Excerpt of a new interview with Robert Pattinson in the Financial Times:
Robert Pattinson has learnt a skill that movie stars need to survive: the art of creating a sense of intimacy while preserving mystique. When I meet the 32-year-old British heart-throb he goes about this by downplaying his status as a serious actor. He giggles, vapes, roars with laughter and generally gives the impression of being a free spirit just surfing the waves of chance.
When I ask how he leverages his star power, he says: “I don’t know how to wield it, really.” This is hard to believe. At the height of the international celebrity that followed his years as a sexy, tortured vampire… (2008-12) he developed a range of ruses for dodging the paparazzi — riding in car boots, swapping clothes with friends.
He could easily have continued appearing in glossy lucrative blockbusters had he wanted to, simply by saying “yes” to offers such as the role of Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey. Instead, the trajectory his career has taken testifies to his determination to become a daring and transgressive actor.
Here is a man willing to go against the grain of fame towards work that is altogether stranger and more soulful. Pattinson’s latest movie, High Life, is set aboard a spaceship of convicts sent by a callous government on a one-way trip to harvest energy from black holes. It is the English-language debut of one of his heroes, French director Claire Denis. The queen of atmospherically loaded European cinema, she is still best known for the heat-struck, homoerotic military drama Beau Travail (1999).
It was Pattinson who pursued Denis, rather than vice versa, and she eventually cast him as Monte, a character conceived with a much older actor in mind (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman was once considered). Pattinson jumped at the role despite not really knowing what he had signed up for, having received a treatment rather than an actual script.
“It was very vague,” he recalls. “Not a lot of specifics on what the mission was, or where the characters came from. But I just wanted to work with Claire, so I thought, ‘I don’t even care. I don’t need any of the details.’ ”
High Life unfolds in dual timelines. In the present, Monte and an infant are the last survivors aboard a spacecraft that is being drawn ever closer to a black hole. In flashbacks we see a chaotic recent past..
As Monte in Claire Denis’s ‘High Life’ Pattinson spends most of High Life acting opposite a beguiling baby but their screen chemistry got off to a bad start. The night before shooting began, Pattinson discovered that the identical twins cast for the role screamed every time he held them.
Rather than panic, he took swift measures. “I remembered my friend Sam. I’d met his daughter when she was three-weeks-old and she seemed really easy-going. She was 13 months by this point. I called up Sam and said, ‘Does Scarlett want to be in this movie?’ He came up at 10pm that night and immediately Scarlett was so at ease in front of the camera.”
When not caring for the baby, Monte’s days are consumed with small practical tasks: typing up reports; walking the echoey corridors of a once noisy spaceship; shaving. The intense focus emanating from this solitary figure gives the film its centre of gravity and the camera’s gaze is held by his physicality.
“I hadn’t done a movie where it was really about skin and how you move your body,” says the actor. “There were so many days of just wandering around corridors and I was getting so self-conscious, thinking ‘Is this going to be really boring?’ But there was a residual bit where I felt very present in my body. There’s something to do with a bunch of stuff, probably being English, where you don’t own your physicality. But being in a contained environment in your underpants for the majority of a movie, you eventually have to own it.”
He put himself entirely in Denis’s hands. “Half the time I’d be doing scenes where I’d be like, ‘Does that make any sense?’ But sometimes I’d turn around and Claire would be crying behind the monitor. When I watched the movie later I thought, ‘Well, she definitely saw something that I don’t fully understand but I feel on a visceral level.’”
The visceral feeling Pattinson describes is what makes High Life (and much of Denis’s work) so mysteriously moving. Amid the sexual goings-on — which run to rape, artificial insemination and much bodily gloop — she evokes a great void of loneliness within which one man enacts a mission whose fruits he won’t live to see.
Pattinson too continues to plot his own course… but doesn’t seem saddled with anxieties about commercial performance. Instead, he gravitates to roles, often supporting ones, that allow Pattinson the star to disappear. His most impressive post-Twlight performances seem united by a gleeful nihilism, such as the billionaire embracing the fall of civilisation in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis and the simple-minded idealist who sings while the apocalypse unfolds in David Michôd’s The Rover.
His leading man jawline was concealed by a bushy beard in James Gray’s Amazon-set The Lost City of Z, and in the Safdie Brothers’ skin-prickling neon nightmare Good Time he was barely recognisable in a goatee, a shell-suit and a Queens accent as a robber on the run in the gutters of New York. His next projects reveal a continued lack of involvement with mainstream Hollywood. There are two American indies, and collaborations with Australian, Colombian and English auteurs.
“It’s more interesting if you feel like you have to start from scratch every time,” he says. He is unfazed by potential failure. “Humiliation is less scary than disappointing yourself. At least with humiliation, you’ll learn from it . . . If your expectation of yourself is, ‘I’m going to be shit because I have no idea what I’m doing’, then you’re always pleasantly surprised. Always have the lowest expectations possible.”
If Pattinson does not know how to wield his star power, he certainly knows how to work against it. As he says, “Most actors who get commercial appeal it’s because they’re consistent. So if you like a certain actor, you expect the same thing they did last time. I don’t want to do that — I want to do the opposite.” ‘
(RP360 note: This interview was conducted a few weeks ago before it was announced that Pattinson is co-starring in Christopher Nolan’s next action thriller which begins filming in June.)
High Life’ is in US theaters now and will open in the UK on May 10
Financial Times full interview
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