VENICE LIDO, Italy – Brad Pitt and George Clooney were back at the Venice International Film Festival Sunday night for the first time since 2008 with the world premiere of their action comedy “Wolfs.”

Written and directed by Jon Watts, who scored with a super-successful trilogy of Spider-Man films, “Wolfs” pits the two leads as comical antagonists engaged in a spectacularly elaborate chase sequence through lower Manhattan and Chinatown.

The starry duo have teamed together in the “Ocean’s” films, while their earlier Venice outing was for the Coen brothers’ satirical “Burn After Reading” (which co-starred Frances McDormand who makes a cameo appearance in “Wolfs”).

“We kind of figured there’s got to be good reason to get back into a film together,” Clooney, 63, said sitting next to Pitt, 60, at a pre-premiere press conference.

“Something we feel like we could build upon what we’ve done before,” Pitt added. “But also, I would say, just as I get older, I just enjoy working with the people that I just really enjoy spending time with. That’s really become important to me.”

“Jon came with this idea about getting us together as these cleaners. Both think they’re the best,” Clooney said of these men who specialize in making crime scenes, bodies, whatever, disappear.

“We liked the idea,” Pitt continued, “and Jon wrote this first draft. We read it, and I said, ‘Great! George, read it.’ He said, ‘Great.’ ”   Clooney marveled at how unusually easy and quick it all was. “What’s ever happened where you just get an idea. And you get the first draft of the script. And that’s what you end up shooting? Usually, there’s years of development.”

“Wolfs” opens for a one-week limited theatrical run Sept. 20, then streams on AppleTV+ Sept. 27.

Brody’s ‘Brutalist’

Adrien Brody won his Best Actor Oscar as a Holocaust survivor and now in “The Brutalist,” which world premiered Sunday night at the Venice International Film Festival, he plays another Holocaust survivor.

The difference this time is his László Tóth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who emigrates to Pennsylvania, is the creation of the film’s married team, screenwriter Mona Fastvold and director and co-writer Brady Corbet.

“It’s such a beautiful thoughtful character and it’s fiction but feels very real to me,” Brody, 51, said in the festival press conference. “For me to embody a character and make him real is not only to represent the past but remind us that so many things in our present we must learn from.

“László is a beautifully written and constructed character on the page and one I felt immediate kinship and understanding. For my mother’s a New York photographer Sylvia Plachy and also a Hungarian immigrant. She fled Hungary in 1956 in the Revolution and was a refugee and emigrated to the US. Like László she pursued the dream of being an artist. I understand the repercussions and the effect on her art parallel László’s creations and how postwar psychology influenced her work and all aspects of her life.”

Adrien Brody poses for photographers at the photo call for the film ‘The Brutalist’ during the 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Sunday. (Photo by Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP)