A new Cannes press portrait of Robert Pattinson
Archive for May 27, 2012
New Cannes Portrait Leave a comment
Even More New HQ Pictures of Rob at the ‘Cosmopolis’ Premiere Leave a comment
*VIDEO* New Robert Pattinson interview with RTL 1 comment
Translation
Rob: When I read the sript, as soon as you read the script, it’s like: wow, it’s so different from anything I did before. It’s the kind of challenge I look for as an actor. I mean no one else but me got that role. And then I read the script, I really liked the style of it. It was well structured and really easy to read as well.
If Robert Pattinson made young girls fall in love with him, he only has eyes for her, Kristen Stewart, who became just as famous with the Twilight saga. For the both of them, it’s not as easy anymore to live a normal life.
Rob: There’s no point in worrying about it. And also, when you come to Cannes, you have to expect all this activity around you. People can think whatever they want.
Rob interview with Next Liberation: talks paparazzi, filming ‘Cosmopolis’ and Jacques Audiard 2 comments
Translation
Everywhere in the streets, Robert Pattinson sees himself on posters, magazines covers and tells himself: This isn’t me. “I don’t recognize my face, my hair, nothing. It’s like an out of body experience.”
Yet standing on the terrace of a big hotel in the morning light, the lead of Cosmopolis, by David Cronenberg, looks like his image. Though, he’s more discret and soft, and above all more happy. He laughs all the time, his contagious cheerfulness that nothing disarms.Subtle. The eternal question on celebrity, for starters. The star of Twilight that caused a riot during his last visit at Cannes (security had to carry him out so he could escape 700 rabid fans), starts with a serious answer. “The most frustrating is to know that it isn’t me they like or hate. To know that I serve as a support to a feeling that has nothing to do with me.” He think for a bit. “The paparazzi, you get used to them. But it’s still weird to see those guys who decided to be assholes their whole lives. You feel like telling them: ‘Why did you chose that job?’ Everyone hates you!'” And then he starts laughing so hard he can’t stop. “It’s like people who give you parking tickets. You watch them, they all seem so happy! Mhhh cool, I’m gonna ruin someone’s day!”
When David Cronenberg called him, he jumped with joy and then with fear. His working method was different for the actor. “David didn’t do rehearsals. A few days before the movie started, I called him. ‘Don’t you think we should talk about it a little?’ He told me: ‘Oh no, don’t worry about it. It’ll come on its own.'” On the set, he tried the old method. “I would lock myself all day in the limo to live like my character. I was hot, sweating and sleeping. They had to shake me to wake me up.” On the third day, he finally got out.
He claims that working with David Cronenberg gave him confidence. “I would look at the end of Twiight approaching and I started asking myself questions ‘What to do, what are the right choices?'” Among his dreams, working with Jacques Audiard. “I love all his movies and his male characters are amazing. I would love to be like this.”
He lives in Los Angeles, like his girlfriend Kristen Stewart, a ‘particular’ life where he can’t really go out for a coffee but he won’t complain. One last anecdote: “When I go to restaurants, if I’m a little drunk … and that I see someone with a phone, I tell myself: ‘He’s taking a picture of me!'” He starts laughing again. “So I get up, pissed off, go to his table: ‘Show me your phone!'” He puts his hands on his sides. “Last time, I almost threw some guy’s phone through the window. He wasn’t he even taking a picture of me, he didn’t even now who I was!”
New Rob interview: talks ‘Twilight’ movies, Cosmopolis, Cannes, Kristen and even about his bodyguard Leave a comment
Robert Pattinson has gone from playing a vampire to depicting another kind of bloodsucker – a billionaire financier whose world crumbles in the course of a nightmarish cross-town drive in “Cosmopolis.”
The “Twilight” heartthrob stars in David Cronenberg’s Cannes Film Festival entry as sleek, self-centered moneyman Eric Packer, who sees his fortune and sense of self evaporate during an eventful day in his stretch limo.
Pattinson’s famously handsome face is on-screen in every scene, but “Twilight”`s young fans may be surprised and confused by a film that explores Cronenberg’s fascination with physical, social and psychic violence.
The 26-year-old actor is not worried.
“If some 12-year-olds went to go and see that, or got the video for their birthday – sitting down and watching that, it’s incredible,” the actor said during an interview on a Cannes hotel rooftop. “I would love that to happen if I was a kid.”
Read more after the jump!
New Robert Pattinson Interview with Viva Press UK Leave a comment
CANNES – Having ended his vampire duties, Robert Pattinson is working hard to establish himself as a leading man where his acting skills eclipse his heartthrob status. His new film, COSMOPOLIS, directed by David Cronenberg, is a bold step forward in that direction. Pattinson’s striking features are a perfect match for the film’s eerie plotting that owes just as much to Cronenberg’s macabre vision as it does to the original source material, Don DeLillo’s eponymous novel. Making its world premiere as part of the Cannes Film Festival’s official competition, COSMOPOLIS sees Pattinson play Eric Packer, a Wall Street billionaire whose life undergoes a strange sequence of events against the backdrop of his rapidly collapsing Manhattan universe. Is this how the 26-year-old Pattinson hopes to conquer new audiences? “I didn’t expect to be able to find a project as brilliant as this even though I could spend my life working with directors like Cronenberg,” explains Pattinson. “I have led a charmed life so far as an actor but I’m trying to find as many different and complex roles as possible and being able to work on this film is another gift that I’ve been given. It’s up to me to show what I’m capable of now!” Though his previous film, BEL AMI, failed to catch on at the box office, Pattinson has high hopes that COSMOPOLIS will be the film that redefines his screen persona. Pattinson was joined at Cannes by his equally famous girlfriend and TWILIGHT co-star, Kristen Stewart, although they typically avoided appearing together even though Stewart has repeatedly “outed” their relationship and Pattinson has similarly admitted their love affair and commitment to each other. In conversation, Pattinson is exceedingly polite and responsive and utterly indifferent to his celebrity status. One gets the impression he would be just as happy if COSMOPOLIS was his first film and audiences would get to know him afresh.
Q: Rob, your role in Cosmopolis is very different from anything we’ve seen you in before. How would you describe your character, Eric Packer?
PATTINSON: He exists in his own, separate reality in a way and in the course of the film he’s trying to discover something about the world he’s really living in and how he can adapt to it. Packer lives in this complex financial universe which is guided by trading algorithms and he plays the game which is dictated by those laws which are their own distinct reality. That’s his central dilemma. He’s dealing with financial data that is constantly projecting him into the future and he doesn’t know what it’s like to live in the present. Packer has become so disconnected from the world that it’s made it difficult for him to understand what the world is really like. I’m sorry if that sounds very metaphysical but that’s how the story unfolds.
More after the jump!
New ‘Cosmopolis’ BTS Still With Rob and David Cronenberg Leave a comment
The BTS still is in Cahiers du Cinema magazine interview with David Cronenberg. You can find all scans of the interview – in French – here. We’ll add a translation as soon as we get it in.
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Translation of the Rob mentions in David’s interview
Why did you choose Robert Pattinson? We inevitably think of his role in Twilight where he’s the kind of vampires. Eric Packer is a vampire too, he evokes eternal youth and he’s also a living dead.
David: Yes, we could say that the character is the werewolf of Wall Street, or the vampire of Wall Street but his way of speaking, his relationships with others and his appearance are completely different from the character he plays in Twilight. I didn’t choose Robert Pattinson because of Twilight, but because he was was the perfect actor for the role. When I make a movie, I don’t think about my previous work and even less the work of others. And I don’t think about the movies my actors made. Of course I saw Twilight, Little Ashes, Remember Me. I also watched tons of interviews of Rob on Youtube – like a lot of directors do, to get an idea of an actor’s personality. I thought even less of Twilight since I imagine a lot of people who are going to see Cosmopolis will not have seen Twilight. No matter what, I’m glad I chose him. I thought he would be good and he was, he even surprised me.How did you guide him to help build his character?
David: Really concrete things: how to dress up, how to do his hair, his sunglasses. When he had to take off his tie and how it had to look. All this is directing an actor too and this has to be decided before you come on set. This isn’t theoretical. An actor can’t play an idea. You can’t ask him: I want you to represent Wall Street with your acting. How would you want him to do that? It’s no good to proceed like that. Where does he sit. How does he move. What kind of relationships he has with the people who enter his limo? Do they respect him or do they despise him? We deal with everything one moment after another, one detail after another. There’s no magic spell for actors. It’s like sculpting.Is the Eric Packer from the book different than the one in the movie?
David: To be honest, I don’t know. He says exactly the same words which is crucial. In that sense, he’s really close to the character in the book. But what he has in his head, can be said in the book but not in the film. Packer is fascinating and scary. He’s a dangerous guy. Not only as a capitalist, but also because he’s capable of murder. And at the same time, he’s sort of naive, pathetic and vulnerable, which makes him attractive. Robert Pattinson was really courageous by accepting this role and I am grateful. Young actors that are in demand are often reluctant at the idea of playing unlikable characters. Not really young actors, for that matter. They’re always scared that by playing a bad guy, they’ll be typecast as such and that it could hurt their career. They want to be loved and to be loved on the screen, in the USA at least.
*VIDEO* New Rob and David Cronenberg Interview with Portugal’s National TV Leave a comment
Cosmopolis poster – Israel 2 comments
Rob talks ‘Cosmopolis’, Cannes, ‘On The Road’ and more with Le Figaro Leave a comment
Translation
Le Figaro: How does it feel to be at Cannes?
Rob: It’s crazy. I was at the screening of On the Road the evening before yesterday. It was intense. At every scene, I felt terrified, blown away, captivated. On the Road and Cosmopolis are kind of similar in a way, they talk about a journey. They’re road movies. In a way, they talk about the same thing, freedom, this desperate attempt to look from something different than the sad daily reality.LF: You and Kristen Stewart, both actors from the Twilight Saga, are in competition at Cannes. Is that a game, a coincidence or a challenge?
Rob: I don’t think of it as a challenge. I admit that it’s really strange. The year when Twilight ends, Kristen and I end up in Cannes … For me, Cannes is the most important competition in the world. When I was a kid, even before I knew I wanted to be an actor, I would rent DVDs with the Palme logo on it to impress my friends. As an actor, you dream that one day all your movies could have that logo on their DVD cases. My secret goal was to one day be invited at the Festival. I thought it could happen in 10 years and it happens now! I think the phone call I got to tell me that Cosmopolis was selected for the official competition, was one of the happiest moments of my life.LF: What push you to make this movie?
Rob: The script. I read it in half an hour. It was perfect. The only thing that terrified me was that the fear that I could screw everything up. What helped me decide too was the conversation I had with David Cronenberg. I asked him why he chose me and he answered: ‘I don’t know!’. Then, I asked him if he understood anything about the script and he simply told me that he didn’t but that it wasn’t important. I hesitated for a week then I called him back one night, almost in tears: ‘I want to do it, as soon as possible!’LF: Who’s Eric Paker?
Rob: He’s a guy who did everything to empty himself. A lot of people think he’s nihilist. On the contrary, I think he hangs on to the slightest bit of hope. But every time, he’s disappointed.LF: How did the filming go?
Rob: David Cronenberg did everthing he could to unsettle me. Eric Packer slipped through my fingers like an eel. David constantly told me: ‘If you understand anything to what we’re doing, it’s over!’ So I played my role like a melody to a song. I didn’t understand the lyrics but I felt like I was in tuned to it. After one week of acclimation, we often filmed scenes in one take. Even the 15 minute scene with Paul Giamatti was done in one take! At the end, this is the movie that gave me the most confidence.LF: Will Cannes be a launching ramp for you after Twilight?
Rob: People don’t watch Twilight for what the movies are but more as a global phenomenon. Edward Cullen is like a superhero A superhero who doesn’t do anything but be super. In Cosmopolis, I’ll finally be judged for my performance. That’s why I’m scared!
Thinking of Rob 