“It seems that the people who suffer the most end up betting for the party that would hurt them,” he goes on. “And so I try to understand where they’re coming from.” When I suggest that money has a lot to do with it — Belgium supporting Tutsi control over the Hutus, and building resentment, prompted genocide — he agrees. But a recent conversation he had with a scholar from the Brookings Institution, the Washington, D.C. think tank, sparked a different view, one where the cause of strife can’t be explained by simple economics. “You gotta understand,” he says, “that it’s also in our DNA. Most Americans don’t have time to watch CNN and Fox and Al Jazeera. They’re trying to make the rent, get the kids fed, they’re tired when they get home and they want to forget about everything. And so suddenly when this voice comes in — and it doesn’t have to be a voice of substance — saying he’s fed up with all of this, that’s the part that hooks into the DNA.”

A fair point to consider, that our social behaviors, prejudices and even the mental process of who we choose to love or hate is rooted in biology, but how does this convince people to actually buy what Trump is selling? “What I’m most hopeful about is that we’re a global neighborhood now, and we start to understand each other more and more — and yet, you see this reactionary push for isolation and separation again.” Pitt shrugs, and says that he thinks a lot of people feel alone, and on a certain level, again because of his background, he knows what that’s like. “A Trump supporter is fighting against just about everything,” he says. “What does he even mean, take our country back? Would someone please explain that to me?” Pitt looks at me, impish and totally serious at the same time. “Where’d it go?”

4. Brad Pitt and I agree about Mel Gibson.

Like his friend and “Inglourious Basterds” director Quentin Tarantino, Pitt’s scholarship in the craft of the medium has mostly been the medium itself. More than that, film was for him a window into the world. “Movies were a way out,” he says. “If you live in a vacuum and suddenly you’re exposed to the world, you’re exposed to other cultures. And remember, this was pre-internet. This was the only lens that could show me how a kid in Brooklyn lived, a kid in Ireland, a kid in Africa.”

On the topic of exotic worlds, he mentions a film he’d like to make about Pontius Pilate, mostly because the script, which focuses on a mediocre Roman official stuck in the middle of nowhere with difficult people he doesn’t like, makes him smile. Jesus doesn’t get much screen time. “It certainly won’t be for the ‘Passion’ crowd,” he says, which reminds me that Mel Gibson’s torture-porn epic is one of the things that drove me out of the church. Pitt bursts into laughter. “I felt like I was just watching an L. Ron Hubbard propaganda film.”

Xenu aside, Gibson movies typically do one thing really well: violence. “Oh, extremely well,” Pitt says. “ ‘Apocalypto’ is a great film.”

Image ON THE COVER Brad Pitt is featured in T’s Sept. 11 Men’s Style issue. Credit... Photograph by Craig McDean. Styled by Jason Rider

5. Brad Pitt’s “I’m getting old” joke is better than yours.

It’s easy to forget that the man is 52 — if anything he’s too skinny — but his children’s interest in relics from the past regularly drives home the point. One of his daughters, for example, loves cassette tapes the way someone Pitt’s age might have a fondness for the gramophone, or making his own daguerreotype. He’s also reminded of his age on set. “When I was making a World War II movie called ‘Fury,’ we did this boot camp for a week, and Logan Lerman, who was the youngest actor of the bunch — I think he was 21 — was given grunt detail. We gave him a watch and he had to keep track of how long it took us to eat and get in and out of our gear. One day he came to me and said the watch has stopped, and I said, ‘You’ve just got to wind it.’ He came back literally 15 minutes later and said, ‘Wait, how do you wind it?’ ”