Allen Coulter Talks About Robert Pattinson To The Vancouver Sun & Says He's Intense, Charm­ing & Unpretentious

Allen Coulter Talks About Robert Pattinson To The Vancouver Sun & Says He's Intense, Charm­ing & Unpretentious

Pic is HQ, it's resized to fit the screen

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There is an ele­phant in the room, metaphor­i­cally. He is a most hand­some, most famous, most per­plex­ing ele­phant. His name is Robert Pat­tin­son, a super­star among Twi-hards who fol­low his every breath­less, blood­less moment in the Twi­light series.

But “the room” is an Amer­i­can indie film called Remem­ber Me, beau­ti­fully crafted with an air of thought­ful melan­choly by direc­tor Allen Coul­ter. This is the story of a New York uni­ver­sity stu­dent estranged from his wealthy father, in trou­ble with cops, and intrigued by the daugh­ter of one detec­tive who has already smashed his face in dur­ing an alley fight. The film just debuted on DVD fol­low­ing its mod­est the­atri­cal run, timed to coin­cide with Friday’s release of The Twi­light Saga: Eclipse.

In Remem­ber Me, Pat­tin­son gets to play a real human being in a roman­tic drama pop­u­lated by other func­tion­ing humans. They are flawed, com­plex, inter­est­ing peo­ple played by Pierce Bros­nan, Chris Cooper, Lena Olin, won­der­ful child actress Ruby Jerins and Aus­tralian dis­cov­ery Emile de Ravin as the object of Pattinson’s burn­ing desire. No one drinks blood, although this saga is rife with tragedy.

Coul­ter, a New Yorker, is on the phone explain­ing how Pat­tin­son, already cast in the first Twi­light, was eager to find an anti­dote — some­thing rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent — even before its release. Exec­u­tives at Sum­mit Enter­tain­ment, pro­duc­ers of Twi­light, were look­ing to help out.

“Hon­estly,” Coul­ter recalls of an early lun­cheon meet­ing with Pat­tin­son, “he was not known, Twi­light had not been released and there was no way to see it. We just knew he was inter­ested. Sit­ting in front of us was a guy who was scruffy, intense, charm­ing, unpretentious.”

Pat­tin­son was freshly returned from Mex­ico and aston­ished because he had been besieged “by 50 girls at the air­port,” future Twi-hards who knew him from pre-release pub­lic­ity. “Lit­tle did he know that this was not even the tip of the tip of the ice­berg,” Coul­ter says, laugh­ing. “Nor did we.”

After lunch, Coul­ter told pro­ducer Nicholas Osborne: “I don’t know why but I have the instinct that this guy could do it.” It would also clinch the pro­duc­tion deal because Sum­mit would com­mit to the $16 mil­lion bud­get. “Clearly,” Coul­ter says now, “that’s not lost on a direc­tor. That cer­tainly gets your atten­tion. But, if we didn’t think he was right, we would have said no.”

The “yes” came, Coul­ter recalls, “because he seemed to under­stand the role. He had the kind of scruffy attrac­tive­ness we needed and a hid­den inten­sity. He was kind of secre­tive in a way that I thought was kind of inter­est­ing, given who his char­ac­ter is and how he’s con­flicted about his father. So we said: ‘Let’s just take a flier!’

“It was after that I saw Twi­light and had to admit that, if I had seen it before, just because it is so rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent, I might have hesitated.”

The Twi­light films, Coul­ter says, are like silent movies and Pat­tin­son is like 1920s star Rudolf Valentino. Pat­tin­son was also about to go viral. “It might have given me pause because some­one that famous brings a cer­tain amount of baggage.”

One prob­lem now might be type­cast­ing. “There will be peo­ple who can­not accept that this young man is doing some­thing dif­fer­ent from Twi­light,” Coul­ter says. “Or they may have an atti­tude about Twi­light and about his fame, about his face being on the cover of mag­a­zines, and that may influ­ence how they see the movie.

“That is some­thing that, in my opin­ion, the movie will out­live and, at that point, peo­ple will sim­ply see it as a young man in a role. And, in my opin­ion, I think he is per­fect for the role.”

Amer­i­cans not in the mood

Remem­ber Me, which co-stars Robert Pat­tin­son and Emile de Ravin along with a rogues gallery of great char­ac­ter actors, is a roman­tic tragedy — not a roman­tic com­edy. That already makes it dif­fer­ent from most Hol­ly­wood movies, espe­cially with its melan­cholic mood.

“I didn’t think of it as dar­ing,” says Amer­i­can direc­tor Allen Coul­ter. “But it’s not a mood that most Amer­i­cans nec­es­sar­ily sign up for. I just thought it was true to the story.”

Indeed, Amer­i­cans did not sign up. Remem­ber Me earned $55 mil­lion world­wide, just $19 mil­lion of that in North Amer­ica despite the star power of Twi­light star Pat­tin­son (he was cast before Twi­light was released and became famous dur­ing the Remem­ber Me shoot). Remem­ber Me, like other chal­leng­ing films that look at youth romance in an intel­li­gent way, is now look­ing for its audi­ence on DVD.

Remem­ber Me includes ref­er­ence to 9/11. “It just seemed like the ulti­mate ver­sion of what this whole story was about,” Coul­ter says, “which is the event that shat­ters your life and changes its direc­tion. It was a gam­ble, to be hon­est, and one that I wres­tled with really until the film was fin­ished. But it was a gam­ble that I was also will­ing to take.”

Any Amer­i­can film­maker who even men­tions 9/11 within a fic­tional story is tak­ing a risk because many peo­ple are still so sen­si­tive about the sub­ject. “For some, it was some­thing that they wish I had not done,” Coul­ter admits. “And, for oth­ers, I think it worked in the way I intended. But every­body felt the need to be as respect­ful and del­i­cate as possible.”

Source VancouverSun via Gossip Dance

12 comments:

Carole UK said...

God I loved Rob in this movie - those long sideburns just killed me.

Great movie, very well acted by everyone. And extremely moving...

Carole UK said...

Oh, and I really love that expression that Rob/Tyler has in this picture.... I've seen Rob doing it before and it's so sexy!

Deelight said...

I finally saw this movie, what a great story!

I really enjoyed it a lot!
Bravo to Rob!
Please keep making interesting movies.

I will need to watch it again and again to decide if Rob did a great or superb job as Tyler.

Roblove said...

What a beautiful photo :) awakes positive emotions :)

HeneciaD said...

@emma you are right tyler makes me smile when he smiles rob makes me smile whenever I saw him happy

Haystackhair said...

beautiful movie. Kills me every time.

BellaMarie247 said...

"Intense, Charming & Unpretentious"
yes, all true.
Also, sexy, witty, smart, dopey, tall, slim, beautiful, endearing, talented, truthful, and just plain amazing.

Remember Me is a very touching and emotional movie. Rob does a wonderful job in it and this should open some eyes (that were previously closed)to his awesome talents.

BTW Rob, you can push me up against the wall anytime you're little heart feels like it. Hard.
Nothing like a good Wall F...

AP said...

Luv Allen's comment about 'secretive.' ;) So glad he met Rob before any preconceptions, although I'm sure Rob's ability to greenlight this film counted for quite a lot. lol I'm finding RM plays even better on the small screen and am wondering if that's Coulter's metier...

shoegal2547 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Christine said...

It's interesting to hear that he might have been less willing to make this with Rob AFTER seeing Twilight and the fame that ensued. I'd have thought the opposite. I'm glad, though. He was wonderful.

I think the melancholic theme was always going to narrow the appeal of this movie. Personally, I had a hard time with the presence of 9/11 in the plot. I get it... what he was trying to do, how respectfully he treated it... but ten years later it's still too personal, too raw a subject for me to think of with any objectivity. Instead of driving the point home, it just shut me down.

shoegal2547 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
shoegal2547 said...

Bought RM last week and have been watching it repeatedly...very good story, and the acting was surprisingly delightful and strong! Enjoyed all the actors in it, but found the relationship between Tyler and his sister so endearing, it gut punched me that she lost him in the end! :-(

Keeper for sure...looking forward to BA and WFE

 
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