Brad Pitt talks Moneyball at TIFF Press Conference

The first press conference of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival – a gathering of director and stars led by ubiquitous Brad Pitt for the baseball memoir “Moneyball” – filled itself with a lot of theoretical and serious talk about the sport, until a reporter near the front representing Hungary and Australia spoke up.

In slightly fractured English, the reporter asked a winding question about obstacles Pitt had faced in life, somehow throwing in a strange career assessment and the star’s past as People magazine’s sexiest man in the world.

“That’s just in general, right?” long-haired Pitt, who plays current Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane in the film, said with a bit of offhand sting from the centre of the press conference podium.

Yep. One official press conference into this year’s TIFF, and the press run is already sanding everything down into banalities and the slightly ridiculous. But Pitt, obligingly, made the best out of it.

“Um…,” Pitt continued, “I grew up in a very Christian environment. A healthy environment. A loving family. But there were parameters and things that I didn’t understand. I’ve always questioned it. And it took me until my adult years and leaving home where I could really try on something different in myself.

“That was Satanism,” Pitt said, to laughter from the crowd. “It’s working out really well. I’ve made a pact. The movie came out, so, well….”

At heart, though, “Moneyball” is an engaging look into the recent history of a sport that had, at the start of the millennium, become a somewhat predictable contest of big-budget behemoths cruelly taking out scrappy, small-market teams. Based on the 2003 book by Michael Lewis, “Moneyball” tracks the innovative partnership between Beane and a Yale nerd with a head for figures and Bill James’ “Baseball Abstract” – a kid named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, showing up at the press conference newly slim and championing a character based on current New York Mets executive Paul DePodesta) – and how they managed to massage tight ownership coffers into a winning team.

Beane brought the Athletics to within a hair of the World Series in 2001, ultimately losing out in the last game of an American League series against the New York Yankees – eventual Series winners, and a team with three times the budget of the A’s. When A’s owner Steve Schott refused to keep up with the sudden salary demands of his sudden stars Johnny Damon and Jason Giambi, Beane was forced to square one – and that’s where he gathered a no-name powerhouse that won a record 20 games straight and again faced those big-money Yankees in the 2002 playoffs.

But director Bennett Miller – who brought out the shading in author Truman Capote in 2005 and led Philip Seymour Hoffman to Oscar glory in “Capote” – also colours in the past of Beane’s passion for the game and the mistakes he doesn’t want to repeat. A phenom who forsook college for a big contract with the New York Mets, Beane never lived up to expectations on the field and bounced around the majors and minors before ending his playing career with the Athletics in 1989, after only six seasons.

“I just related to that kind of a very personal kind of – you look for something that’s a common system… and you find yourself very much on your own, with nothing to hold on to,” Pitt said of his “Moneyball” role. “And, so… this film, I know there’s something in it there that connects for me.”

The press conference began nearly half an hour after its scheduled noon start, though that gave media representatives plenty of time to settle in to the new long and winding scheme of such events at TIFF.

Under a new structure this year, reporters and photographers are crammed into regulation-sized elevators and hauled up to a sixth-floor room for the press conference. So, the trail is slow, the lineups long, the room shoulder-to-shoulder with buzzing news staff – and it looks like a few more festival kinks need to be worked out. Last year, press conferences were held at larger, portioned hotel ballrooms at the nearby Hyatt Regency Hotel, and for years previous, midtown at the Sutton Place Hotel. (Festival organizers and volunteers referred media to rooms with feeder video, so when MSN ultimately made it to the actual press conference, there were a few seats still available here and there.)

In the end, the appearances by Pitt, Hill, Miller, Hoffman (who plays Athletics manager Art Howe) and relative newcomer Chris Pratt, who plays scared-stiff catcher-turned-first-baseman Scott Hatteburg. In the end, Pratt emerged the most excited guy in the room, the underdog of an underdog story.

“I didn’t ask him, like ‘Hey, how do I deal with superstardom one day?’” Pratt joked about working with Pitt. “That’s a little presumptuous. I didn’t mean to say that I’ve never been actor. But, similar to Scott Hatteburg, I’m more of, like – we all are actors who do this for a living, but in baseball, there’s Derek Jeter, and then there’s Hatteburg… Don’t get me wrong: I’m really famous in my hometown.”

-Seán Francis Condon - MSN.ca

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