'Burn After Reading' cast fueled by Coen brothers' humor

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TORONTO -- Leading-man roles are good for the ego, concedes Brad Pitt, whose ego would seem to need no enhancement these days. Wherever he goes, hysteria follows."The leading-man role is usually the guy who's got the answers, who can figure things out and defuse the bomb within seconds and is all experienced, and all of that is pretty good for the ego sometimes," Pitt told a press conference where (in a rarity) tickets were dispensed to prevent interlopers."It's much more fun to play the guys who make the wrong choices, have limited experience and make the wrong presumptions and then have to deal with it from there, and I think that's the fun we had with this one."The personal trainer Pitt portrays in "Burn After Reading" is among what producers/directors/writers Joel and Ethan Coen affectionately call their "dolts and knuckleheads." George Clooney has his own "trilogy of idiots" from "Burn," "Intolerable Cruelty" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"Clooney wasn't at the press conference, but the Coens were, flanked by Pitt, Tilda Swinton and John Malkovich at a table on a dais bookended by the movie's red posters.Pitt's hair is back to normal after its brush with a bad blond streak in the film, and he was the focus of many, but not all, of the questions that ranged from choices about composer and cinematographer to the vulgarity-laced vocabulary of Malkovich's character."Burn" mines laughs from a missing memoir written by an angry ex-CIA analyst, a middle-aged woman hell-bent on plastic surgery, a can-do personal trainer and a couple of cheating spouses. An attempt at blackmail goes tragically awry and not everyone makes it out of this wacky world alive."We sort of wanted to do a spy movie; it didn't exactly turn out that way," Joel Coen said. "Like most of our stuff, it's not really meant to be a comment on Washington. ... It's really about these particular characters," although Linda Tripp provided a vague early blueprint for Frances McDormand's Linda Litzke.A member of the Canadian press asked if the brothers "think history is made by idiots rushing into things with a single-mindedness? Do you think this is sort of the way of the world, perhaps George W. Bush, even?"Joel, who often takes the lead, started to answer and then deferred to Ethan, who sidestepped the landmine and concluded, "It's certainly not about George Bush or anything specific politically. ... We've all got the inner knucklehead, and, again, it's kind of good fodder for stories."The actors praised the brothers for fostering a calm, fun, efficient movie set with short, easy, laughter-filled working days.Malkovich, who speaks like an erudite tenured professor, said that's "partially because they're both very good and a little bit because there are two of them and nothing gets out of the infield. Things are seen, things are noted, things are remarked upon and that isn't always the case."Or things are noted and laughter still spills over in unexpected ways."There is a scene in 'Fargo' where Steve Buscemi is slogging through the snow trying to bury this money in the snow, and he kept sinking up to his waist, and I think even in the finished movie you can hear me laughing," Joel said. His brother chimed in, "We left it in, it kind of sounds like Steve breathing."Other sound bites:A hair-raising contest: "We had a kind of competition going on the set of who had the most ridiculous hair," Swinton said, conceding victory to Pitt. "We were all going for the Javier Bardem prize, and I went down the Mrs. Krabappel route," from "The Simpsons."On an invitation spurned: In "Burn," a character builds a device inspired, in part, by one at the Museum of Sex in New York, and the brothers offered to meet Clooney there so he could check it out. "And George said, 'That's all I need, to be seen coming out of the Museum of Sex with you guys,' " Joel recalled.On early lukewarm response to "Burn": "Well, you'd rather people like it than not," Ethan said, "even including critics."On life post-Oscar: Swinton, a Supporting Actress winner for "Michael Clayton," said it hasn't changed anything for her. "Pretty much everything I've done since I was going to do anyway, and occasionally people remind me there was this peculiar night that happened and it's sort of like a rather nasty dream. I'm sorry, it is; for those who are not so keen on standing up in front of 3 billion people, it's a kind of trauma. It would be all right if they sent it to you in the post."On what's next for Pitt: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," a Christmas release he calls "a bit of a love letter to New Orleans and a bit of a love letter to family and the people who make dents in your life along the way."(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri(at)post-gazette.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)