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"Ma vie était une fête perpétuelle": rencontre avec l'un des acteurs les plus audacieux d'Hollywood, demain dans les Inrocks... pic.twitter.com/9fqlLDTRzH— les inrocks (@lesinrocks) November 6, 2018
Plan de vol : Robert Pattinson décolle demain dans "High Life", le trip spatial de Claire Denis, et atterrit vendredi dans ton kiosque en couv' de Sofilm. #Pattinson #MeilleurMagazineDeCinemaDuMonde pic.twitter.com/OIXpcFUuLR— So Film (@So_Film) November 6, 2018
With ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Twilight’ far behind him, Robert Pattinson’s latest film is punk jailbreak thriller ‘Good Time’. He tells us about getting into acting, hanging out in New York prisons and why London is his favourite city
Robert Pattinson’s hair is no more. When I meet him, his enviably tousled locks have been replaced with a brutal shearing practically designed to break a million ‘Twilight’ fans’ hearts. This buzzcut is a by-product of Pattinson’s new film ‘Good Time’, which requires his character to give himself a terrible bottle-blond dye job and left him looking like Scarecrow in the ‘The Wizard of Oz’ after a hard night out. Seeing him reclining on a Soho hotel’s sofa in the unfussy jeans-and-T-shirt-and-sneakers combo that’s become his uniform (‘I could keep my stuff in a plastic bag,’ he says), it’s easy to imagine that without another project to work on – Claire Denis’s sci-fi adventure ‘High Life – he’d still be cheerily rocking the yellow mop top.
Pattinson, it’s fair to say, is happiest doing the opposite of what people expect. As a teenager in Barnes, he had an unorthodox introduction to acting: he auditioned for a play just because he fancied a girl in it. His lucky break came getting the part of Cedric Diggory in ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ at 17. Then he had megawatt fame thrust upon him by the £2.5 billion-grossing behemoth that was ‘The Twilight Saga’. Since then he’s taken the road less travelled. ‘People were waiting outside my house a few years ago,’ he remembers of the ‘Twilight’-fuelled hysteria that saw him doorstepped by fans and his girlfriend, FKA Twigs, receive death threats from racist Twi-hards, years after the series had finished.
Then SW13’s most famous son ditched the blockbusters, and the spotlight. He spent the past few years working with cult directors like David Cronenberg, Werner Herzog and James Gray. The resulting films haven’t always set the box office alight, but they have been singular, occasionally brilliant and hellishly hard to shake off. ‘Good Time’ is another one of those. A scuzzy pulp thriller with a patina of sweaty desperation, it’s a furious, compelling watch. It’s also a likely Oscar contender, and Pattinson is a revelation.
When Robert Pattinson takes out his phone to show you something, the least you can do is lean forward and take a gander. It’s a few days after Halloween, and the actor is swiping through social media-posted photos of men dressed up as his peroxide-blonde, red-jacketed character in his most recent film, Good Time. His co-director, Josh Safdie, has texted him a steady dose of pics.
“It’s crazy!” he exclaims while scrolling. “There are tons of them. Loads and loads. It’s so unexpected. It really, really shocked me. Like wow, people like the movie! It’s nice.”
Indeed, Pattinson — best known for his turn as brooding vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight saga — is currently at the 20th annual SCAD Savannah Film Festival to receive the Maverick Award for his startlingly intense performance. He hides his dashing looks (and British accent) in the gritty indie to portray Constantine, a hot-headed, low-level crook from Queens, New York, who embarks on a late-night odyssey to bail his mentally impaired brother out of prison after a failed robbery attempt. “I was really happy with the movie,” he says. “I’m amazed that I’m not sick of talking about it.”
Speaking from a room inside the Savannah College of Arts and Design library, Pattinson, 31, talks about making Good Time, his Twilight legacy and more with Parade.com
Do you prefer Robert or Rob?
Call me anything!
What about R-Patz? Do you hate that?
I don’t understand how I can get rid of that. It’s so annoying. Jennifer Lopez started the J.Lo thing, but I didn’t start that name! Why some people get a nickname and some people don’t is really unfair!
So let’s talk about Good Time. It’s electrifying but definitely doesn’t go down easy. Was it challenging to film?
It was a high level of energy to maintain. But it’s a fun part. The moral compass of a character is neither here nor there. He’s not a good or bad person. He’s also kind of nuts. I always find it interesting to play a part where all this guy’s actions indicate that he’s a bad person and your only job is trying to fudge that. You don’t know what’s going on. You could have easily played it as a complete psychopath.
Your Queens accent is particularly impressive.
I’m weird with accents. I don’t think I’ve ever done the same accent in a movie ever. Even when I try to do an English accent, it doesn’t come out in my normal voice. I’ve learned that if you just spend enough time with people, it just all starts happening. For this movie, the script was written in a Queens accent and accents are always the first thing I pick up on when I read something. It’s a fun one to do. You can feel it when it feels right.
You also had a strong turn in The Lost City of Z this spring. Do you think 2017 was the year you officially broke out from being “Twilight actor Robert Pattinson”?
Um, no. Actually, I was pretty surprised by Lost City of Z. I was barely in it! People liked it. But with Good Time, I was consciously trying to do something that felt different. I’m also just older. I used to be so worried about looking too young. This is the first year where it’s like, nope! I’m going to have to try to look younger again.
Have you ruled out doing another big film franchise like Harry Potter and Twilight?
No way! I find it so difficult to find anything I get excited about. In general, it’s about directors. If a great director called, I’d be like, “Yeah.” Martin Scorsese is producing a film I’m starting next year.
Looking back, what do you think is Twilight’s legacy?
It’s fascinating. They’re such odd, specific movies. And they became so mainstream. . . Even now, I don’t know anything else like it. It’s essentially a romance. I like romantic movies. But whenever you try to find one, people are like, “Oh, no one goes to see romantic movies.” But what about Twilight? It seems to me like such an anomaly. It’s still quite a unique story, and even the audience is unique. It was swayed so specifically female. It didn’t even try to appeal to a male audience! That’s still really interesting to me.
SAVANNAH, Georgia—Robert Pattinson has been lying to you for years. No, he’s not secretly balding (though his FernGully-like mane has seen considerable deforestation) or back together with his famous ex. It’s far bigger than that.
The deception began on April 21, 2011. That morning, the actor appeared on the Today show, opposite Matt Lauer. He was promoting his film Water for Elephants, a circus drama featuring Reese Witherspoon, Christoph Waltz, and a majestic Elephas maximus named Tai. Lauer commenced the terribly early interrogation with a silly question about whether, as a child, Pattinson had ever fantasized about running away and joining the circus. “No… the first time I went to a circus, somebody died… one of the clowns died. His little car exploded. The joke car exploded on him, seriously… Everybody ran out, it was terrifying.”
Cut to Aug. 3 of this year. Pattinson is on the couch of Jimmy Kimmel Live! discussing his new film Good Time, a hyperkinetic New York odyssey awash in neon and ominous electronica that earned a six-minute standing ovation at Cannes. “There’s this one scene which we shot, where it’s basically… there’s a drug dealer who busts in to the room and I was sleeping with the dog, and basically giving the dog a handjob,” he tells Kimmel, who cocks his head back in laughter. “The director was like, ‘Just do it for real, man, don’t be a pussy!’ and then the dog’s owner was like, ‘Well, he’s a breeder, I mean, you can. You’ve just got to massage the inside of his thighs…’ But then I didn’t agree to do the real one, so we made a fake red rocket.”
Both of these stories, Pattinson tells me, are total bullshit. There was no burning clown, no simulated canine masturbation, and no fake dog penis. He is, it seems, possessed of a bizarre tendency to spin fantastical yarns on talk shows. It tickles him.
READ THE REST AFTER THE CUT
Robert Pattinson was recently required to film in New York. More specifically, he had to act the part of a criminal narcissist, on the run from the law with his mentally disabled brother after a failed bank robbery on the streets of Harlem. It posed some practical challenges, not least because Pattinson has one of the most recognisable faces in show business.READ THE REST AFTER THE CUT
The movie in question was Good Time and its directors, Josh and Benny Safdie, are known for their gritty social realism, so the shoots were often clandestine, set against a busy urban backdrop, and Pattinson’s primary concern while filming was that he would be spotted and attract a crowd.
He spent a lot of time ‘trying not to think about being famous. I was constantly worried.’ But trying not to be famous is tricky when you’re Robert Pattinson. The Twilight movies, in which he played a chisel-featured teenage vampire locked in a hopeless love affair opposite his then real-life girlfriend, Kristen Stewart, catapulted him into the realms of teen heart-throb megastardom in his early 20s.
Vanity Fair named him ‘The Most Handsome Man in the World’ in 2009 and Barbie produced a doll with his features painstakingly rendered in plastic. ‘Looks just like the dazzlingly beautiful vampire Edward Cullen,’ the packaging claimed.
Pattinson filmed five of the Twilight movies in quick succession from the ages of 22 to 26, as well as appearing in the hugely successful Harry Potter franchise, and after that it was impossible for him to walk out of his front door without being mobbed by Twihards or Potterheads. He’s 31 now and freely admits he still doesn’t get out that much. ‘I don’t know anything about anything,’ he says, only half-joking. ‘I live in a bubble inside my ivory tower.’
I had not pegged Robert Pattinson as a big laugher.
Boy, was I wrong. Pattinson, 31, rocketed to fame as heartthrob vampire Edward Cullen in the “Twilight” films. They were dopey but huge, making him a superstar. Since then he seems to have gone out of his way to find as many non-Edward roles as possible, and he’s found some good ones — interesting work in “The Lost City of Z,” “Cosmopolis” and “Maps to the Stars,” among others.
In “Good Time,” he may have found his most different — and best — role yet.
He plays Connie Nikas, a low-rent loser who enlists his developmentally disabled brother to help him rob a bank. Things go south in a hurry, and the film follows Connie over a single night as he tries to get his brother first out of jail, then a hospital.
It could not be farther from Edward Cullen, and Pattinson seems happy about that. But mostly he talked about robbing banks. And laughing.
Question: Without giving too much away, there’s a scene in which a dye pack goes off in a car, and you are covered in dye. How did you shoot that?
Answer: That’s just the dye pack going off in the car (laughs). I mean, that’s just what happened. And it’s almost impossible to get it off. And also I had bronchitis at the time, so I was breathing in this basically, like, red paint dust, so I was coughing out everywhere. It was absolutely disgusting. But yeah, it would be difficult to get away with a robbery (laughs).
Q: It doesn’t seem like a good career move.
A: People think that bank robbery has gone away as a crime in a lot of ways. But people do these little bank robberies all the time.
Q: It sounds like you’ve done your bank-robbery research.
A: I was talking to a guy, a 21-year-old guy who was in prison — well, he’d just been released, but he got put in when he was 21. He had robbed like 70 banks or something. And he did it the exact same way, just robbing them for like five or six grand at a time. Apparently that’s a big thing, because every bank has an insurance policy. Most banks don’t have an armed guard anymore. If most banks had an armed guard there would be no bank robberies whatsoever, pretty much. But a bank robbery, yeah, a teller will pretty much give you the money, basically.
Q: The movie is funny. Was there as much energy on the set as there is in the film?
A: Oh yeah, tons. I mean, (directors) Josh and Benny (Safdie) are like little dynamos. We really worked at a breakneck pace the whole time. I’ve never really seen a movie that I’ve done that the final edit really reflects the pace of which we were shooting. And it’s also the pace of Connie, my character’s, night, basically. The story is being told at the same time that it’s happening to the protagonist. And I’m glad you thought it was funny. I thought the script was hilarious. It’s not very unique, but he as a character, it’s just always so unexpected, where his mind goes. I find that so funny. But my sense of humor gets me in trouble a lot (laughs).
Q: Your character is kind of a low life, but he’s trying to take care of his brother. Is he a good guy?
A: I don’t know if he’s necessarily good or bad. He obviously doesn’t think, “I’m a bad guy.” At all. It’s weird. The movie’s fun, he’s kind of a fun character. But really I think that the sadness is a lot of the characters are sort of doomed, and I think a lot of Connie’s energy is that he can sort of feel in the back of his mind that he’s doomed.
Q: Most actors tell you they don’t judge a character, they just play them.
A: I don’t think anybody is necessarily 100 percent bad, but at the same time I kind of like playing characters I wouldn’t necessarily sympathize with in reality myself. It’s just interesting. What I find most interesting is when someone tries to justify someone’s supposedly bad action. They’ll invariably say, “Oh, it’s because this happened to them and this happened to them.” But I generally like to find a character who you literally don’t understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. I think as soon as you define something, it’s boring. It’s like establishing if you’re in love with someone or not. If you could define all the details of why you’re in love with someone, you’re probably not in love with them.
Q: People spend a lot of time and money to figure out who you’re in love with. Doesn’t that get frustrating?
A: Um, it’s only frustrating if, for one thing, it affects my personal life, and the other thing, it affects other people around me. It’s just a weird thing. Everyone is trying to put you in a box the whole time — like everybody in life. I always see it as this sort of battle. Everybody is putting you in a box. “You made this decision” or whatever. You’re just constantly trying to break down the walls of the box and having this thing built around you all the time. Especially if you’re trying to do performances and trying to be believable as some character. If people know too many details about your life and have too many preconceptions, it just gets harder and harder. You just have to fight against them all the time. That’s the only frustrating thing about it, really. I can guarantee you, at the end of the day, I’m an angel. Never guilty of anything (laughs).
Q: At least you’re famous for something good.
A: I just sort of fell into this, so everybody’s dealing with the hand they’re dealt and trying to make the most of it. With this, I just happen to really love movies. I loved movies before I even knew what acting was, or even considered it. It just becomes quite satisfying as the years go by, thinking you’re going to make one of the movies which I used to like as a teenager.
Q: You’ve done really eclectic stuff. Is this movie the kind of thing you’d be doing if you’d never done “Twilight?”
A: Oh yeah, for sure. The only thing I’m trying to aim for is if when you have a movie come out, you get to a point where people are expecting a surprise. Those are the performers I like, when you go and watch a musician or an actor or anything and you don’t know what to expect at all. There’s no real consistency in any kind of archetype or anything. That’s the only thing I’m really trying to head for.
Q: You’ve done a good job of that. Nobody goes into movies thinking you’re going to be a teenage vampire.
A: (Laughs). Even that! To be honest, I always found it funny, doing that, and then everybody thought, are you afraid of being typecast? And it literally couldn’t be, probably more so than any other role I’ve ever done, could not be further away from my true self. I don’t know what my true self is.
Q: Are you glad you did “Twilight?”
A: Oh, for sure. Everything. One of the things I’m kind of proud of is pretty much every single decision I’ve made, I feel like I sort of made them for the right reason. I really thought the parts and the experiences were going to be really interesting to me, and they have been. No regrets whatsoever.
"Just before an interview with the Safdie brothers – the filmmakers behind the gritty crime-thriller “Good Time” – a reporter gets a warning: “They like to talk.”Meredith also tweeted out some extra tidbits from Rob that are not included in the article:
(.......)
Their “Good Time” star Robert Pattinson calls this trait an “abundance of energy.”
“It’s just that, from Day 1, Minute 1 of the day until wrap,” he said. “Just always at maximum.”
(.....)
The project came out of a meeting with Pattinson, who told us in a phone interview that he was drawn to the “frenetic, frenzied energy” of the brothers’ work.
(.....)
Pattinson said he feels lucky to have worked with them when he did.
“I could really see that people around hadn’t really noticed the extent of their potential when I first met them,” he said. “You can feel that they had — that they still have a lot inside them people haven’t really seen yet.”
ok fine 1 thing. he said people assume he's brooding/quiet because of his most famous characters, but IRL he gets manic/wild about ideas.— Meredith Goldstein (@MeredithGoldste) August 20, 2017
We also talked about @GoodTimeMov vs Cosmopolis, and he said that his character in Cosmopolis is more energetic as the movie progresses.— Meredith Goldstein (@MeredithGoldste) August 20, 2017
whereas in Good Time, his character looks like he's hitting a wall. Also, he said both characters appeal to him because— Meredith Goldstein (@MeredithGoldste) August 20, 2017
"They desperately want to touch some kind of reality whether it's time or whether it's any kind of conventional, emotional connection ..."— Meredith Goldstein (@MeredithGoldste) August 20, 2017
And I did not ask "are we talking about you or your characters, Robert Pattinson" but I assumed it was sort of both.— Meredith Goldstein (@MeredithGoldste) August 20, 2017
He talked about this character, who seems to be chasing his tail:— Meredith Goldstein (@MeredithGoldste) August 20, 2017
"You know when you see a dog going faster and faster and faster. Eventually at a certain point you're like, well, that's kind of profound."— Meredith Goldstein (@MeredithGoldste) August 20, 2017
I told him that the Safdie brothers called his face "iconic," and he said:— Meredith Goldstein (@MeredithGoldste) August 20, 2017
"I don't know how it works as an icon. Just, as [they say] in the movie, just some white guy."— Meredith Goldstein (@MeredithGoldste) August 20, 2017
Robert Pattinson, I’m sorry.
Outside the Bowery Hotel in downtown Manhattan, where I interviewed Pattinson on Thursday morning, a cabal of paparazzi clutched their cameras in anticipation. For this I felt persuaded to apologize by way of introduction. It must feel suffocating to sit on the other side of such vultures.
Pattinson pled ignorance. “I just came in and they weren’t there,” he said, playfully defiant. “I’m almost certain it’s not about me, though.”
Who else would they be looking for?
“I go in and out, and I’m like, ’They’re not following! It’s clearly someone else,’” he said, almost proud at the realization that maybe there’s somebody more sought-after in the building. Doubtful. If anything, his comment proved that he’s all too familiar with the dance that occurs between shutterbug and famous subject. After all, this is the man who, according to a GQ profile published last week, rode around in the trunks of cars and parked rental vehicles throughout Los Angeles in case he needed to make a quick getaway. He’s depressingly well-trained in the art of paparazzi circumvention.
It made sense that Pattinson was semi-incognito when I met him in a discreet corner of the hotel’s bar. Dressed in a chunky gray sweatshirt, jeans and a ratty black baseball cap that covered his forehead and concealed his signature mane, Pattinson was calm about the pap situation but exhausted from the many interviews he’s given in recent weeks to promote “Good Time,” his new movie. “I’m terrible right now,” he said, laughing.
“Good Time” is a film that begs discussion, because of its contents and because it confirms that post-“Twilight” Pattinson will not be pigeonholed into any sort of Hollywood box. By nature, it feels weird to declare one’s love for “Good Time,” a grubby indie drama in which Pattinson plays Connie, a mostly irredeemable goon flitting through Queens, trying to evade the police after robbing a bank with his deaf, mentally challenged younger brother, Nick (Benny Safdie, who co-directed the movie with his brother, Joshua). Connie calls the shots, but Nick is the one who lands in jail, sending Connie on a goose chase to secure $10,000 to bail him out.
At once unnerved and expressionless, this is the fiercest performance of Pattinson’s career, which has taken him from “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” “Water for Elephants” and four of those uber-famous vampire flicks to the comparatively obscure art-house scene. Since the “Twilight” series ended in 2012, Pattinson has solidified his range via two movies directed by sci-fi weirdo David Cronenberg (“Cosmopolis” and “Maps to the Stars”), a dystopian revenge drama (“The Rover”) and a few arty biopics that not many people saw, including this year’s excellent “Lost City of Z.”
If popularity is the metric, Pattinson’s IMDb page makes it look like he hasn’t done much over the past five years. It’s not because he isn’t in demand: Pattinson said he reads about eight scripts each week ― that’s more than 400 per year.
He can’t define his taste, not even to his agents: “I’m only looking for things that surprise me, really.” He’s instructed his reps to pass along scripts that feature character descriptions along the lines of “tall, 31, pedophile, gross.” It’s a joke, of course, the point being that Rob Pattinson has no interest in conventional roles. He wants to play the last person you think he’d play.
That’s “harder” today, he confirmed, than it was in 2008, when the inaugural “Twilight” movie opened. Back then, Hollywood was only just beginning its franchise takeover, where familiar properties with ballooning budgets ― reboots, spinoffs, interminable sequels, single books split into two or more movies ― eroded a lot of the space occupied by fresh stories. In fact, “Good Time” came about because Pattinson saw an image from the Safdie brothers’ previous film, the heroin-junkie romance “Heaven Knows What,” and reached out to say he liked their style.
Thankfully, he’s had the paychecks to bankroll his interest in independent projects. Pattinson and co-stars Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner reportedly earned $25 million apiece, along with 7.5 percent of the massive theatrical grosses, for the two-part “Breaking Dawn.” But Pattinson had no idea in 2008 that “Twilight” would help to define Hollywood’s new bigger-is-better economic model.
“I remember when ‘Twilight’ first came out, it was the first time I’d really heard film series be referred to as ‘franchises,‘” Pattinson said. “And then you see everyone talking about the word ‘franchise’ as if it’s this revered term. ‘Franchise’ should not be about a movie. That’s a fast-food restaurant. Everyone was like ‘the franchise, the franchise’ the whole time. I just thought, ‘Shut up!’ It’s rote. All these actors are saying ‘franchise’ ― it’s like, what are you doing? You’ve drunk the Kool-Aid!”
Pattinson may be franchise-free now, but that could change, if Lionsgate gets its way. An executive from the studio, which distributed the “Twilight” films, recently said “there are a lot more stories to be told” in the series, assuming author Stephenie Meyer is keen. This was news to Pattinson.
“Really?” he asked. He then thrust his hands into the air and yelped in faux-enthusiasm: “Yes!”
So, that’s a “no thanks,” right?
“Well, you never know,” he said, backtracking. ”It did inspire me at the time. And, really, it’s kind of awesome. It’s the way people interpret it. People would excuse you for not taking something seriously if it becomes this mainstream thing and everyone’s fiending. I took it just as seriously — more seriously — than other things I’ve done.”
Having developed a sort of paparazzi PTSD from the whole experience, you’d think Pattinson would dismiss any “Twilight” talk out of hand. Instead, he grasps the cultural role it plays, and he clearly respects the fan base ― largely teen girls ― who bought $3.3 billion in tickets worldwide. If nothing else, he understands his reputation is forever linked to that of Edward Cullen, and there’s no point in condemning that.
“It’s also like, you fucking did it,” he said. “It’s you! At the end of the day, the behind-the-scenes shit doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.”
Because Pattinson backed away from movies that carry the potential to top the box office, he was surprised to learn that talk shows would still book him to promote “Good Time.” Was anyone still interested, he wondered.
“I do sort of live in my own world a lot of the time,” he said. “I’m pretty ignorant. It’s funny ― I’ve basically, as far as I can tell, been really under the radar for years. I’m kind of surprised at it all. [...] I thought I had really reached a hyper-saturation point. And also I think you just keep repeating yourself all the time, and you need to re-form yourself before you have anything to say. I didn’t have anything to say for years. I still don’t really have anything to say.”
Except he does. “Good Time” was his most immersive filmmaking experience to date. A London native, Pattinson embedded himself in Queens, mastering the New York borough’s native accent, losing weight so Connie would look slightly malnourished, and living in a low-rent basement apartment. The story takes place over the course of a single night, including dashes through the streets in unchoreographed shots that let Pattinson interact with his surroundings organically. In terms of bystanders, he went largely unnoticed. At last, invisibility was his.
Indeed, Pattinson, like his co-star and ex-girlfriend Stewart, has made peace with his fame. Now he’s just working to ensure it doesn’t affect those who orbit him ― presumably his current girlfriend, singer FKA Twigs, though he didn’t mention her by name, and probably wouldn’t.
“That’s why I’m always relatively open about stuff about myself, and I always try to contain it to that,” he said. “You can never tell how someone’s going to report something, and how anyone else around you is going to react, because they didn’t ask to be talked about. I can take responsibility for stuff I say about myself, but it’s the same way I don’t like people talking about me.”
Pattinson laughed as he said that last sentence, at which point his publicist announced that our allotted interview time had ended. I shook his hand and strolled out of the Bowery Hotel. It had been less than half an hour since I arrived, and the paparazzi lineup had doubled in size. Pattinson’s new moon isn’t without its old tricks. At least there was no need to be sorry.
GOOD TIME opens in less than 6 weeks. pic.twitter.com/lGx3MbxC1w— SAFDIE (@JOSH_BENNY) July 3, 2017