Bel Ami: How Did The Directors Deal With Robert Pattinson’s Sudden Fame?

Robert Pattinson has made a generation of girls swoon, and brought in millions of dollars for the producers of the Twilight phenomenon, where his portrayal of Edward Cullen means he needn’t get out of bed again if he doesn’t feel like it.

So, it would be understandable if such adulation had gone to his pretty tousle-haired head, and made him a bit difficult to work with. How did the directors of his new film Bel Ami deal with such an idol on this, their very first film?

“He was delightful,” insists Nick Ormerod, one half of the directing duo along with Declan Donnellan – established theatre directors with a body of stage, ballet and opera work more than three decades in the making, but novices when it came to film.

As the winner of several Olivier awards, British director Declan Donnellan is used to the odd coup de theatre, that moment when events on stage take a turn for the astonishing.

But what happened on the red carpet in Berlin for Bel Ami, his feature film debut, had even Donnellan thinking he had lost the plot.

“There was one moment when I thought I’d gone mad,” says Donnellan, who was in Glasgow last month for the film festival premiere of Bel Ami with the movie’s co-director, the theatre designer Nick Ormerod.

A corrupt government –- supported by a corrupt media –- that seeks to invade an Arab country for its resources is how Declan Donnellan described his film adaptation of the 1885 Guy de Maupassant novel “Bel Ami,” which focuses on France’s complex relationship with Morocco.

But Donnellan and collaborator Nick Ormerod’s movie, which  premieres Friday at the Berlin Film Festival, will get attention for a less geopolitical reason: It stars Robert Pattinson.

When Brit theater veterans Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod were approached by “The Full Monty” producer Uberto Pasolini to direct a film version of 19th century novelist Guy de Maupassant’s “Bel Ami,” it was as if all their Christmas wishes had come true at once.

“It’s a novel that we’ve always wanted to do a feature about,” said theater director-writer Donnellan, whose stage credits include “King Lear” and “The School for Scandal.”

“It’s a completely modern theme about fame and corruption in which a man discovers the way to power is through the women in Paris,” he said. “It’s all about fame and money made in a world in which women have a lot of influence.”