Safdie brothers: Robert Pattinson in 'Good Time' like De Niro in 'Taxi Driver'
by Orlando Parfitt. Screen International. May 23. 2017
What was it like to work with Robert Pattinson?
Benny Safdie: I have so much respect for how deep he went, the places he went, the people he met, just his level of commitment, 16 hours a day, he was willing to do whatever. It was cold, I was playing the brother in a wheelchair, and we said to him ‘we don’t need you for this shot’, but he would stay and push me around in the cold. He said: “I need that, to take it that far”. He went above and beyond.
JS: We bought Rob to a lot of active jails. He turned up in character in the hope that he inmates wouldn’t recognise him as a movie star. We pushed our start date on purpose in an effort to buy more prep time and I would say there was three to four months of character prep for him, which is a lot for a movie star in his career.
How would you describe his final performance?
JS: I wouldn’t even call it a performance. If you were to show the film to someone who has no idea who Robert Pattinson is, they would just assume that we found this guy. The only performances that I could liken what he did would be to an Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon or Tommy Lee Jones in The Executioner’s Song or Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. I’m mentioning icons of my filmic mind. This is what people will liken this to, it’s a transformation.
Personally for him he wanted to disappear. When he was fully in character, in costume, in make-up and when he knew his voice, he would just take a walk around the neighbourhood, simply because normally he can’t do that. He would walk into a pharmacy and buy a Coca Cola and no-one would say anything to him or look at him, or take a picture of him, and that’s how he knew he had the character down.
Moonlight distributors A24 have US rights to Good Time, what were they like?
JS: They approach film as if they’re part of factory line of seamstresses who are trying to sow together a tapestry of the zeitgeist. They think of movies not as movies but as cultural events, they only care about distinction. In their office once I asked: ‘what does that guy do?’ - he was just looking at numbers. I was like ‘box office numbers?’ And they said ‘no, statistics of life’. I’m very impressed by them.
BS: They don’t have a specific model that they willingly attach to each film, they treat each film as object of preciousness and they tailor everything to that world. They become the films, they put a lot of love and care to trailers and everything that goes out there and that’s a very unique thing.
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