The vampire star doesn’t hold back when it comes to his image. His latest movie, “Cosmopolis” is set in a limo, where he lives with daily prostate examinations and customer visits.
Robert Pattinson is walking with a cup of coffee in one hand a red lollipop in the other hand at the hotel’s restaurant, at the rooftop in Cannes. He manages to not look like a moviestar which is very clever because everybody follows the moviestars in Cannes, and it’s like you can almost feel the air crackles of static electricity.
But that doesn’t seem to bother this 26-years-old british man. He talks, laughs and is excited and often sounds, frankly, like he was a few years younger and not a young veteran with experience from a dozen feature films.
-It was so weird at the screening yesterday, cause I didn’t even see the movie, I just sat there and listened if someone coughs. I just sat there and thought -”Oh God, please let it go well, oh god please!”
So little, it helps the confidence to have been involved in a “Harry Potter” film, and that after having been a handsome vampire in four Twilight movies, be a superstar and dream guy for 3 billion teenage girls. He had a particular reason to worry. The film “Cosmopolis” is not digestible. It is based on a novel by the esteemed American writer Don DeLillo from 2003. Pattinson plays an immensely rich and bizarre young businessman who travels in a huge limousine through a city – they associates to New York- in the uprising. The car is his office, at various stops employees jumps in to bring him into the world situations and the business. It’s bad made on all fronts, class war rages, his own empire is about to collapse, as well as his marriage. Nothing seems unperturbed Pattinson’s character, which, although it is becoming more violent on the streets are determined to go straight through town to get a haircut.
The Canadian David Cronenberg directs, so viewers get guaranteed no help in understanding this odd vision of the future. The film takes place almost entirely in the limo.
- Well it looks weird, the script, but for me the most difficult part of the job was to determine whether I would take the role or not. I wondered if I could really do this. A week after David asked me, I thought on the one hand that “I know it is a great story and it’s Cronenberg that’s going to direct so it’s really a cool deal.” And on the other hand, “You’re on camera the whole time and if you fuck up, you will fuck up the whole movie.”
Rob pulled himself together when he realized that the only reason to say no would be that he did not dare. He would be forced to admit that to the producer. – “They’ll think I’m a wimp, I can not say it,” I thought.
At a later conversation with David came Rob’s fear: “All actors are always afraid of something,” said the white-haired director. After “Cosmopolis” none can accuse Robert Pattinson of holding back with his image.
To his character’s oddities, is that every day he undergoes a thorough medical examination. It includes that the doctor checks the prostate. That is, the extract, in the limo while Pattinson is having a conversation with his associate Juliette.When Pattinson describes his collaboration with Cronenberg, you get a picture of how the former jumped like a little eager puppy funt feet on the latter, which is more like the one to take each day as it comes.
-I always wanted to talk about the complexity of the script, but he said: “Just wait until we are on the set and the time, when we are in the limo, you will understand how to act.”
If Cronenberg did not manage to find a good way to take the stage that was at today’s recording schedule he simply jumped to another. Pattinson admired his self-confidence, but it was hard: -You had to know the entire script and be prepared to take on any scene anywhere.
Pattinson has a reputation that he read diligently, but DeLilo is a writer that he has discovered only in connection with this job. Lately, he has to his own surprise, “it’s weird” – stuck for poetry. He has fallen for American Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “though I’m not so fond of the beat writers.”
As Cronenberg promised, the limo helped. A real car was used, divided into so that you could take it apart in about twenty parts. During the shots, there was only one remote camera, a sound engineer, stowed so that he did not appear, and so Pattinson and have currently played against.
- You could not see out, the windows were completely black. It was so quiet, as in a recording studio, the air was completely dead. It’s weird. You become aware of the sound of your own voice.
Rob got used to it and surprised to his delight that it gave him the upper hand when he played against the actors, he was a little afraid of, like Binoche, who was now a little shaken up by the strange environment. The luxuriously equipped coffin look-a-like limo helped the creation of the complex billionaire Eric Packer.
- They say you have to share the world with all the other people. He is apparently quite convinced that he can live in his own world, where he forces everyone else to communicate on his terms. Pattinson seems on the other hand not sure about most things. At an early Los Angeles screening of “Cosmopolis” he managed for once to see one of his own movies and really see it because it was such a ‘David’ movie. “Otherwise, Rob usually sit and feels so tormented by the sight of himself – “Oh Jesus, I look like an idiot, what am I doing with my face?”
Sure he doubts himself, he answers when we ask him a question. You have to: – As soon as you start believing that you are good, you become useless. Though it’s a exhausting way to live.
"Robert heard about us through his assistant Jeff. Jeff grew up with Cory Parsons, a key member of the Home Plate Project team.”
“Bids came in from all over. There was a worldwide response due to Robert Pattinson’s participation. It’s really what got us all the attention and helped us raise all this money.”
“The fact that a superstar like Robert Pattinson was willing to take the time to do a personal sketch is amazing.”
“It took us from a good little project to something that raised over $ 50,000.”
"Emory said the actor was told when the bid hit $ 3000 and that today (9/1) his assistant texted Pattinson the final, stonker bid."
As you may have heard — it has been in the news here and there — Twilight stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart broke up this summer.
Actually, everyone has seen the stories — including Pattinson. “Yeah, I read it,” the 26-year-old British actor says during an interview at a New York hotel. “It’s my life. You sort of want to read it. You feel like you need to read it. It’s one of those things where you keep picking a scab. You know you shouldn’t be doing it, but it’s a weird kind of addiction. You desperately want to stop.”
About a month ago, a tabloid published photos of Stewart, Pattinson’s live-in girlfriend of four years, in an embrace with her Snow White & the Huntsman director, Rupert Sanders. Since then, the media seem able to talk of little else.
“At times, I find the whole thing pretty funny,” Pattinson admits. “It is pretty funny. My life is kind of ridiculous to me. It’s so absurd at times.” Pattinson would rather talk about his new film, the David Cronenberg drama Cosmopolis. When the noted independent filmmaker, whose credits include A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007), gave Pattinson the script for Cosmopolis — based on the Don DeLillo novel — the actor could see himself as Eric Parker, the 28-year-old billionaire asset manager whose world falls apart around him as he rides in his stretch limo to get a haircut while wagering his company’s massive fortune on a bet. But Pattinson had one problem.
“I was honest with David and said that I loved his script, but I didn’t fully understand it,” Pattinson says. “I knew, if I tried to have a BS conversation about it, that David would call me out.”
Cronenberg, too, had some reservations — about Pattinson. “Could this British guy do a New York accent where it’s not agonizing?” the filmmaker recalls wondering. “Could he play that age? Does he have the charisma to hold the audience for the whole movie, because he’s literally in every scene? “I did my homework and watched Little Ashes (2008) and Remember Me (2010),” Cronenberg says. “I even watched interviews that Robert did. I wanted to know what this guy was like when he was just being himself. I wanted to get a feel of what he was like as a person. I wanted to know that he had a sense of humor, and he does.
“I finally said, ‘OK, this is the right guy.’ ”
Most of Pattinson’s films have required him to forgo his natural British accent, so he had no problem finding Eric’s New York speech patterns.
“I don’t even know what accent I was doing half of the time,” he admits. “I always found that the dialect was written in the lines. The voice was also part of the preparation. I wasn’t even trying to get a New York accent.”
His next film is, of course, the series-ending Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2, due in November. Cosmopolis is nothing like that, which is by design. “I try to do something different from vampire Edward Cullen each time I’m not doing a Twilight film,” Pattinson says. “I even try to make him different each time I do Twilight.”
As a child growing up in London, Pattinson had dreams of stardom, but they involved music. That he ended up as an actor still bemuses him. “When I’m asked to write down my occupation, it’s still hard for me to write actor.”
After auditioning for Troy (2004) but not getting the part, Pattinson was cast in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) as the handsome, charming and doomed Cedric Diggory. Three years later, he began his turn as soulful vampire Edward Cullen. For “Twi-hards” dreading the end of the film franchise, Pattinson offers some words of hope. “I’m sure they’ll have a Twilight TV-series spinoff soon,” he says. “They’ll do it again.” That presumably wouldn’t involve Pattinson. There is talk of a film prequel, however. Would he be willing to play Edward again? “Who knows?” says Pattinson, laughing. “The only thing that creates a little bit of a problem is that I’m supposed to be 17 forever.”
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