wake-up moment for you? Well, for me, someone
who's so fortunate, it became a question about equality. We may have all been
created equally, but we're not born equally.
What have you seen that breaks your heart? You hold these
children, who have already lost their parents to these diseases-TB, AIDS,
malaria-and you know how vulnerable they are. And I look at them and I can't
help but ask, "What is their future?" And my response is, "This is
unacceptable." But I don't limit it to children-it's the families that really
break my heart.
So what can people do? It's more than just witnessing it and
saying it's a terrible situation. This should be our focus: the solution. This
is where Bono has been very successful. Bono is a wonderfully dedicated beast
unto himself. I find him very inspiring. But the Web site related to the
documentary-pbs.org/rxforsurvival-provides links [to] ways for people to get
involved.
Did you learn anything from Rx for Survival? I did. I
learned about how simple some of the solutions can be, like adding vitamin A to
a child's diet prevents river blindness. As the documentary shows, vitamin A
costs 2 cents for a dose. A bed net [to prevent malaria] is a third the price of
a CD. These things aren't out of reach.
Are you planning any more humanitarian trips right now?
What's next? No. My plan right now is to have a child...
Right. Congratulations! So can I ask- [Laughs] I'm
absolutely not going to talk about that here.
OK. Well then, congratulations on doing a good thing and on getting
yourself educated about some issues. Yeah, who'd have thought?