It becomes clear after only a few minutes being in a room with them that the trio of Robert Pattinson, Guy Pearce, and David Michôd have formed an easy camaraderie with one another. Their film, The Rover, had its premiere months ago at Cannes, and they’ve been on a busy press circuit promoting the movie through various festivals and release dates worldwide. They recently stopped in London for the UK premiere of the film and Filmoria was lucky enough to have a seat at the table to discuss this newest project.
The Rover, is set in the near future following a severe economic collapse of the western world. Law and order are pretty well in disarray and in the middle of the Australian Outback is Eric (Guy Pearce) who just wants to get his car back, stolen by a band of thieves. While tracking the criminals, he runs into Rey (Robert Pattinson), the younger brother of one of the men who stole his car, and the only person who knows where they may have gone. They strike up an unlikely partnership in order to get Eric’s most prized possession back.
The chiselled Brit teen idol tells LWLies about his work on The Rover and his swift transformation into an actor who’s always up for a challenge.
Robert Pattinson’s star power still burns across the globe but all he wants to do with it is make interesting art house movies. David Michôd’s The Rover fits that bill. Pattinson stars opposite Guy Pearce as a splash of humanity in a violent vision of post-apocalyptic Australia. We spoke to him at the Cannes Film Festival, where he also had David Cronenberg’s Maps To the Stars on the docket.
LWLies: David Michôd has said that there’s a very angry man – aka him – at the heart of The Rover. What emotions did you draw from for it and what emotions do you think it conjures? Pattinson: It definitely conjures a lot of dread and anxiety but it was the character I was reading from. Also the first thing I connected to was purely a stylistic thing. Clean writing and also having it so stark. It was so original, even the way it looked on the page.
What did you find interesting about Rey when he first came into your life?
I thought it was quite interesting to read something where you actually can’t tell if the guy’s mentally handicapped or not. I asked David at the beginning in the auditions whether he was or not and he was like, ‘I don’t know. Maybe’ and then we established that he was someone who has just been really severely bullied or someone that has been told that he’s mentally handicapped his whole life but it’s more to do with confidence. He’s really shy and people around him, his family, are really rough and have been slapping him around his whole life and so he’s decided that he can’t be his own person. He’s never even attempted to think for himself or speak for himself or anything. It was interesting, the only time when he is his own person is when a horrible man forces him into it.
He wears a green and yellow plaid shirt, black sneakers with thick soles and thick cotton socks. He wears a pair of light colored pants, which seem to have been worn by him for a week. When he speaks, he keeps his head slightly angled, he breaks his sentences; suddenly he stares at me, with a crocked smile and watch me like he was thinking “Do you really care about this?” Of all the stars that you can meet, Robert Pattinson is the one that disguises himself the best. His diversity and his potential are in this askew allure, like his face, like an odd predestination. He seems to be here by accident, and by accident famous, lost and amused, without complacence. For instance, talking about his sex scene with Julianne Moore in Maps To The Stars, he is able to say: ”It was our first encounter; it was my first day on set. In Toronto, where we were filming, the weather was steamy hot and I was sweating a lot. She is one of those absurd people that don’t sweat at all. Ever. So, think what a situation, I was trying not to wet her back with my sweat! And I must have looked so weird to her eyes because she kept asking me: “Are you alright?”
At 28 years old he seems to find himself in a zone of his career that he likes. Escaped from the post Twilight frets, he committed himself in avoiding scripts made to keep him stuck to an image of himself that he doesn’t recognize, and he is becoming a constant presence in very important film festivals. After the double commitment with Cronenberg (Cosmopolis and Maps To The Stars), he filmed Queen Of The Desert, by Werner Herzog (a movie about the legendary life of Gertrude Bell), and in the meanwhile in autumn his movie, The Rover, will hit the scene in the Italian theaters. The Rover is the new movie of David Michod, a young Australian director, well known for his fabulous film noir Animal Kingdom (2010) that was screened in Cannes. Guy Pearce was cast in Animal Kingdom in the role of a policeman and in this new post-apocalyptic thriller, all filmed in the Australian outback, he plays the role of a man robbed of his last owning: a car that hides a secret. So begins this story in which he (Guy) chases after the men who stole his car, with the help of a disturbed and confused guy that has the face of Robert Pattinson.
Filming The Rover in a remote part of south Australia with cast and crew all staying in a local pub was just about perfect, says Robert Pattinson. The filmmakers all mucked in together, braved filming in soaring temperatures, and at night bonded over a drink or two. Pattinson wouldn’t have had it any other way and says that it helped director David Michôd and his cast and crew build an unbreakable bond.
“It was amazing,” he says. “Because the whole crew was staying in the same place and there was nothing else to do, we were living in a pub. It’s annoying if you’re in an unfamiliar city and all the people you work with are from that city, they all go home, so you’re just stuck in your hotel.
“When you can hang out with a bunch of new people, you get close to them really quickly, especially when there’s literally nothing else to do. It’s really fun. I hadn’t done that for a long time. I had a fantastic experience making this film.”
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