In an interview years later, Tom Dicillo said that "Johnny Suede," his first feature film, was the product of a "shooting nightmare." According to Dicillo, Brad Pitt (Johnny Suede) played the character as if he recently had a "frontal lobodomy." There was even a suggestion in the interview that Pitt willfully dumbed-down the character despite Dicillo's direction to play him as an ordinary mixed-up guy "just trying to figure things out." There was even a hint that Pitt was intentionally sabotaging the shoot as buzz began to circulate that he was destined for stardom (think Thema & Louise). However, I believe he was simply too good an actor to take a character like Johnny without irony. Dicillo considers the movie a failure and said that he was forced to leave in strange, awkward scenes because he simply had no choice (read money) to shoot them again.

"Johnny Suede" remains forever a puzzle. Is Johnny brain-dead or really a perfect symbol for a fallen and lost humanity? Nobody knows...Perhaps, the wasteland in which the action takes place is merely a sign of low-budget, low-awareness-film-making, or is it a deeper, more spiritual wasteland, one in which we all inhabit? Do we, like Johnny, need to have a shoe tossed into our face to understand the true nature of love. Is Tom Dicillo just writing about himself, or did he really intend to make one of the dreamiest, way-cool films about love and art? Nobody knows...