ROUNDUP: Great interviews with Robert Pattinson, Guy Pearce and David Michôd for The Rover

ROUNDUP: Great interviews with Robert Pattinson, Guy Pearce and David Michôd for The Rover

This is a great batch! First up is a red carpet interview with Rob and Guy talking about the fun beatings Rob had. LOL


Robert Pattinson & Guy Pearce on red carpet from Naomi Rossdeutscher on Vimeo.

This is a fantastic interview from the Sydney press conference and a little from set. Really good info shared by Rob and David and also in the editorial (they DID shave Rob's arms!). Rob also talks about Queen of the Desert and playing T.E. Lawrence.

Via the Herald Sun:
Robert Pattinson puts stake through Edward Cullen’s heart with ‘career redefining’ role in The Rover

R.I.P. Edward Cullen.
Seven weeks in the baking heat of the South Australian Outback has accomplished something even an army of vengeful Volturi couldn’t. 

Described by one influential industry magazine as “career redefining”, Robert Pattinson’s against-type performance as a slow-witted drifter in desert Noir thriller The Rover has enabled him to emerge from the long shadow cast by the Twilight franchise. 

That might explain the 28-year-old English actor’s relaxed and charming demeanour during interviews for David Michod’s hotly-anticipated follow-up to Animal Kingdom — the film that reinvented both Jacki Weaver’s and Ben Mendelsohn’s careers — which stands in marked contrast to his polite and unassuming but slightly-guarded approach to the media at the height of the Twilight phenomenon. 

Pattinson says the glowing reviews that came out of the Cannes Film Festival last month, where The Rover screened in a prestigious midnight slot, felt like a validation “for about five seconds”. 

But his next film is almost more important. 

“With all that Twilight stuff, I know that if I was not me, I would be judging me,’’ he says. 

“It’s almost like setting up a brand. If you get enough good reviews so that people go in expecting a good movie, then half your job is done.” 

Guy Pearce, Pattinson’s co-star in The Rover, made the transition from soapie heart-throb to serious actor two decades ago with The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, which was also selected for a midnight screening slot at Cannes. 

“Basically, he is a leading man but he consistently does character parts,’’ says Pattinson. 

“I always kind of admired how he did that and it is basically the same career path that I would like to have.” 

The actor has just finished filming his own Queen of the Desert, helmed by veteran German director Werner Herzog and starring Nicole Kidman as archaeologist Gertrude Bell, in Morocco. 

The role of T.E. Lawrence, he says, was his most challenging thus far. 

“Even though it’s only a few scenes, it was definitely the scariest thing I have done. I am playing Lawrence of Arabia. Those are huge shoes to fill. It was just crazy walking in with the outfit on.” 

Even when Edward Cullen was dominating his life, Pattinson still made time for other projects, such as Remember Me with Australia’s Emilie de Ravin, Water for Elephants, with Reese Witherspoon and Christoph Waltz, and the period drama Bel Ami, with Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas and Christina Ricci. 

His collaborations with veteran Canadian director David Cronenberg, on Cosmopolis and Map to the Stars, for which co-star Julianne Moore won best actress at the Cannes Film Festival this year, gained art house respect. 

But it’s the character of Rey, a slow-witted misfit needy almost to the point of self-annihilation, that has drawn a firm post-Twilight line in the sand. 

Michod put Pattinson through two rigorous three-hour audition sessions before casting him in the role. 

“I had always thought he was some angular, super good-looking brooding guy,’’ says the director. 

“Then I met him and he was way more interesting than that. He wasn’t just a pretty boy. He had a really interesting face. He was interestingly awkward. And clearly very bright. 

“And the fact that he was willing to come back two days later (for a second audition) said to me quite definitively that he really wanted to do this movie and he really wanted to work hard. 

“It also said that he was humble enough to not think it should be handed to him on a platter.” 

Since The Rover had a budget of $12 million, and required a challenging, seven-week shoot in the South Australian Outback in February and March, it’s clear that neither money nor glamour were driving factors in Pattinson’s desire to land the role. 

But the remoteness of the locations might actually have been a bonus for Pattinson, who would have been keen to escape the media attention that followed his split with long-time girlfriend Kristen Stewart in the wake of her affair with Snow White and The Huntsman director Rupert Sanders. 

“The environment doesn’t really let you go outside,’’ he said during a break from filming in the one-pub town of Marree, at the intersection of the Birdsville and Oodnadatta Tracks. The mercury on set that day hovered around the early 40s.
Time and distance have changed his perspective. 

“I am constantly being prompted to say how awful it was,’’ Pattinson said during a press conference last week ahead of the film’s Australian premiere at the Sydney Film Festival. 

But I really liked it. I just found it incredibly serene being able to look to the horizon. I liked the hardness of the landscape as well. There’s something strangely mystical about it.” 

The external transformation of Pattinson from handsome heart-throb to brutalised victim took some doing. 

The hair and make-up department sprayed him with a combination of olive oil, fly spray and sunscreen to achieve Rey’s sallow, unhealthy-looking complexion. The actor’s arms were shaved to make him look thinner, even whiter, and more vulnerable. And his hair was shorn crudely to help give the impression that he was suffering from a nasty case of mange. It was a daily process that took almost two hours to complete. 

Pattinson’s internal shift is even more startling. 

Ironically, the actor credits his experience on the Twilight films as a major factor in helping him find that character that allowed him move on. 

“I never really had anyone pick on me at school. I think I just managed to skirt the edge of every different little group imaginable,’’ says Pattinson. 

“But for some reason, I just got Rey, who has been bullied his whole life. 

“I think it’s about fear as well. And I guess maybe the last few years, being a little scared of crowds, being a little bit paranoid when you are walking down the street, that fed into it a little bit. 

“(That sense of) being extremely wary and also not knowing how people will react. There are trust issues there. Being a little more isolated, you get bit dislocated from normal behaviour. 

“Rey is looking at people not knowing whether they are going to slap him or laugh.”

David Michôd also had a couple more interviews pop up from his Australian promo and promo from when he was in NYC after Cannes.

This Yahoo interview David talks about the Pretty Girl Rock scene. This has turned into quite the highly anticipated scene. :)



Another good read including the editorial. Excerpt from Screen Crush:

In David Michôd’s second full length feature film, ‘The Rover’ (his first was the surprise Australian hit ‘Animal Kingdom,’ which garnered Jacki Waver an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress), Guy Pearce is a khaki shorts-wearing misanthrope living in post-financial apocalypse Australia. While mourning something (we find out what later) at a local dystopian watering hole, Eric (Pearce) has his car stolen, which sets off a movie-length hunt for the said stolen car. Along the way, Eric meets Reynolds (Robert Pattinson), a violent lost soul who holds the key to finding the all-important stolen car. 

I met Michôd in the swanky lobby of the Bowery Hotel, a far cry from the world he creates in ‘The Rover.’ It was a surreal experience, discussing the economic collapse of the entire world while, unrelated to anything, comedian Aziz Ansari sits directly across from us for some type of business meeting. A lot of laughs were coming from that side of the hotel lobby. I can only assume Ansari was not talking about ‘The Rover.’ 

And it’s interesting to listen to Michôd discuss Robert Pattinson, an actor who Michôd had never seen in his most famous work, the ‘Twilight’ series. Pattinson does bring a bit of a wild card to this production. He’s still immensely popular with his ‘Twilight’ fans, but Pattinson is openly pursuing projects that distances himself — like this one and two David Cronenberg films — from the movies that made him famous. And, for what it’s worth, Michôd has no clue how that will affect the attention received for ‘The Rover.’
...
I know you hadn’t seen the ‘Twilight’ movies before casting Robert Pattinson, but what does his fame bring to this movie? Does that help? Can it possibly hurt? 

I don’t know, it’s all a great unknown to me. You know, I love the idea of being able to take a person who I can only imagine his talents have been grossly underestimated. 

This is a good movie for him, along with the Cronenberg films. 

He’s a really smart guy with great taste. And he knows the filmmakers that he wants to work with. But, who knows what it will mean for the movie in the public consciousness, you know? I have no idea whether or not it will work for us or against us. But, I don’t really care — because I love the surprise and the revelation of it. And I would hope that people embrace it, because I think he’s really good in it. It was never going to be enough for me that he gave just a good, solid performance. It was always important for me that he give an extraordinary one — and I think he does it. He and Guy both. 

Whose idea was it for Robert Pattinson’s character to have tics? 

That was his. They felt organic. I don’t know how conscious and deliberate they were for him, but when I was watching them, they felt like this nice little organic manifestations of the character. 

And you dirtied him up. 

[Laughs] It had to happen. For me, Rob’s character is like a lost puppy dog. He’s lost his owner and he just kind of latches on to the first person he finds. It happens to be a particularly bad choice.

Thank you Nancy R!