Robert Pattinson talks about picking strange roles, proactive fans and more in 3 interviews

Robert Pattinson talks about picking strange roles, proactive fans and more in 3 interviews

Here's some weekend reading to dissect. 2 interviews were conducted during Cannes and the final one is a translation but reads well. Enjoy some ClassicRob!



The Sunday Times - From Beauty To Beast: The best thing about Robert Pattinson is how weird he is. If he weren’t acting, he’d be the one in the office grinning with half a mouth and going out of his way to avoid the water cooler. He’s friendly, but weird — with a laugh like Butt-head if he’d gone to a nice independent school in Barnes. We met in May at the Cannes film festival, once he’d finished his cigarette under a sky barely holding its rain. To call his clothes “grunge” would be a disservice to the thought that goes into grunge. It’s just messy: lumberjack shirt, T-shirt, trainers, white jeans. “I’m so hung-over,” he moans, as I turn the tape on. “I feel absolutely disgusting.”

The room is packed with soggy hacks. They sit in clusters, for 15 minutes of R-Patz, for a quote about Twilight to spread over the internet. The vampire saga is over, but remains undead. From 2008 to 2012, those five films, based on Stephenie Meyer's novels, made £2 billion worldwide and fostered a fan base still fervently in love with their leading man. To many, he will always be Edward, the immortal who cared and fell in love with Bella (Kristen Stewart). They added to the mystique by becoming an off-screen couple, too. Throw in his key role in Harry Potter and it’s unsurprising that the pallid hunk has spent much of his life in the headlines. It’s been an odd coming-of-age for the youngest of three, who grew up in a polite London suburb and, as I find out, doesn’t really like big films.

What he does like is his latest role, in The Rover, an indie thriller from the ­director David Michôd, who hasn’t even seen Twilight. This pleases Pattinson, who talks avidly about the film even though he went to a party last night and “forgot” he had to work. There are few more normal 28-year-old multi­millionaires. We talk about a recent interview for Dior in which he spoke, foolishly, about French girls because, “I was being asked ‘What’s your favourite part of scent?’” He shakes his head at the inanity of the question. “I also told someone I use moisturiser, and then saw it written down — I’ve spent all this time ­trying to get credibility and there’s a fucking headline about moisturiser!’”

The thing is, he’s mortified. All he wants, and needs, now is credibility. He’s loaded: five Twilights and some fashion contracts have sorted that. So, over the past few years, since David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis in 2012, he has been seeking weird, dirty roles. He’s the only actor to have had sex in a limo — on screen — twice this decade. In The Rover, he defecates in a dusty shrub. I put a quote from Catherine Hardwicke, who shot the first Twilight, to him. “Rob’s obviously ridiculously photogenic, but he’s also so talented. I see him creating stylised, odd, wild characters.” He squirms at the first part, but loves the second.

“I’m picking things so strange, they can’t be judged in normal terms,” he says. His brain is creaking; his voice, soft and tired. “If anything’s relatable in a mass way, I don’t know if I can do it. That’s just not how I relate to anything. If there are certain character beats, I’m not going to be able to achieve them. So I like making it my own game. You can invent a new set of ­emotions that don’t even really make sense to you.”

In The Rover he plays Rey, a bloodied drifter in a future Australia, ravaged ­lawless by some unspecified crash. He may be a ­soldier and, as Pattinson puts it, is “handicapped”. The actor is excellent, bringing the baggage of his better-known work to a sombre, serious film — Sad Max, if you like — that pits him against Guy Pearce’s angry Eric. The pretty one sings along to a song that goes: “Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful.” Rey’s teeth are awful: ­pyramid-sharp and crooked. They remind Pattinson of “the kids at school who didn’t brush their teeth” — the “weirdos”, he smirks. “Always the ones who played too many video games.”

This is what’s fun about Pattinson — or, at least, his hung-over version. There’s no filter. Most big shots would hold back from a slur about people who play video games, as most of them watch their movies, too. But he doesn’t. I suggest that the mentally and physically crooked Rey is his Miley Cyrus moment, a public ruining of something innocent. “It’s like doing Miley Cyrus,” he repeats, grunt-giggling, but I don’t think he ever thought of ­himself as pure. He certainly doesn’t care. He doesn’t even have a publicist. I could have asked who he’s dating, but any answer about that from a globetrotting young heart-throb in May, for a piece in August, felt hopeless. On the way out to Cannes, I read up on his love life. There were rumours about the model Imogen Kerr, and Katy Perry, and Katy Perry’s stylist.

I ask what he thinks he will be rem­embered for, how Google will autofill his name in the future. Stewart — his Twilight co-star, about whom he recently said, “Shit happens” — will always be there. So will Twilight. What else? “Gay?” he laughs. But it’s not really up to you, I add. Yours is an image controlled by manic fans, ones who retweet any news about any role hundreds of times a minute. “They’re very pro­active,” he nods. “Good publicists. But I don’t like referring to them as ‘fans’. I think it’s gross when people are, like, ‘I love my fans!’ You don’t even know them.” He continues, saying he thinks that’s probably dubious as he’s “quite insecure”, before booming, theatrically: “ ‘How can you ever love me? You don’t!’ ” I have no idea how much of this conver­sation he will remember.

More under the cut!

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"Robert Pattinson Is Unbelievably Talented" - Declan Donnellan

We all know that Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod have a high regard for Robert Pattinson but it's still nice to hear it again and again.



From The Herald Scotland

AS the winner of several Olivier awards, British director Declan Donnellan is used to the odd coup de theatre, that moment when events on stage take a turn for the astonishing.

But what happened on the red carpet in Berlin for Bel Ami, his feature film debut, had even Donnellan thinking he had lost the plot.

"There was one moment when I thought I'd gone mad," says Donnellan, who was in Glasgow last month for the film festival premiere of Bel Ami with the movie's co-director, the theatre designer Nick Ormerod.

"I was convinced I heard some people scream 'Nick', 'Declan'. I thought this is really pathetic, you've gone mad. But we looked round and there was a group of about six people who had photos of us taken from the set, pulled from the internet. We were so grateful," he says, laughing. "We threw them in Rob's face."

The "Rob" to whom he refers, and the reason why Donnellan and Ormerod were amazed to receive any attention at all, is Robert Pattinson, one of the stars of Bel Ami but best known for playing Edward Cullen in the Twilight saga. For Twihards, as fans of the vampire films are known, Pattinson is a one-man Beatles, or a taller Daniel Radcliffe, take your pick. When he walks a red carpet it gets very noisy, very quickly.

Bel Ami, adapted from the Guy de Maupassant novel, is the tale of Georges Duroy, a French country boy and former soldier who has no talents to speak of but plenty in the way of good looks. Arriving in fin-de-siecle Paris, Georges finds himself a job as a political journalist just as war is brewing. More importantly to his towering ambitions, he finds a role as favoured "friend" to many a powerful man's wife.

After Water for Elephants and Remember Me, Bel Ami marks another staging post in Pattinson's trek from teen film star to leading man. Though the Twilight saga grinds on (brace yourselves for Breaking Dawn: Part 2 later this year), the 25-year-old is wisely thinking about what happens next.

His chances of impressing in Bel Ami are aided by a cast of fellow actors which includes Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott Thomas as the Parisian ladies charmed by Georges.

It's possible to see a certain irony in Pattinson, a young actor largely known up to this point for his good looks, playing a character who has little else to offer but his handsomeness. Donnellan is having none of that. (Kate: You tell 'em Declan!) "I've worked with actors for 35 years and some very, very good ones. Rob is unbelievably talented. He is not Georges Duroy." (David Cronenberg, who directs Pattinson in the forthcoming Cosmopolis, also praised the Pattinson acting chops when I interviewed him recently.)

Indeed, one of the reasons Pattinson, together with Scott Thomas and the rest of the cast agreed to work for not very much on what is Donnellan and Ormerod's feature debut (they previously have a short film to their names) is that they know the pair through the theatre, or through Donnellan's textbook on acting, The Actor and the Target.

(........)

The difference between stage and screen acting is one of scale, says Donnellan. "But great film actors still act. The camera likes to see people think, but so does the audience."

Which leads us back to Pattinson. Most feature film debuts struggle to get an audience. Pattinson's name and face on the billboards should mean that won't be a problem for Bel Ami. There might also be added interest because of what we'll delicately call the film's more intimate scenes. (Kate: ahem...)

"I've done worse on stage," laughs Donnellan. "It is the most unerotic experience in the world doing a sex scene. It ain't erotic on stage either, but you can laugh more on stage."

As for the possibility the film will attract the type of audiences not normally drawn to adaptations of 19th-century French novels, their attitude is that everyone is welcome. That said, they acknowledge that when they began working with Pattinson the first Twilight film was just opening. "The whole mania hadn't started yet," says Donnellan.

On set, Pattinson just got on with the work. "He's very much his own man," says Donnellan. "He's very quietly serious. All of that Rob hysteria you see is completely absent from the set. There's no sense of that at all, he's a nice guy from Barnes."

Their first real taste of that "hysteria" was the Berlin Film Festival red carpet. That turned out okay, and they have similar hopes for the film when it opens in the UK next week

To read the full article head over HERE

Thanks to Nancy for the tip!

Scans of Robert Pattinson In "The Herald"

We had the interview last night but now our lovely reader Larice sent us these scans of Robert Pattinson in "The Herald"

We have the best readers!
Thanks so much Larice





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Natalia Tena Talks About Robert Pattinson & "Bel Ami"

I'm not quite sure what to say about this(read below for yourself to see what I mean).
Natalia Tena who plays one of the prostitutes in "Bel Ami" with Robert Pattinson talks very directly about how she played her role.



From the HeraldScotland

But before that we’ll see her in Bel Ami, a big screen adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s amoral 1885 novel due out next month. She plays a prostitute in a starry cast which includes Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci, Kristin Scott-Thomas and an old friend – Twilight heart-throb Robert Pattinson.

They met in their late teens on a photoshoot for up-and-coming British actors. Afterwards they went to the pub and got drunk. Tena was holding down two bar jobs at the time, so actor Tom Sturridge also on the shoot, rang her boss and said she’d had an accident and wasn’t coming in. “Needless to say I got fired,” she says. They then decided to go to Berlin, but only got as far as Tena’s flat. She couldn’t find her passport.

“We had this summer of being really close,” she says. “Then I remember Robert taking me out a few months later. He was like remember Robert taking me out a few months later. He was like‘I’m just saying goodbye because I’m going to America for a few months to do some vampire thing.’ I said ‘Cool, I’ll see you when you get back.’” And she explodes into laughter. “Now he’s massive. Literally massive. He used to be like a labrador puppy, but he’s much more mature and serious now.”

So no problem with the sex scene in Bel Ami, then? “Because we know each other, it was cool,” she says. “We just took the piss. I said ‘You just bang me. Can we make it like anal sex, because it looks worse?’” Like everything else about Natalia Tena, her answer is direct, honest and raucous. She is, in that sense, a rock chick to her bones.

Source heraldscotland via gossipyal | Source

Robert Pattinson Article in Scotland's The Herald

Robert Pattinson’s move from fright club to fight club



His role as a non-violent vampire in the Twilight saga has made Robert Pattinson a pin-up for his generation, so what’s with the sudden aggression?

Robert Pattinson is not a violent man. In person, the 23-year-old actor is a bit like his character Edward Cullen in the blockbusting vampire saga Twilight: good-looking, obviously; non-aggressive. He is also likeable, self-assured and more than a little dreamy – perhaps even wistful. Admittedly, he’s not an immortal vampire like Cullen, and has no desire to sink his teeth into anyone, which can be hugely disappointing for some of his more zealous fans. “You’d be surprised by how young some of the girls are when they come up to you,” he tells me. “I’ve had a seven-year-old come up to me and say, ‘Bite me, please!’ It’s a little bit weird.”

In his latest film, the emotionally fraught family drama Remember Me, there is no biting but there is a smattering of violence. Pattinson plays an angry young man who endures a turbulent relationship with his businessman father (Pierce Brosnan) while building a relationship with a new girlfriend (Emilie de Ravin). His character, Tyler, is also prone to occasional brawling. In what seems a stark contrast to his aforementioned dreaminess, the young actor admits he felt a strong connection with this aspect of his character’s personality.

“There are certain things which are like fantasy scenes of mine,” says the Londoner. “Even the way the character fights was quite satisfying. In the script it said that he fights like a pit-bull, and I was just like, ‘Yeah, sweet. I want to fight like a pit-bull!’”

Over the last three years, I’ve sat down with Pattinson no fewer than six times and, even though he’s rocketed from complete unknown to international megastar during that period, he doesn’t seem to have changed very much. He’s still quite bashful, embarrassed at being the centre of attention and yet also refreshingly honest and disarming. The fighting talk, though, is new; maybe it’s symptomatic of his meteoric rise? Whereas once he simply disliked the paparazzi, now he despises them.

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