Robert Pattinson interview from Cannes in Swedish ‘Dagens Nyheter’ newspaper

The vampire star doesn’t hold back when it comes to his image. His latest movie, “Cosmopolis” is set in a limo, where he lives with daily prostate examinations and customer visits.

Robert Pattinson is walking with a cup of coffee in one hand a red lollipop in the other hand at the hotel’s restaurant, at the rooftop in Cannes. He manages to not look like a moviestar which is very clever because everybody follows the moviestars in Cannes, and it’s like you can almost feel the air crackles of static electricity.

But that doesn’t seem to bother this 26-years-old british man. He talks, laughs and is excited and often sounds, frankly, like he was a few years younger and not a young veteran with experience from a dozen feature films.
-It was so weird at the screening yesterday, cause I didn’t even see the movie, I just sat there and listened if someone coughs. I just sat there and thought -”Oh God, please let it go well, oh god please!”

So little, it helps the confidence to have been involved in a “Harry Potter” film, and that after having been a handsome vampire in four Twilight movies, be a superstar and dream guy for 3 billion teenage girls. He had a particular reason to worry. The film “Cosmopolis” is not digestible. It is based on a novel by the esteemed American writer Don DeLillo from 2003. Pattinson plays an immensely rich and bizarre young businessman who travels in a huge limousine through a city – they associates to New York- in the uprising. The car is his office, at various stops employees jumps in to bring him into the world situations and the business. It’s bad made on all fronts, class war rages, his own empire is about to collapse, as well as his marriage. Nothing seems unperturbed Pattinson’s character, which, although it is becoming more violent on the streets are determined to go straight through town to get a haircut.

The Canadian David Cronenberg directs, so viewers get guaranteed no help in understanding this odd vision of the future. The film takes place almost entirely in the limo.
- Well it looks weird, the script, but for me the most difficult part of the job was to determine whether I would take the role or not. I wondered if I could really do this. A week after David asked me, I thought on the one hand that “I know it is a great story and it’s Cronenberg that’s going to direct so it’s really a cool deal.” And on the other hand, “You’re on camera the whole time and if you fuck up, you will fuck up the whole movie.”

Rob pulled himself together when he realized that the only reason to say no would be that he did not dare. He would be forced to admit that to the producer. – “They’ll think I’m a wimp, I can not say it,” I thought.
At a later conversation with David came Rob’s fear: “All actors are always afraid of something,” said the white-haired director. After “Cosmopolis” can noone accuse Robert Pattinson of holding back with his image.

To his character’s oddities, is that every day he undergoes a thorough medical examination. It includes that the doctor checks the prostate. That is, the extract, in the limo while Pattinson is having a conversation with his associate Juliette.When Pattinson describes his collaboration with Cronenberg, you get a picture of how the former jumped like a little eager puppy funt feet on the latter, which is more like the one to take each day as it comes.

-I always wanted to talk about the complexity of the script, but he said: “Just wait until we are on the set and the time, when we are in the limo, you will understand how to act.”
If Cronenberg did not manage to find a good way to take the stage that was at today’s recording schedule he simply jumped to another. Pattinson admired his self-confidence, but it was hard: -You had to know the entire script and be prepared to take on any scene anywhere.

Pattinson has a reputation that he read diligently, but DeLilo is a writer that he has discovered only in connection with this job. Lately, he has to his own surprise, “it’s weird” – stuck for poetry. He has fallen for American Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “though I’m not so fond of the beat writers.”
As Cronenberg promised, the limo helped. A real car was used, divided into so that you could take it apart in about twenty parts. During the shots, there was only one remote camera, a sound engineer, stowed so that he did not appear, and so Pattinson and have currently played against.

- You could not see out, the windows were completely black. It was so quiet, as in a recording studio, the air was completely dead. It’s weird. You become aware of the sound of your own voice.
Rob got used to it and surprised to his delight that it gave him the upper hand when he played against the actors, he was a little afraid of, like Binoche, who was now a little shaken up by the strange environment. The luxuriously equipped coffin look-a-like limo helped the creation of the complex billionaire Eric Packer.

- They say you have to share the world with all the other people. He is apparently quite convinced that he can live in his own world, where he forces everyone else to communicate on his terms. Pattinson seems on the other hand not sure about most things. At an early Los Angeles screening of “Cosmopolis” he managed for once to see one of his own movies and really see it because it was such a ‘David’ movie. “Otherwise, Rob usually sit and feels so tormented by the sight of himself – “Oh Jesus, I look like an idiot, what am I doing with my face?”

Sure he doubts himself, he answers when we ask him a question. You have to: – As soon as you start believing that you are good, you become useless. Though it’s a exhausting way to live.

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Then the director snared Pattinson, one of the hottest actors on the planet. But “Cosmopolis,” which opens locally Friday, is not a multiplex-ready entertainment or even a horror film. Based on a novel by Don DeLillo (“White Noise”), it’s a day in the life of a paranoid billionaire who runs his empire, beds his lover and checks his prostate in the back seat of a limo that’s circling Manhattan.

To get the movie made, Cronenberg, 69, had to enter the sanctum of the same kind of kingpin who is satirized in the movie.

“One of our investors in this film is known as the French Warren Buffet,” Cronenberg told me when I passed the distributor’s background check and was able to chat with him on the phone recently. “One of the reasons he wanted to get involved is because he says he deals with people like Robert’s character all the time. They live in a kind of bubble of unreality. They handle billions of dollars every day but they never really touch money. He felt that this story was strangely accurate.

The ace up Cronenberg’s sleeve was Pattinson, who attracted investors and then delivered a performance that leveraged his vampire persona from the “Twilight” movies. “I don’t mind the metaphor of a blood-sucking businessman,” Cronenberg said, “but by the end of the movie, as he’s thinking about his past and visiting his childhood barber, he’s a much more vulnerable character.

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Robert Pattinson and David Cronenberg interview with The Columbus Dispatch. Part of it was posted here.

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This Q&A happened during Cosmopolis promo in Europe - On May 30th in Paris, but it’s the first time we have video from it.

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Interview with OREGON

Given the heavy New York atmosphere of the film, it’s something of a surprise that Cronenberg should have chosen the British actor Robert Pattinson for the lead role. Pattison is best known, of course, for the relatively featherweight demands of the “Twilight” films, which reveal little of the heavy, internal and intellectual stuff that “Cosmopolis” demands. After declaring that “casting is a black art: there’s no rule book to guide you,” Cronenberg explains that he watched some of Pattinson’s non-“Twilight” work, especially “Little Ashes,” in which he played the young Salvador Dalí, and felt he’d found his man. Still, he admits, there is, in all such matters, a leap of faith.

“It’s just intuiting that he can do the role,” he says. “Because you’re asking him here to do things he hasn’t done before. But I was convinced by the time that I had done all my work that he was the right guy. I knew he was good, and he surprised me by how good he was.”

Interview with IFC WARNING: Contains Spoilers.

IFC: You mentioned wanting to see great actors speak the dialogue, and the movie is filled with them. But I’m curious about Robert Pattinson, who’s still a young actor and doesn’t have nearly as much experience as some of the supporting cast, but has a massive following. When you have a project like this, do you do more tailoring of the script to fit his strengths, or more work with him to match his abilities and talents to the material?
CRONENBERG: For all the actors, you don’t really know what you’re going to get. Except for some auditions that a few actors did for certain roles, I never heard the dialogue spoken until we were shooting. With Rob in particular, I never heard that particular dialogue spoken until we were shooting. You go into filming with confidence that you have the right guy, but you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. There’s a very organic thing that goes on in “Cosmopolis” that’s very spontaneous, because until Robert’s sitting in the limo with the actual actor opposite him who he’s playing the scene with — and there are so many different actors who come in and out of that limo — he doesn’t know how he’s going to react, because he’s not acting in a vacuum. He’s reacting to the other actor… . For example, the very first scene we shot was in the limo with Jay Baruchel. Rob was shocked by how Jay was playing it, because he was playing it with so much emotion and vulnerability, and Rob had never anticipated that. So he had to react to that. That’s the excitement of the movie: you mix all of these things that are potent and good, but you don’t really know what you’re going to get from that.

IFC: It’s sort of like cooking…
CRONENBERG: [Laughs] Yes, it is. It’s like cooking a meal you’ve never made before.

IFC: On the subject of changes form the source material, I’m going to get into spoiler territory here for a moment and ask you about the end of the movie and how it differs from the book. The movie leaves things more uncertain than the book, it seems…
CRONENBERG: It’s hard to discuss without spoilers, but it would’ve been very easy to put a gunshot on the soundtrack and you would know that Eric was murdered. And in the book you know that he’s murdered, or at least if you believe Benno, he’s been murdered — but that’s the thing, because Benno is not exactly a trustworthy narrator. In the book there is still some scope for uncertainty as to Eric’s fate, but as we were shooting that last scene, I loved that these two guys were frozen in that last moment — almost frozen in an eternity of uncertainty. They’re bound together. They’re locked together in this sort of archetypal moment. I thought the moment should be eternal.

IFC: I can picture you going, “And cut it right… there!”
CRONENBERG: [Laughs] Basically, yeah. So it was more like that than a dramatic thing. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I can’t stand to have this character killed,” or “Rob’s fans won’t like it if I shoot Robert,” or anything like that. I wasn’t worry about that stuff. It was really spontaneous. As I mentioned, we could’ve easily made it clear that he’s killed, cutting to black with the sound of a gunshot.

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Here’s some screen caps we took from Robert Pattinson’s Kimmel interview :D

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This is an interview with Robert Pattinson from the Cosmopolis Promo in the UK earlier this year. We think it got missed in all the action happening at the time. Great little interview, read on…

Written-off Robert Pattinson as just another fleeting tween sensation? Then listen up. Because Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg’s smart adaptation of Don DeLillo’s futurist novel, is about to announce the 26-year-old Brit’s true arrival. LWLies met up with Pattinson recently to chat about the making of Cosmopolis and why he’ll always be up for a challenge.

LWLies: We were in Cannes when Cosmopolis first screened. How was that whole experience for you?
Pattinson: It was kind of terrifying, but mainly because I’ve never been to a premiere with potentially a hostile audience. It’s a film which could potentially be quite divisive because it’s quite wordy and in Cannes there’s the added complexity with the language barrier. I remember sitting there and looking around at all these blank faces. No one was laughing. I genuinely thought it was going to get booed. I was so grateful it wasn’t savaged.

The whole Cannes booing thing is kind of a carnival, you can’t take it too seriously.
I know, I know. But then David [Cronenberg] was telling me about when Crash screened and people were screaming in the audience. Like, actually going wild during the movie. And I was speaking to Gaspar Noé the other day and he was saying that with Irreversible everyone was yelling ‘How would you like it?!’ and all this nonsense. He was sitting next to the guy who plays the rapist [Jo Prestia] thinking, ‘Fuck, I’m going to get killed after this’.

Did it put you at ease being in David’s company?
Yeah, totally. He was really relaxed. The thing is, normally when you go to a premiere you don’t often stay for the whole movie, but in Cannes you sit through it wondering if you’re going to get clapped or booed afterwards. It’s a pretty terrifying experience and a strange environment to watch a film in. But I’d seen the film before Cannes and I knew I loved it, which is a pretty rare thing for me because I don’t normally like the stuff I’m in.

Was Cosmopolis something you chased or were you approached?
I read the script about a year before we made it. Someone sent it to me on the basis that it was just a really well-written script. I really liked it then but we didn’t act on it right away because initially Colin Farrell had been cast, but he dropped out and suddenly I was in a position to go for it.

What was it like working in an environment where you’re in a small closed set, in the back of a limo for most of the film, and you only share a few minutes of screentime with the other actors?
I worked with everyone for about two or three days, but actually the further we got into the shoot the less time the scenes took. So where the early scene with Jay Baruchel took, like, three or maybe four days, a the others were generally much shorter. After two weeks of shooting a movie you normally just relax into the routine of the work, but with Cosmopolis we had big names coming in every few days shooting their scenes and then going. It really keeps you on your toes and in many ways it’s like shooting loads of different, or smaller movies. But you get used to it and actually you get quite comfortable because you’re so familiar with the set.

Was it difficult having David direct you remotely from outside the limo?
It was a little odd a first. But you know I did this Harry Potter movie where we filmed a lot underwater, so I was kind of experienced in not having the director standing next to you. It was similar in some ways to that because you can’t see anything apart from what’s inside the limo and a camera that’s mounted on this remote-controlled crane. David always had the camera positioned incredibly close to your face as well, with a really wide lens on it. So you have a totally different relationship with the camera because normally you’re trying to communicate with the guy behind the camera, you ignore the camera. Here you’re doing everything for the camera, but it’s like no one’s watching, like no one’s ever going to see it. It’s like you’re close friends with this little machine.

Do you see this as a significant juncture in your career?
Not really because the film is so obscure. It’s not like everyone’s going to get it. But yeah, it’s definitely a good step in terms of my career and where I’d like to end up.

Having done a lot of mainstream films are smaller, more out-there films now more appealing to you?
Um, I mean… Sometimes. But it’s not like I went out looking for the highest risk project. To be honest what attracted me was working with David and the quality of the writing, which was just insane compared to some of the garbage I’d been reading around the time. I’d never read any Don DeLillo before, so it was a bit of an eye-opener. But I’m not looking for obscurities the whole time. The movies I’ve signed on to do after this aren’t quite as odd as this but they’re certainly artistically ambitious.

So few actors ever receive the level of exposure you have right now, do you feel a pressure to try to maintain that by taking on bigger roles?
I don’t really know. If I could stay at a level where I was consistently working then I’d be happy. But I can’t predict the way the industry is going to go. Things change so quickly, there are so many people who were huge a few years ago and now can’t even get a film made. Right now people seem to care about me, but I’m sure that won’t last. Frankly I find it all a bit absurd. I’m just trying to do as much interesting stuff as I can for as long as I can.

What do you love about movies?
I think it’s the easiest was to educate people about, like, a million things. I remember watching Godard movies when I was younger and being introduced to Henry Miller and from there discovering Tom Waits and suddenly you’ve learned so much. Cool movies taught me so much more than books in school ever did. I didn’t even realise I was interested in working in movies when I was watching them when I was younger. Now I can’t imagine doing anything else.

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In casting Robert Pattinson, it’s kind of a double-edge sword, isn’t it? You have hisTwilight fans anxious to support him in whatever he chooses to do and then you have the people who dismiss him because he is ‘that guy from Twilight‘.

“Yeah. In a weird way, on the one hand of course I’m completely aware of all of those elements and also of course when you’re making a movie that for an independent movie was relatively expensive, you have to have a leading character who is very charismatic and who can carry the weight and has the star quality and so on, because you’re going to be looking at him. He’s literally in every scene in the movie, and that’s pretty unusual. I mean even in Tom Cruise movies, Tom is not in absolutely every scene of the movie – but Rob is. So he has to have that. But at the same time, you want to forget the movies, you know? You want to forget his movies and my movies because we’re creating this completely new thing and you don’t know what audience you’re going to get. You can anticipate it, you can think about it, but really you don’t know. So ultimately when you’re making the movie you’re saying, ‘Okay, I’m here with these actors. They’re wonderful actors, I cast them because they’re terrific and they will bring great stuff to the script,’ and then at that point you’re just making a movie and you’re not thinking about any other movie.”

Needing an actor to carry the film by being in every scene, how did you figure out Robert Pattinson was the right guy to play Eric?

[Laughing] “Well, this is the magic of casting! I think as a director, it’s part of your job. It’s a really important part of your job. I think a lot of people don’t even realize that the director’s involved in casting. Some people say, ‘Did you choose your actors?,’ and I say, ‘Yes. You’re not a director if you don’t.’”

“Of course, you’re juggling many things, like I say. You’re juggling, for example, their passports. This is a Canada / France co-production and we were limited to one American actor. Most people of course don’t know that – nor should they. Paul Giamatti is the only American in this movie even though it takes place in New York City. So from that kind of aspect to just finding the right guy…of course he’s got to be the right age, there are a lot of things that are just basic. And then after that, though, there are no rules. You as a director just have to intuit that this actor will be able to carry off this role.”

“We often talk about chemistry, for example, in movies between actors, let’s say. When I was doing A Dangerous Method, Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender - how do I know they have chemistry together because I had never seen them in a movie together? They’ve never been in one; they’ve never met each other. I don’t see them together until I’m actually directing them, so I have to be this kind of dating master who can anticipate that this couple will be good together. It’s a strange kind of thing. So you give yourself credit when it works, and you have to berate yourself when somehow it hasn’t worked. That’s basically where you’re left.”

It strikes me with Cosmopolis that the chemistry actually needed to come between you and Robert more so than between Rob and any of his co-stars.

“There’s truth in that too. That is the unspoken thing is the chemistry between the director and the actors is the key. And at a certain point I think Rob would…you know, he’s a serious actor and he didn’t want to be the one who was going to blow this movie. He was kind of thinking, ‘Well, I’ll be alone in that limo because I won’t have one person who is always playing opposite me. It’s really a one-man show with a lot of day players coming in.’ And I said, ‘No, you won’t be alone because I’ll be there. I’ll be with you every moment.’ And so that is a real element.”

Do you think that you view the character of Eric the same way that author DeLillo did? Or do you think that you two don’t necessarily agree on how an audience should look at him?

“I think we actually illuminate things for each other. I’ve been on the road doing publicity with Don in several countries and I think he was pretty intrigued by seeing what would happen. Because, after all, once you put Rob Pattinson in that role, that’s a very specific thing. You’ve got a particular face and a particular voice and a body, and that’s something that the novel can not have. That’s one of the things that movies can do that novels can not do, and so it immediately shapes the character in a way that he wasn’t shaped in the novel. So, there are differences, I think, but it’s not a major split or divergence. It’s just really shading and shaping things. It’s just really hearing the dialogue spoken, which was something that when I read the novel, I thought, ‘Yeah, I really want to hear this spoken by really great actors.’ Just doing that immediately changes your reaction to the characters and to the words. So there is a difference, definitely.”

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