viaRob: When I read the sript, as soon as you read the script, it's like: wow, it's so different from anything I did before. It's the kind of challenge I look for as an actor. I mean no one else but me got that role. And then I read the script, I really liked the style of it. It was well structured and really easy to read as well.If Robert Pattinson made young girls fall in love with him, he only has eyes for her, Kristen Stewart, who became just as famous with the Twilight saga. For the both of them, it's not as easy anymore to live a normal life.Rob: There's no point in worrying about it. And also, when you come to Cannes, you have to expect all this activity around you. People can think whatever they want.
Le Figaro: How does it feel to be at Cannes?Rob: It's crazy. I was at the screening of On the Road the evening before yesterday. It was intense. At every scene, I felt terrified, blown away, captivated. On the Road and Cosmopolis are kind of similar in a way, they talk about a journey. They're road movies. In a way, they talk about the same thing, freedom, this desperate attempt to look from something different than the sad daily reality.LF: You and Kristen Stewart, both actors from the Twilight Saga, are in competition at Cannes. Is that a game, a coincidence or a challenge?Rob: I don't think of it as a challenge. I admit that it's really strange. The year when Twilight ends, Kristen and I end up in Cannes ... For me, Cannes is the most important competition in the world. When I was a kid, even before I knew I wanted to be an actor, I would rent DVDs with the Palme logo on it to impress my friends. As an actor, you dream that one day all your movies could have that logo on their DVD cases. My secret goal was to one day be invited at the Festival. I thought it could happen in 10 years and it happens now! I think the phone call I got to tell me that Cosmopolis was selected for the official competition, was one of the happiest moments of my life.LF: What push you to make this movie?Rob: The script. I read it in half an hour. It was perfect. The only thing that terrified me was that the fear that I could screw everything up. What helped me decide too was the conversation I had with David Cronenberg. I asked him why he chose me and he answered: 'I don't know!'. Then, I asked him if he understood anything about the script and he simply told me that he didn't but that it wasn't important. I hesitated for a week then I called him back one night, almost in tears: 'I want to do it, as soon as possible!'LF: Who's Eric Paker?Rob: He's a guy who did everything to empty himself. A lot of people think he's nihilist. On the contrary, I think he hangs on to the slightest bit of hope. But every time, he's disappointed.LF: How did the filming go?Rob: David Cronenberg did everthing he could to unsettle me. Eric Packer slipped through my fingers like an eel. David constantly told me: 'If you understand anything to what we're doing, it's over!' So I played my role like a melody to a song. I didn't understand the lyrics but I felt like I was in tuned to it. After one week of acclimation, we often filmed scenes in one take. Even the 15 minute scene with Paul Giamatti was done in one take! At the end, this is the movie that gave me the most confidence.LF: Will Cannes be a launching ramp for you after Twilight?Rob: People don't watch Twilight for what the movies are but more as a global phenomenon. Edward Cullen is like a superhero A superhero who doesn't do anything but be super. In Cosmopolis, I'll finally be judged for my performance. That's why I'm scared!
Le Figaro (Google translate)) At 21, the star of Twilight is in official competition at Cannes. She vampirizes the screen in the role of Marylou, the heroine of On the Road by Walter Salles, the adaptation of the novel by Jack Kerouac.
He likes to think he’s cynical like the character he plays in Cosmopolis, his new movie competing at Cannes, “but actually I’m a naïve person”. He has a clear mind on everything else, though: on his job “I know I’m a privileged person”, on money“it’s better to spend somebody else’s”, and love. Are you listening, Kristen?
Men in suits, bodyguards with their earpieces and mirrored sunglasses. The sky above Manhattan is a grey blanket which, within the two-hour running time of Cosmopolis, will turn more and more black.
Eric Parker, a golden 28-year-old billionaire of the financial world, gets into a limousine, and his driver, a taut-faced who reminds of Russian secret service men, informs him of the traffic jam due to the visit of the President of the United States. But he doesn’t care: he just needs a good haircut now, and the only barber able to please him is on the other side of the town.
That’s how Eric’s trip through New York and among his ghosts starts, while the global capitalism outside is about to be subverted by a people’s revolution and a killer, who somewhere can’t wait to finish him off. The most mind-blowing 24 hours of his life, broken up by women with whom he has casual sex, a doctor who daily appeases his obsession with disease, a cold and distant wife, and protesters who wave rats.
The adaptation to the big screen of Don DeLillo’s most visionary novel – written in 2001 and prophesying the Occupy Wall Street protests and everything we are living, was an impossible mission that only a brave director like David Cronenberg could achieve. And only a brave director like David Cronenberg could think of casting Robert Pattinson as the leading role.
It’s true that Pattinson isn’t only Twilight, the saga that will come to an end on November 14th with Breaking Dawn Part 1. Between an episode and the other, he starred in Remember me, Water For Elephants and Bel Ami. But it’s obvious that a character like this can make the difference for him, between keeping holding onto Edward Cullen’s canines and becoming an A-list actor.
In Cosmopolis, Pattinson still has the pale-white face that made teenagers and women from all over the world fall in love with him, though the romantic look has disappeared. We interviewed Robert over the phone from London where he has gone back in the last days, and he sounds so much different from the vampire that made him famous: a young boy’s voice, many laughs, he greets me warmly as if I were a friend “Hey, how are you?”.
I know his publicist is lying in ambush somewhere near him, ready to drag him away from any question on his love story with Kristen Stewart, the envied Bella who, like in their real life two-year relationship, bewitched him in the story, too. I’d better start with the movie.
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