VIDEO: Paul Giamatti On Filming With Robert Pattinson "He's Really Really Good. I Really Enjoyed Working With Him"
Awwww I love all the praise that Rob is getting from his co-stars, from David and from all the reviews for this movie.
I have that proud Mama Steph feeling
The tone of Cosmopolis is this very straight-faced, serious type of wacky. How did Cronenberg describe the tone to you?
You know, he didn’t, in a lot of ways. I think he just trusted we’d get a sense of it. Even though the dialogue is very odd, you know what his sensibility is anyway, so you kind of know what the tone is. I did something I don’t normally do on a movie…I just came in at the end, after they shot most of the movie, and I asked David if I could watch the footage, because I wanted to see the tone of the movie and what Rob looked like, talked like, and moved like. I felt it was something I needed to see, because I’m playing a guy who always has a fantasy of him in his head. I did ask to see the footage for exactly what you just said: it’s an odd tone. I wanted to just watch some of it, so I could see how I could fit into it and, in some ways, veer off of it.
It is similar to a few of his previous film in how abstract the story can be at times. When you get a script this dense and full of symbolism, do you try to apply meaning to everything or do you just go with it?
In this instance, with this script, I read this whole script many, many times. I usually do that anyway, but, on this, it felt essential for me to read it a bunch of times. It wasn’t about just concentrating on my stuff, partially because it was so interesting. I just had such a good time reading it and thinking about it. Like you said, there’s a tonal thing, and I needed to have a sense of that in my head. I also feel like the character has a real awareness of Rob’s character, so I felt like I needed to know Rob’s character. Certainly, in my scenes, it all had to make crystal sense to me [Laughs].
You mentioned the disappointment you can get when seeing how your performance was handled. With experiences like that, how do you define whether something you’re in is a success or not? Do you mostly focus on the final outcome, the experience, or how your performance ended up?
Now, at this point in my life, I think I look mostly at whether I enjoyed my time at work with my colleagues [Laughs]. When you’re getting older, that becomes the more interesting thing. All the other stuff is out of your hands, so it’s really just about enjoying the work I’ve done. Whether I’m ever good in the work, I don’t know. Whether people enjoy it or not, I don’t know. It’s just about whether I had a good day at work.
Check out the rest of the interview over at FilmSchoolRejects
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