Robert Pattinson's interview for the San Francisco Chronicle

Sorry, ladies. In the daylight, Robert Pattinson's skin does not sparkle like diamonds. (Kat: What a relief...) He's not even unusually pale. The closest he gets to his dreamy-vampire persona is when, during the course of conversation, he absently tousles his hair into something like his undead do. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Mr. Hunky Bloodsucker in person is how soft-spoken he is.

That is, until an unwanted visitor appears on the balcony.

"Jesus, I thought that crow was going to come in the room," he says. "That would be a bad omen!"

The large black bird has settled menacingly on the railing, facing outward but occasionally glancing over its shoulder as if to say, "I see you."

Menacing birds

"Weird," Pattinson says, laughing. "I've been having bad experiences with birds. I just got a dog and I was trying to make him pee out on the balcony and there were these enormous seagulls who have absolutely no fear of people. I genuinely thought a seagull was going to grab my dog. Terrifying."

Animals and animus are primary components in Pattinson's new film, the Depression-era romance "Water for Elephants." Pattinson plays Jacob, an erstwhile veterinary student who, after a personal tragedy, essentially runs away with the circus. There he meets performer Marlena (Reese Witherspoon), who is as enchanting as her husband, charming but imbalanced circus owner August (Christoph Waltz), is discomfiting. The web becomes more tangled when August's big new acquisition - a bull elephant - steps into it.

"I don't think there was one thing with the elephants I didn't do," Pattinson says, though not impressed with that fact. "They were pretty nice animals. Everything was pretty easy. The first time I met Tai, she was with, like, five or six other fully grown Indian elephants. They came wandering around, but they would never, ever tread on you. Even their back feet, they're so sensitive to what's going on around them. Gary, their trainer, said, 'Sit,' and all of them sat down, like how a dog sits. I just thought, however this movie comes out, I want to work with this elephant." (Kat: Note to Tai - thank you for winning over Rob so he'd sign on to this movie - another reason to love you, sweet girl.)

Soulful elephant

Even in Pattinson's rapidly growing gallery of lovely leading ladies, Tai ranks up there for beauty and soulfulness of eye. And she was apparently considerably easier a co-star than, say, the horses with which Witherspoon was matched.

"Reese got thrown off once. She got stepped on a bunch of times," Pattinson says. "I saw it happen during scenes, and she didn't say anything, continued on the scene."

He gives a close-mouthed, wide-eyed look of shock, and laughs again. "But yeah, she's pretty tough. (In one scene) the horses were running within a foot of her, and the horses do tread on you; it's nothing like the elephant. And if something goes wrong, they freak out. But she was so easy with them. The horses behaved slightly differently with her than with me. She has a thing. I have an elephant thing, she has a horse thing."

Pattinson is comfortable enough with his animal magnetism to make much of his humor self-deprecating. He acknowledges that having worked with Witherspoon previously - albeit briefly, and for naught, as his scenes were ultimately trimmed from "Vanity Fair" (2005) - was a source of comfort.

" 'Vanity Fair' was my first job and I was completely freaking out about it," he says. "She came to my trailer and said she wanted to run lines or something. She's just really sweet and easygoing. I mean, we didn't hang out or anything, but we sort of felt we knew each other when I met her again."

Odd one out

Still, he was in awe of his co-stars. "When you see Christoph and Reese and they're both Oscar winners and they're big movie stars - also, they have the big parts, they have the kind of loud parts - I'm coming into that thinking, 'I'm kind of the odd one out here, and I'm also in every single scene.' You're a little bit worried.

"She has such an amazing aura on a set. The days she was there were so different from days when she wasn't. She definitely creates a really nice vibe, and everyone's happier when she's around. They're almost depressed when it's just me," he says, laughing.

It was hard to be depressed around Waltz, however.

"He's extremely funny. He had just done that skit on Jimmy Kimmel, 'Der Humpink.' It's one of the funniest skits I've ever seen in my life," he says of meeting Waltz. For the record, "Der Humpink" is an utterly insane sketch one can find online - but afterward one might never be able to look at Col. Hans Landa of "Inglourious Basterds" the same way again ... or feel at ease about his inquiries into life on that French farm. (Kat: Runs off to search youtube....)

"He's very, very good at making anything seem sympathetic. He is kind of, in the book and in the script, just a nutcase. But I think Christoph didn't want to play that straight up," Pattinson says. "But Jacob keeps trying to steal his wife, so where's the happy ending? He's destroyed this hardworking man's business, steals his wife."

British Pattinson confesses a foreigner's fondness for the American 1930s, Depression and all, for how iconically American they seem to him. He referenced Gary Cooper films to help create his "Water for Elephants" character. But it was another American star, playing the older version of Jacob, who connected surprisingly with the young actor.

"The first thing Hal Holbrook said to me was" - Pattison takes on a pretty good Hal Holbrook croak - " 'You look exactly like me!' He came in a couple of days to watch the way I walk and stuff. 'You walk exactly the same as me. And you look like me and you sound like me.' I was looking at the pictures of him when he was younger, and he really does ... we're really similar body shapes. It's really odd. I wouldn't mind ending up like Hal Holbrook."

Water for Elephants (R) opens Friday at Bay Area theaters.

Read MORE after the cut!

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Robert Pattinson: I'm always in work mode

Here are some parts from The San Francisco Chronicle interview:

"It's strange because it already feels much more of a slick machine," Pattinson says of the film, which is being directed by Chris Weitz. "The first one we had such a young cast. Everybody was friends. It was fun. There was nothing like what it is now. Now there are people waiting outside the hotels all the time. We have security. It's crazy."

And Pattinson hasn't even started yet. He's been in Vancouver for three weeks pacing up and down his hotel room while the shoot has been under way because "I like to get some kind of momentum going in my own process, so when I actually turn up on the set I should know vaguely what I'm talking about." (Gozde: Yeah, that's always a good idea)

Pattinson, whose almost ethereal beauty has been a key part of "Twilight's" success, is nothing if not self-deprecating. He delivers his thoughts in a stuttering, half-finished manner distantly related to another British heartthrob, Hugh Grant. He also seems to share Grant's well-known discomfort with attention. In fact, the only respite from all the screaming women recently has been movie sets.

"I feel like most of the time for the past few months I'm pretty much working every time I get out of the house, working or not, so I might as well be working," he says. "I'm always in work mode. Just in case someone comes up to you, you've got to have your game face on."(Gozde: Altogether now: Awwwww!)

Probably none of this will change with the release of his newest film, Paul Morrison's "Little Ashes" - if for no other reason than few of his fans will see it. Shot before "Twilight" made Pattinson a tousle-haired poster boy, the film, set primarily in the 1920s, is about the relationship between Spanish poet-playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca (Javier Beltran) and Surrealist gadfly Salvador Dali (Pattinson). What begins as a mutual admiration society of up-and-coming artists becomes much, much more. Speculation has it that Lorca and Dali were, or almost became, lovers. The film goes there, to a degree that made Pattinson very uncomfortable until he actually saw it.

"I guess I was expecting things to be more graphic," Pattinson says. "There's so much shame involved, and the thing I was really worried about was trying to show the madness of it."

skipped

Which is another way of saying that Pattinson is unconcerned about being locked into author Stephenie Meyer's franchise in the same way that the Harry Potter cast has been in theirs. It won't last that long.

Then it will be interesting to see in which direction Pattinson decides to go. No doubt his fans would prefer him to continue looking good, but he appears to have other ideas. He talks about one part he's considering in which he speaks a foreign language he doesn't know and another in which he plays "an incredibly abusive, terrifying character." He certainly seems to like playing characters who are tormented, or at least struggling with who they are.

"I try to choose things which are something that I'm going through in my life," he says. "Jobs that will help me realize or add something about myself. I don't really think about it in terms of a career."

You can read the whole thing here


Thanks to RPO :)