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.”
It has been a summer of discontent for Robert Pattinson. Since his longtime girlfriend and “Twilight” co-star Kristen Stewart was photographed in intimate poses with another man a few weeks ago, the heat on his life has been daunting.
How does he deal with it?”
“It drives you nuts,” he says of all the hoopla. “It’s just nuts.
“I don’t know how I cope with it. I really don’t know,” he says in a good-natured voice.
“At times, I find the whole thing pretty funny. It is pretty funny. My life is kind of ridiculous to me. It’s so absurd at time.”
Last week he fended off countless questions about the scandal while making the media rounds to promote “Cosmopolis,” his new film with director David Cronenberg (“A History of Violence,” “Eastern Promises”)
As Eric, Pattinson is in every scene of the film, portraying a character unlike any he's tackled before. And in our exclusive interview in support of Cosmopolis' theatrical release by eONE Films, writer/director Cronenberg explained why Pattinson was right for the part of Eric and how he went about tackling the adaptation of DeLillo's novel.
In casting Robert Pattinson, it's kind of a double-edge sword, isn't it? You have his Twilight fans anxious to support him in whatever he chooses to do and then you have the people who dismiss him because he is 'that guy from Twilight'.
"Yeah. In a weird way, on the one hand of course I'm completely aware of all of those elements and also of course when you're making a movie that for an independent movie was relatively expensive, you have to have a leading character who is very charismatic and who can carry the weight and has the star quality and so on, because you're going to be looking at him. He's literally in every scene in the movie, and that's pretty unusual. I mean even in Tom Cruise movies, Tom is not in absolutely every scene of the movie - but Rob is. So he has to have that. But at the same time, you want to forget the movies, you know? You want to forget his movies and my movies because we're creating this completely new thing and you don't know what audience you're going to get. You can anticipate it, you can think about it, but really you don't know. So ultimately when you're making the movie you're saying, 'Okay, I'm here with these actors. They're wonderful actors, I cast them because they're terrific and they will bring great stuff to the script,' and then at that point you're just making a movie and you're not thinking about any other movie."
The phone call began with Pattinson and Cronenberg laughing.
Question: Sounds like you two aren't having any trouble having fun. Pattinson: We rollick and frolic. We have no problem.
Q: And Robert, you haven't been in the news enough lately. Pattinson: Heh.
Q: Your character is a disconnected guy trying to connect. Or maybe it's the other way around. How do you play that? Pattinson: I think he's just very, very self-obsessed. It's going deeper and deeper into self-obsession until it kind of implodes. It's also just the words. Everything is done for me. I sort of instinctively felt like I knew what to do from the beginning because the script was so good.
Q: Is it tricky to direct someone having a prostate exam (as Packer does in the film)? Cronenberg: For me? Oh, no problem.
David Cronenberg remembers the time Oliver Stone asked him, “David, does it bother you to be such a marginal filmmaker?”
To which Cronenberg, one of Canada’s most admired and famous directors, replied, “Well, Oliver, it depends. How big of an audience do you need?”
Therein lies the secret to Cronenberg’s success. Cosmopolis, his new movie opening Friday, is an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel about a young billionaire named Eric Packer who spends a day in his limo riding around New York City in search of a haircut.
There is practically no traditional plot in Cosmopolis. More than half the movie takes place inside the limo, where Eric has meetings with his staff, gets a checkup from his doctor (“Your prostate is asymmetrical”) and even has sex. Although Eric is played by Robert Pattinson, the hugely popular star of the Twilight series, Cosmopolis is a tough sell for the multiplex crowd — a rigorous, challenging and oddly hypnotic movie filled with dense, jargon-heavy dialogue.
At 69, Cronenberg continues to make his heady movies the hard way.
“When you’re a filmmaker, you spend a year and a half of your life — maybe more — putting these things together: You have to get your financing in place and you go after actors who will reject you,” he says. “It’s a difficult process. So the movie has to really excite and intrigue me and make me feel like I’m going to discover something by making it,” he says.
NEW YORK - Robert Pattinson was nearing the end of shooting the last “Twilight” film, concluding a chapter of his life that had picked him out of near obscurity and was preparing to spit him out … where exactly? “Twilight” had made him extravagantly famous, but his next steps were entirely uncertain.
“Out of the blue,” he says, came the script for “Cosmopolis” from David Cronenberg, the revered Canadian director of psychological thrillers (“Videodrome,” “Eastern Promises”) that often pursue the spirit through the body. Pattinson, having never met or spoken to Cronenberg, did a little research: He looked him up on Rotten Tomatoes “and it was like 98 percent approval,” he says.
“It was like: OK, that’s my next job,” says Pattinson.
Pattinson now has the unenviable task of releasing his most ambitious movie, his most adult role, into a media storm that instinct would suggest should be run from like a pack of werewolves. Promoting “Cosmopolis” puts Pattinson in front of cameras and microphones for the first time since his “Twilight” co-star and girlfriend Kristen Stewart last month publicly apologized for having a tryst with director Rupert Sanders.
It has been a summer of discontent for Robert Pattinson. Since his longtime girlfriend and “Twilight” co-star Kristen Stewart was photographed in intimate poses with another man a few weeks ago, the heat on his life has been daunting.
As Eric, Pattinson is in every scene of the film, portraying a character unlike any he's tackled before. And in our exclusive interview in support of Cosmopolis' theatrical release by eONE Films, writer/director Cronenberg explained why Pattinson was right for the part of Eric and how he went about tackling the adaptation of DeLillo's novel.
NEW YORK - Robert Pattinson was nearing the end of shooting the last “Twilight” film, concluding a chapter of his life that had picked him out of near obscurity and was preparing to spit him out … where exactly? “Twilight” had made him extravagantly famous, but his next steps were entirely uncertain.
