From New­sOK:

‘Remem­ber Me’ star Robert Pat­tin­son won’t for­get what ‘Twi­light saga’ has cre­ated him

NEW YORK — Robert Pat­tin­son is under­stand­ably a lit­tle fid­gety and dis­tracted these days. Every­where he goes, it seems, he’s fol­lowed by light­ning­like flashes and shutter-clicking hordes of paparazzi. When word gets out that he’s in town — and, some­how, it always does — screech­ing gag­gles of young female fans gather nearby and swoon over his every move.

So it is that the hunky, 23-year-old British star of the hot teen vam­pire films “Twi­light” and “New Moon” seems a bit pre­oc­cu­pied as he is ush­ered into a mid­town hotel suite to dis­cuss his new movie, “Remem­ber Me,” dur­ing a recent press event hosted by Sum­mit Entertainment.

Flanked by a team of stern, clock-watching pub­li­cists who admon­ish every­one around, “No pic­tures; no auto­graphs,” Pat­tin­son looks slightly sheep­ish as he’s handed a bot­tle of Fiji water and set­tles into a chair.

His hair tou­sled and his face fash­ion­ably stub­bled, he’s decked out in gray shirt, gray wind-breaker jacket and rum­pled dark jeans, appear­ing every bit the suc­ces­sor of moody-broody heart­throbs in the James Dean–Johnny Depp lineage.

“Remem­ber Me,” a con­tem­po­rary roman­tic drama about two young lovers strug­gling to deal with fam­ily rela­tion­ships dam­aged by untimely deaths, was shot on loca­tion around New York City, and Pat­tin­son admits through a series of rue­ful laughs that his red-hot celebrity made the pro­duc­tion a chaotic ordeal. Every­where they filmed, groupies and paparazzi crowded in and cre­ated turmoil.

“It’s weird,” Pat­tin­son said. “I did this film, and I hardly knew any­one on the crew because I couldn’t get out of my trailer, espe­cially the first month. I mean, I didn’t know any­one on the set. It was really odd.

“But at the same time, it’s really a quite nice les­son in dis­ci­pline because you lit­er­ally have to do it,” he said. “You can’t say, ‘I’m not per­form­ing until all these peo­ple go away.’ It was way more intense than any of the ‘Twi­light’ films even.”

Direc­tor Allen Coul­ter said he knew going in that Pattinson’s fever­ish celebrity would require extra lay­ers of secu­rity around the filming.

“I knew when Rob was going to the bath­room accom­pa­nied by about 14 guards that we had real secu­rity issues,” Coul­ter said. “I mean, we expected some­thing, but not what we got. Joe Reidy, a mas­ter­ful assis­tant direc­tor who’s been with DiCaprio work­ing with Scors­ese and oth­ers, even he was stag­gered by the inten­sity of it. It was tough.

“The first few days in par­tic­u­lar, when we had to get our foot­ing, Rob and the oth­ers man­aged to per­form inti­mate scenes when we had 30 to 50 guys on the side­lines with cam­eras, that we were barely able to con­trol, not to men­tion 700 to 1,000 young girls all vibrat­ing. It was not easy for the cast to act, and it was not easy for us to do our jobs.”

Despite rig­or­ous secu­rity efforts and lots of burly pro­duc­tion assis­tants to keep crowds at bay, “you sim­ply couldn’t defeat it,” the direc­tor said. “They (groupies) had inroads and ways of find­ing out where we were going to shoot. And we’d show up some­where at 5 a.m., and there would be girls stand­ing there wait­ing for us so they could see Rob walk from his trailer to the set. They’d see him for maybe 15 sec­onds. They’d wait all day for that.”

Still, Pat­tin­son, who went from a sup­port­ing role in two “Harry Pot­ter” movies to inter­na­tional star­dom as sexy vam­pire Edward Cullen in the first two films of “The Twi­light Saga” series, said he’s learn­ing to deal with the daunt­ing dis­trac­tions of fame.

“It really is just about blank­ing it out,” he said. “I mean, at the begin­ning I was hav­ing loads of prob­lems with it because it was really crazy. When we were film­ing around Wash­ing­ton Square Park, it was just com­plete may­hem. There was this one moment where one of the secu­rity guys saw me get­ting more and more and more angry with the paparazzi guys, and he said to me, ‘Imag­ine like going up and try­ing to hit one of them and miss­ing, right there in front of 40 cam­eras.’ And that was enough to break my rage. It didn’t really bother me after that.”

The noisy com­mo­tion of celebrity, how­ever, did detract from his per­for­mance, Pat­tin­son admitted.

“It makes you a lit­tle more self-conscious. I mean … yeah. You can’t really exper­i­ment with things. You can’t really do silly things to get your­self com­fort­able. So it did in a way detract. But at the same time, there is a cer­tain qual­ity to Tyler (his char­ac­ter) that’s a lit­tle bit clenched, that’s about sup­press­ing his emo­tions, so maybe it helped.”

Pat­tin­son said he received a valu­able les­son in han­dling the demands of celebrity with grace from co-star Pierce Bros­nan, who plays his emo­tion­ally with­hold­ing, busi­ness tycoon father in the film.

“Pierce did one thing the first night I went out to din­ner with him before we started shoot­ing,” Pat­tin­son said. “We were in this place, a sort of old-fashioned French restau­rant, and all these sort of banker-looking guys were there. They didn’t rec­og­nize me, but they obvi­ously rec­og­nized him, he was prob­a­bly like their idol, and Pierce said he noticed these peo­ple look­ing over.

“And I’m sit­ting there get­ting more and more self-conscious and ready to leave. And he goes over and intro­duces him­self to every­one at the table. And at first I thought, ‘You are com­pletely insane.’ But it worked so well. I mean, he talked to them for about a minute. And peo­ple did not look around after­wards, and you can tell that they’re going to go home and say, ‘Yeah, he’s such a nice guy.’

“And after that there was noth­ing weird about us being in the restau­rant,” Pat­tin­son said. “You’re no longer a kind of freak. But, of course, he’s got enor­mous con­fi­dence, so he can do that. If I did that, it would prob­a­bly look like I was try­ing to start a fight or something.”

Finally, Pat­tin­son said he is try­ing to main­tain a calm san­ity about his dizzy­ing fame and to be aware that it could go away as quickly as it came.

“I think it’s all really sim­ple,” he said thought­fully as han­dlers swooped in to wrap up the ques­tion­ing. “I mean, you look at how peo­ple are judged in the pub­lic arena, and I think the major­ity of peo­ple kind of get beaten by it, the peo­ple who are seen all the time. I mean, the less you’re seen then you’ll be all right. As long as you keep attempt­ing to make qual­ity films, then even­tu­ally your name stands for some­thing other than mean­ing­less celebrity. It’s a kind of dif­fi­cult bat­tle, but you have to make the work mean more than your celebrity. I think Johnny Depp has done that, and that’s what I’d like to do.”

Via Rob­PattzNews