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“I’ve always been fascinated by someone who tells me, ‘I like your choices in that scene,’ because I don’t even know what the options are,” Pattinson says, giggling. “I feel like you have a thick membrane of consciousness and you’re digging inside yourself, trying to find one little idea and hope it works. It’s an all-consuming terror and it has been there from the start. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m just tossing a coin, relying entirely on luck.”
And, yes, this is ridiculous, and Pattinson, 33, knows that full well. But in recalling his transition from playing the vampire romantic Edward Cullen in the “Twilight” franchise to making strange, art house movies that people might stumble across at 2 in the morning and think, “What in the name of God is going on here?,” Pattinson can peg the pivotal moment.
“It’s when David [Cronenberg] called me for ‘Cosmopolis,’” Pattinson says, referring to the 2012 movie in which he played a Wall Street titan crawling across Manhattan in a limo. Before that, all his auditions were for mainstream movies. “I didn’t know you could go after the people you wanted to work with. And that’s what I’ve done the last eight movies.”
That includes “The Batman.” Pattinson read about Reeves making a noir “Batman” movie and thought, “I haven’t done a big thing for ages. This is the one I want.” (His agents were shocked.) He badgered Reeves, met with him and producer Dylan Clark a number of times and finally secured an audition. He spent three weeks preparing for his audition scene only to have all his work cast aside once he put on the Batsuit.
“The lesson I always learn is don’t ever bother preparing for anything because it’s pointless,” Pattinson says. “Every time I’ve heavily prepared a scene, I go in and they’ll say something like, ‘Oh, by the way, it’s zero gravity.’ Or: ‘It’s raining.’” And I’m like, ‘But I really wanted to play it this way! I’ve been thinking about it every waking minute!’ It never works!”
Again, Pattinson finds all this extremely amusing and so you do too because it’s impossible not to get caught up in his casual, good-natured and clear-eyed view of acting and stardom. Two years ago for a magazine cover profile, he was asked to do a video in which he’d interview his hair. He was furious. Now he’d probably do it. But at the time, it seemed too obvious.
“And I never want to do something for an audience ... ever,” Pattinson says. “I think it’s literally disgusting.” He bursts out laughing at the force of his disdain.
“It’s just so disrespectful of people. ‘I made this for you,’ he continues, on a roll. “You don’t know me. How can you know what I want? And it also indoctrinates the audience into thinking that they somehow are special because someone said, ‘I made it for you.’ They didn’t make it for you. They made it for your money.
“Everybody should be making [things] for themselves. If no one likes it, you just have to do it more. And put it out more places. And eventually someone will like it. It has to work eventually. I call it the [Charles] Bukowski method.”
(....)
Robert Pattinson had me laughing non-stop in this interview. The quote in the headline belongs to him, of course. https://t.co/8XsL3zy9ZZ— Glenn Whipp (@GlennWhipp) October 24, 2019
My favorite quote didn't make it in, where Pattinson explains his facial expressions in all those closeups in THE LIGHTHOUSE: 'It's like you're shitting out of your eyeballs.' pic.twitter.com/jptU9ELdG5— Glenn Whipp (@GlennWhipp) October 24, 2019
Excerpt from LA Times interview: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe and the ‘orgasm that won’t stop in ‘The Lighthouse’He's too modest, btw. It's first-class shitting. (Dafoe is pretty great in the movie too.) pic.twitter.com/591HHXcbtk— Glenn Whipp (@GlennWhipp) October 24, 2019
Think #RobertPattinson will be your favorite #Batman?— LAT Entertainment (@latimesent) September 8, 2019
He has a whopping 7 films in the works for 2019-2020, including the #TIFF19 film “The Lighthouse” https://t.co/X7xpeCQefA pic.twitter.com/JWnbyIbrFI
Robert Pattinson: "I kind of use movies in a lot of ways to kind of combat little things I sort of have a problem with in reality... I'm so weirdly self-conscious of my body" https://t.co/YFh2g7CCT7 #TIFF18 #HighLife pic.twitter.com/TkDm4psps8— LAT Entertainment (@latimesent) September 11, 2018
Sam's baby :)
The actor told IndieWire that he didn't quite know what he was getting himself into with the Zellner brothers' oddball western, but that's sort of his thing these days.
When Robert Pattinson first received the script for the David and Nathan Zellners’ “Damsel,” a quirky, inverted western in which various cockeyed suitors pine for love of a woman disinterested in their advances, he passed. “It just seemed like one of those things that’s never going to get financing, so it just didn’t really register with me,” he said.
A few weeks later, he went to see “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” in theaters, not realizing it came from the same sibling director pair. He called his agent, eager to meet whoever was behind it.
“He was like, yeah, you just got offered a role for their new movie and you didn’t meet with them,” Pattinson recalled. He circled back on “Damsel,” which sees him entering strange terrain for an actor whose penchant for stone-faced roles has evolved from the “Twilight” franchise to auteur-driven work like David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis” and the Safdie brothers’ “Good Time.”
As Samuel Alabaster, the foolishly overconfident pioneer eager to rescue Penelope (Mia Wasichowska) from her supposed captors even though she may not want the help, Pattinson found himself in the unlikely position of a comedic role. That was something he didn’t expect when he signed up, in part because the melancholic “Kumiko” — in which a Japanese woman, believing the plot of “Fargo” to be real, gets lost in Nebraska — had a totally different feel. “Kumiko’ is one of the strangest movies ever,” Pattinson said. “To have such an odd movie and make it coherent and kind of touching, the aesthetic of it is really elegant of it, and kind of cool, too — they had a lot going on at the same time. Connecting that with the script for ‘Damsel’ felt really left field to me.”
When he read “Damsel,” he said, “it didn’t read necessarily as a straight comedy, it just felt really odd.” Still trying to figure how to classify the movie after production wrapped, he dug back into the Zellners’ filmography and watched “Kid-Thing,” their dark, lyrical story of a young girl who hears a voice down the well. Unlike “Kumiko,” the Zellners’ first project on a bigger budget, “Kid-Thing” conveys their off-beat, deadpan humor in clearer terms. He recognized that while “Kumiko” had a “stately” feel to it, the Austin-based filmmakers’ other movies were “more ramshackle.”
Still, “Damsel” doesn’t signal some new phase of Pattinson’s career in studio rom-coms. While Samuel commands the first act of the movie, his obsession with finding the girl of his dreams required the actor play it straight. “The guy is completely psychotic,” Pattinson said. “He’s never done anything more nefarious than annoying people, but his capacity for delusion is kind of frightening. He’s not a bumbling moron. His actions are very premeditated. He’s deeply, deeply mad. I was approaching it like that.”
In one standout moment from the movie, Samuel performs an entire song on acoustic guitar that he’s written for Penelope. Searching for a way to categorize the movie he was making, he hoped to make the crew laugh. “There were scenes where nobody was laughing,” he said. “I was trying to get a reaction from people. With that song, I finally saw the boom operator smiling, and it was the biggest relief.”Click HERE to read the entire interview!
With the release of “The Lost City of Z” and “Good Time,” 2017 may well be remembered as the year Robert Pattinson officially became a critics’ darling.Read More After The Cut
Some might claim the shift began in 2012, when the British actor, still best known for setting hearts aflutter in the “Twilight” movies, drew raves for his change-of-pace performance in David Cronenberg’s art-house chiller “Cosmopolis.” Since then Pattinson has reteamed with Cronenberg on “Maps to the Stars,” done further career-redefining work in David MichĂ´d’s dystopian thriller “The Rover,” and earned plaudits for his appearances in films including Werner Herzog’s “Queen of the Desert” and Anton Corbijn’s “Life.”
But his versatility has never been on such dazzling display as it has this year, first with his shrewdly underplayed supporting role as the real-life Amazon explorer Henry Costin in James Gray’s “The Lost City of Z.” He followed that with his arrestingly deglamorized star turn as an amateur bank robber in Josh and Benny Safdie’s thriller “Good Time,” which opened in theaters Friday.
The steady accumulation of prestigious world-cinema names on Pattinson’s rĂ©sumĂ© represents the fulfillment of a dream that took root during his teenage years. Well before “Twilight” sent him into the celebrity stratosphere, Pattinson says, he was an obsessive film buff with a particular passion for French art cinema. Even critics who have been slow to appreciate the actor’s talent (guilty as charged) would likely approve of his taste, which has steered him toward favorites as different as Jean-Luc Godard, Leos Carax, Claire Denis and Herzog.
This month, Pattinson is headed to Poland to begin shooting the sci-fi adventure film “High Life,” the first English-language project directed by Denis, whose films he began watching avidly as a teenager. Pattinson’s other forthcoming projects include “Damsel,” a period western costarring Mia Wasikowska and directed by David and Nathan Zellner (“Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter”), and “The Souvenir,” a two-part romantic mystery from British director Joanna Hogg.
LA Times: Critic Betsy Sharkey offers her personal list of 30 actors under 30 who matter to movies, starting with the youngest.
There are always those actors who rise above early on....They not only make an imprint in the role but they also tantalize about what they might do next.
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Such actors have that sense of promise — one of the first things I look for when I see a new face on-screen — and it became a key factor in compiling my list of 30 under 30 who matter, members of a generation more interested in the art than the artifice. The ones I've singled out represent a diverse array of talent. But there is a tonal quality as well that resonates through the list, an earnestness and directness in the actors' approach to the work, more of what we think of as an indie style even when the project is in blockbuster territory or playing with extremes of sci-fi fantasy.
It's a generational gene pool that is particularly rich in talent, so rich that limiting the list to 30 has required painful cuts.
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Whatever perks of fame and fortune might come their way as a result — and several tied to mega franchises in "Harry Potter" and "Twilight" have had explosive head starts — this crew seems to truly care about the craft.
Yet at some point, a career in the movie industry becomes a question of staying power.
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Pattinson is finally gaining traction with a string of demanding roles in the offing and an impressive turn in the just-released "The Rover," a case of a gritty turn rising above the project.
The final measure for me in weighing whom to include is that sense of trajectory. It's the sense that the roles right around the corner are likely to push the actors to creative and artistic higher ground — that these 30 under 30 won't accede only to what Hollywood, that great lover of youth, desires but that they will also take on a wide range of roles and find ways within each to make them their own — essentially, the Meryl Streep model.
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By the way, for the 30 under 30 who've made my list, there are no statuettes, no red carpet. Just a "well done" from a critic who appreciates those who respect the craft, to those whose artistry is making the movies a better place to spend $14 on a Saturday night.
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Robert Pattinson - 28:
Hit my radar as the swoony vampire in “Twilight”
Proved a keeper after playing the arrogant young billionaire in David Cronenberg’s arty “Cosmopolis”
Looking forward to him as T.E. Lawrence in Werner Herzog’s “Queen of the Desert”
"The Rover" is a bleak work, and an uncompromisingly violent one, but it's been made with so much skill that it's hard to get it out of your mind. The second feature film by Australian writer-director David Michod, responsible for the surprise 2010 critical success "Animal Kingdom," it confirms him as an impressive filmmaker with a talent for creating distinctive worlds and depositing us right in the heart of them.
Set in an economically impoverished future, "The Rover" stars Guy Pearce in a performance of pure controlled ferocity. He plays a man on an implacable, obsessive stop-at-nothing quest to recover his stolen car, with an unrecognizable Robert Pattinson equally strong as a weaker man who gets pulled along in his wake. Tense and remorseless and shot in 100-degrees-plus heat, this is a film that chills the blood as well as the soul.Click HERE to see the current list of theaters for the nationwide release this Friday!
Robert Pattinson might feel a little relieved that The Twilight Saga has come to an end. He's said as much himself! But that doesn't mean he won't miss it.LAWD! Are we going to get FashionDesignerRob in the new Rob era???
"In a year, I think I'll definitely miss it," R.Pattz admitted on the black carpet at the Breaking Dawn Part 2 premiere held at Nokia Theatre. "It's such a strange experience. That's why I waited to see the movie until tonight. It's such a different thing seeing it with the fans instead of on a DVD or whatever."
Fans that have been with the saga since the very beginning. And are still just as dedicated five years later, if the throngs of screaming fans that have been camping out for days are any indication.
"It was incredibly overwhelming, the first one. I mean, it felt like you were getting hit by a truck," Rob recalled of his first Twilight premiere. "This one, you kind of know what the deal is. You know nothing really weird is going to happen."
And Twi-hards, don't start your grieving just yet—because Edward Cullen himself may not hang up his fangs forever.
"Yeah! Yeah definitely," Rob told us when asked if he would ever play a vampire on the big screen again. "If it was a good script."
As for the flashy green suit he rocked tonight?
R.Pattz laughed, "I had a dream about an emerald green houndstooth suit, and I got Gucci to make it."