PRINT INTERVIEW: Robert Pattinson Talks James Dean & 'Life' To 'The Sydney Morning Herald'

PRINT INTERVIEW: Robert Pattinson Talks James Dean & 'Life' To 'The Sydney Morning Herald'

With Life hitting Australian cinemas on Sept 10th 'The Sydney Morning Herald' published this interview with Rob, Dane & Anton. It's a good read, grab a coffee, get comfortable and check it out.

When the actor James Dean died in a car crash in 1955, the second and defining film in his short career – Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause – had just come out. Dean was 24.

East of Eden had put him on the map earlier that year; Giant was in the works. In retrospect, three films doesn't seem much of a basis for what Dean was about to become: the embodiment of a generation's bohemian disaffection with their parents' post-war world. Fact was, however, they didn't come any cooler than Jimmy Dean. They still don't.

You can see that in the clutch of photographs taken of Dean for Life magazine by ambitious young Magnum newcomer Dennis Stock.

It was Stock who took the photograph that would grace millions of teenage bedroom walls in the decades to come, a photograph familiar even to people who don't know who Dean was: Dean with his collar turned up against the wind in wintry Times Square.

It is that photograph that forms a kind of backdrop for Anton Corbijn's new film Life, which traces the brief relationship between Stock and his equally ambitious subject.

Any actor would show due trepidation before agreeing to play James Dean, not just because of his hallowed status but because it would be so easy to slip unawares into mumbling, fidgeting parody.

Dane DeHaan, who is most familiar as Green Goblin in the recent Spider-Man films, kept saying no.

"I didn't really think I could do it. Then I had a meeting with Ian Canning, the producer, and he explained to me how for him it wasn't simply a movie about James Dean, it was a movie about how a normal person could be turned into an idol. Which I think is a really interesting topic."

DeHaan felt some kinship with Dean, whom he describes as "a really bull-headed, uncompromising artist, pretty mistrusting of the world around him."

From the start, as Corbijn shows, Dean was at loggerheads with the studio heads; Ben Kingsley does a spectacular turn as studio mogul Jack Warner, telling Dean exactly how much of a rebel he wants him to be.

"I know what that's like, although I have a different take on it," DeHaan says. "I don't let it get to me as much as he does. When I made this film, it was right before the press tour for Spider-Man. There was this looming sense of what was going to happen, in the same way as before East of Eden came out."

Stock was a slick but snitchy character who, having walked out on his wife and a son in whom he felt no interest, was desperate for validation as a photographic artist.

Robert Pattinson, the former Twilight heart-throb who plays Stock, watched taped of interviews of Stock that were recorded when he was in his late 70s.

"He had all these resentments still, all these things he envies James Dean about, all these chips on his shoulder all still very evident," Pattinson says. "In his eyes, someone like James Dean is just living freely and doing whatever he wants, he's the artist he wants to be. It's crazy, but I related to it. He's a kind of tragic figure."

You might think that if Pattinson related to anyone it would be the heart-throb star, who is portrayed in Australian Luke Davies' script as being only too well aware that his image is being manipulated.

Not at all, Pattinson says: playing Dean didn't interest him. "I don't know if I've had like a James Dean thing. For one thing people were really looking at James Dean like a leader. Young people, both girls and guys, saying, 'Tell us how to live. It looks like you know the secrets!' Well, I don't think anyone has ever looked at me like that."

And, for another thing, Dean had a vision of his future that he knew was being deliberately thwarted.

"In this movie, he is already disillusioned and disappointed," Pattinson says. "Whereas when all that stuff was happening to me, it was kind of exciting and fun because I had no idea what was going on … I felt like there was a door in front of me left open and you could just keep pushing the door with no idea of what was on the other side. I was just curious. I didn't realise until years later that you can't turn any of it off: the door has slammed behind you."

Corbijn is now 60, as old as the Stock pictures; his life overlapped with Dean's by just five months.

He was (and is) a hugely influential still photographer of rock musicians before he broke into the film world with his striking biopic of Joy Division's Ian Curtis, Control, in 2007.

For him, he says, the Times Square picture of Jimmy Dean is "like jazz". "It is a symbol of the change in society, the emergence of rock'n'roll and a generation who wanted to own their own time, who wanted a life that was not their parents' lives." It was always, he says, about "more than just James Dean".

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Thanks Flavia

NEW STILLS + Robert Pattinson talks about his career & MORE - "I don't know if I'm any good at sculpting a career, but I know what I want to do."

NEW STILLS + Robert Pattinson talks about his career & MORE - "I don't know if I'm any good at sculpting a career, but I know what I want to do."

UPDATE: 2 more print interviews under the cut! Love what the HuffPo interviewer said about the Pretty Girl Rock scene. If you watched our press con videos and heard our questions/comments, you KNOW we take issue with how the scene is being reported. I'm soulmates with the HuffPo interviewer. And Rob of course. ;)
The second interviewer has some cool quotes about Rob's full body acting with Rey's look and more!

These gems almost got away from us! They came out during the premiere and FeistyAngel gave us the heads up about the new stills found in The Short List magazine, an extension of the Sydney Morning Herald.

Not only do we get these fantastic stills of Rob from The Rover but the interview is really good too. He talks about Life and why he wanted to play Dennis Stock. Idol's Eye and The Childhood of a Leader get a mention too, the latter said to film in September.






Check out a few more print interviews under the cut! Good bathroom material LOL

Click HERE to read the rest

'The Sydney Morning Herald' Talk To Robert Pattinson & David Michod

'The Sydney Morning Herald' Talk To Robert Pattinson & David Michod

This is a really good interview with David Michod and Robert Pattinson talking about The Rover.
You can read ALL of David's interview over HERE but you'll find the part where David talks about Rob and Rob's interview in the excerpt below.

The story began as an exploration of the relationship between characters – only gradually did Michod begin to delineate their world. ‘‘This is ... a version of Australia – perhaps representative of a larger Western world – that has broken down," he says. "There’s still an infrastructure, there’s still a society, but everything’s a bit broken, a bit loose. There are still families, people trying to make a living, but you get the feeling there is violence bubbling under the surface, in a way that’s far more palpable.’’

Within that environment, two contrasting characters meet and join forces – for reasons that only gradually become clear. Michod wrote one of the roles with one of his Animal Kingdom stars in mind: Guy Pearce. Pattinson, however, was far from his thoughts until they had an unrelated meeting in Los Angeles.

‘‘I like to meet actors, and I like to meet actors whose work I’m not necessarily familiar with,’’ Michod says. He had never seen any of the Twilight films, the hugely successful vampire romance franchise that made Pattinson a household name and a paparazzi target. ‘‘But I heard a couple of people say that he’s interesting.’’ When they met, he found Pattinson ‘‘very smart and not the sort of pretty boy I was expecting’’.

Talking to Pattinson, in the final stages of the shoot, it is clear he was more than enthusiastic. He was already aware of the members of Blue-Tongue and had seen several of the films. ‘‘I like the way they work together and keep it quite tight. It reminded me of me and my friends, and I knew it was the kind of environment I wanted to work in – with a bunch of young people who were ambitious."

What's more, he loved Animal Kingdom.When The Rover came his way, he was in.

‘‘It was such a startlingly original script. When I read it, I thought, this is one of those parts where you think, 'I’d love to do this, but I know I’m not going to get it.'’’ He did a couple of tests in Michod’s Los Angeles house. ‘‘They were exhausting, they were about three hours long, but it was kind of fun. I liked the way he worked in the audition. Normally, they’re such horrible experiences.’’

Pattinson's character, Rey, is an American. He and his brother have come to Australia to work, but have fallen on hard times. He is naive and trusting ‘‘in a really strange way. He was brought up to believe he’s not capable of being independent. [He is] someone who has always been looked after and he has taken it with him into adulthood.’’

So when he loses contact with his brother at the beginning of the film, he is stranded. ‘‘He grabs onto the first person who comes along’’ – and this happens to be Pearce’s character, who has an ulterior motive for joining forces. ‘‘No matter how he gets treated, Rey just wants to please him. There’s something so strange and disturbing about the whole relationship.’’

*NEW* Interview: Robert Pattinson Talks To The Sydney Morning Herald About "The Rover" & A New On Set Pic

UPDATE: Added MORE from Rob's interview
*NEW* Interview: Robert Pattinson Talks To The Sydney Morning Herald About "The Rover" & A New On Set Pic

Check out this great new interview with Rob where he talks about "The Rover" and tells a little bit more about his character Rey.

David gives Rob great praise too (not that that surprises us, right?)

Also there's a new on set pic of David, Rob & Guy.



From The Sydney Morning Herald:

'It's very odd,'' Robert Pattinson says. ''There's something strange and disturbing about the whole relationship.''

The Twilight actor is talking about the two characters at the heart of his new film, The Rover, which finished shooting on Saturday in outback South Australia.

He plays a young man, Rey, caught up in an uneasy, dangerous alliance with a stranger, Eric (Guy Pearce), in a not-too-distant future.

The Rover is the much-anticipated new film from David Michod, the writer-director of Animal Kingdom. The title refers to Pearce's character: damaged, solitary, utterly without hope.

Pattinson has been casting his net widely since his lead role in the wildly successful Twilight movies brought him celebrity and a certain amount of paparazzi attention. He's quick and sometimes self-deprecating, and has a surprisingly hearty laugh. Looking for roles post-Twilight, he says, ''I don't know if I'm necessarily any good at sculpting a career or anything. But I know what I want to do.''

He wanted to be part of The Rover because ''it was an original script and it was one of those parts where you read it and you think, 'I'd love to do this, but I know I'm never going to get it.'''. There, ''already self-defeating before I've even started'', he says.

In this film, he's a long way from the debonair 19th-century Frenchman of Bel Ami or the New York billionaire of Cosmopolis, two of his recent roles. The near-future that Rey inhabits has a broken-down, improvised, desperate feel, and Pattinson's appearance is in keeping: unkempt and unshaven, with make-up that discolours his teeth.

Rey is an American who has come to Australia with his brother. He is, Pattinson says, ''the kind of person who has been brought up to believe they're incapable of living independently. Someone has always been looking after him.'' When he's separated from his brother, ''almost the first person that comes along, he grabs them. It doesn't matter how he gets treated''. And Eric treats him very badly at first.

The Rover was shot over seven weeks, ending with more than a fortnight in the remote small town of Marree, 685 kilometres north of Adelaide, whose population of 90 more than doubled with the presence of the movie crew. Almost every part of Marree has been incorporated into the world of the movie. The filmmakers said it felt like their own Hollywood studio backlot.

The Rover takes place ''in an unspecified relatively near future, after a number of years of quite seriously steady Western economic decline,'' Michod says. ''It's not post-apocalypse. This is an Australia that has broken down into a kind of resource-rich Third World country.''

He did not start with the idea of this near-future, but with the enigmatic, shifting relationship between the two central characters. He wrote the role of Eric for Pearce, but did not start thinking about Pattinson until they met in Los Angeles.

He had not - and still has not - seen any of the Twilight films, but had been told that Pattinson was interesting. He found Pattinson was ''really smart, and not the sort of pretty boy I was expecting. As soon as it was time to start testing… he was my first choice, by a long way.''

MORE From The Herald Sun

EDWARD Cullen wouldn't last five minutes in the baking heat of Marree, a one-pub town 650km north of Adelaide. Access all Areas. $1 for the first 28 days. Only $2.95 a week thereafter. Learn more.

But Robert Pattinson has channelled the physical discomfort of his seven-week, summer shoot in the middle of the Australian Outback into a character that he hopes will make an equally indelible impression as the Twilight vampire.

“It’s added lots to the performance – being covered in dirt, pouring sweat, with tons of flies around, you lose your inhibitions quite quickly,’’ the English star said on the set of his latest film, The Rover, in which he sports a crude, DIY haircut and badly-decayed teeth.

A neo-western set in a brutal, anarchic near-future, the $12 million film is director David Michod’s hotly-anticipated follow-up to the internationally-acclaimed Animal Kingdom.

Guy Pearce plays the title character, an embittered outsider with whom Pattinson’s naive victim forms an uneasy alliance

Located at the intersection of the Oodnadatta and Birdsville Tracks, Marree, population 90, is about far from Hollywood as an actor can get.

“That’s good in some ways,’’ says Pattinson. “You definitely end up making a different movie. Being in the desert has a funny effect. It does change you in a way.”

Pattinson, whose on-again, off-again relationship with Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart has been a matter of much conjecture, admits the different time zones and lack of mobile phone reception have taken a toll on his private life.

“Yeah, it’s tough. But at the end of the day, it’s only two months.”

Filming on The Rover, which has spent time on location in Hammond, Quorn, Copley, and Leigh Creek, wrapped yesterday.

Pattinson said he was intending to take the next three weeks off, but confirmed his participation in three upcoming projects: Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert, with Naomi Watts and Jude Law; Maps to the Stars, a comedy directed by David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis), and Hold Onto Into Me, with Carey Mulligan.

Thanks to PJ for the tip!