Category Archives: Cosmopolis

Rob and Cronenberg talk to ‘The Boston Globe’ about adapting the novel, Cosmopolis, to the big screen and the experience they shared while ringing the opening bell for the New York Stock Exchange.

One of the most difficult tasks for Cronenberg was translating the intricate dialogue from the novel to the silver screen. In order to keep the flavor of the book in tact, Cronenberg maintained the poeticism. When asked about whether Cronenberg and Rob had a better understanding of the story now that they’ve finished filming, they both respond with saying that they are still learning new themes and interpretations:

Pattinson: Well, I like it. I don’t think that confusion is necessarily a bad thing. We’ve done hundreds of interviews now and I still find myself coming up with new things to say.

Cronenberg: Those statements that we made, which were very candid, can be misinterpreted as meaning we were inept, incompetent. But not at all. You know, I don’t do storyboards, for example. I don’t really know what I’m going to do at every set up and every shot. It’s all very spontaneous and of-the-moment, even what lens to use. That’s what we’re talking about. We don’t have it all mapped out. We’re trusting the script and trusting the dialogue that is all 100 percent Don DeLillo’s and taken from the novel directly. We know that if we respond directly to that . . . the movie will have its coherence.

Further in the interview, Rob and Cronenberg are asked to share their experiences from ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange:

Cronenberg: All through the halls of the stock exchange they have these monitors built into the walls, and they were all showing clips of “Cosmopolis.” All of the people there who were marshaling us were incredibly excited about the movie and really wanted to see it. And they were incredibly friendly and sweet, and I was suddenly thinking, “This is the wonderful, friendly face of capitalism. I don’t know why I’ve been fighting it for so long. I think I’m going to buy some stock.” [Pattinson laughs.] And the stock exchange is about marketing. To link the starting of the day with some product that’s being marketed was a no-brainer. And the fact that it might be rather ironic that we were opening the stock exchange; I don’t think it occurred to them.

Pattinson: I’m so clueless about anything to do with that world. I was kind of just terrified that I was somehow going to mess it up. And also to see people’s enthusiasm. It’s so alien. Even people’s attitudes there. It seems so alien to me. I mean, I’ve met traders before, but in their own environment — everyone’s extremely happy, which is not what I expected. It doesn’t seem stressful at all. They were all excited about seeing who was going to ring the bell this morning. They had the American gymnastics team closing it that day. It looks like a really fun place to work.

When asked about how well Rob and Cronenberg have gotten along during this publicity tour, Cronenberg responds, “we were Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” I think I can speak for everyone when I say that a Cronenberg film is not the most commercialized piece of film. Therefore, his fan base tends to be a bit off-kilter. Rob comments on the interesting mix of Cronenberg’s horror fans and his own Twilight fans:

Pattinson: Absolutely. We were in London and we did a Q&A and it was two very diverse groups of people who suddenly came into contact with each other for I think probably the first time. And, I don’t know . . . David’s horror film fans . . . and general “Twilight” female fans . . . are actually quite a good pairing. I think both of them didn’t see anything in each other first of all, but they’re quite a good, odd couple. When you see a bearded guy with long hair, who absolutely will weep [for Cronenberg] . . . and then a “Twilight” fan who will weep at that, they actually look like a couple.

Read the full article here.

Source: The Boston Globe | via RPLife

Rob talks about how he acquired the role as Eric Packer in Cosmopolis, saying that:

“I got the script out of the blue and was offered the role, which was a little shocking. Usually, the movies I am offered straight-up are terrible. This script felt so original, it was almost gleaming. I knew there was a movie to be made here. I was just worried that I might not be the one to pull it off. I kept thinking ‘There are tons of people better than me for this job!’ It took me a while to make peace with that.”

Rob further comments about how nerve-wrecking it was when he first began filming:

“At the start of the movie, I am wearing this dark, blank suit. I am wearing completely blacked-out sunglasses and I’m standing still, not moving. Every tool actors use for their performance has been taken away from me, but I felt secure because I knew David was watching me — really watching me — and that gives you confidence. Most of the time on movie sets, I question whether the director is even paying attention to what I’m doing.”

The dialogue in Cosmopolis is poetic. The way sentences are put together and how the words just fall off of your tongue so calculated are beautifully translated on screen. Rob commented on how he felt liberated by this syntax:

“I felt a physical connection with the writing — I thought it was so good — and I wanted to read it aloud as soon as I got the script, just to see how it sounded. It is so perfectly written. I loved the fact that I didn’t need to put my personal stamp on it as an actor. I just had to perform it in the truest way possible.”

Read the full article here.

Source: Miami Herald

Anne Thompson: Why did you cast “Twilight” star Robert Pattinson as your ice-cold 28-year-old Master of the Universe?
David Cronenberg: Of course you begin with the basics. Is he the right age for the character? Does he feel convincing as a screen presence? Obviously you need someone with charisma to hold the audience for the entire movie. He’s in every scene without exception, that’s unusual. You want someone proven, who people want to watch, who will never be boring. I knew I would be crawling all over his face for the entire movie, so I wanted someone whose face is constantly changing, through all the angles. And he had to have chops for tricky dialogue. The art of casting is to intuit, to see from what he’s done before that he could do this.

Was there a particular performance that gave you confidence?
I saw him in “Little Ashes” as the young Salvador Dali. He does a Spanish accent, he was not afraid to play a character of ambiguous sexuality and eccentricity. That probably of all the things I saw made me think he was the right guy.

Did you cast Pattinson with a certain likeability factor in mind, so that audiences would like him in spite of the character he is playing? Feel some vulnerablity?
I really don’t care. I want the lead character in a movie to be interesting, fascinating and complex, but to be likeable to me is way down the list. It’s not on the list, because it is a simplistic thing for the lead character to must be likable. He has to be watchable, that’s the key, and fascinating, and likeable if it works for the project, fine, let him be likeable. If not I don’t worry about it.

There are actors who do not want to play unlikeable characters, afraid it will damage their credibility as stars or effect them personally. Actors who are more interested in being actors than stars, like Viggo Mortensen, don’t worry about being likeable or not on screen.

How did Pattinson surprise you? 
He literally surprised me every day, as he read dialogue and interacted with the other actors. We were throwing different factors at him almost very day because of the stucture of the screenplay. He really has extended scenes. With one actor at the end, Paul Giamatti, he really let it fly, in that he didn’t cling to a preconceived idea of what he should be doing. He reacted spontaneously to other actors as they surprised him and he surprised them. He was terrific and not predictable and dead-on accurate.

How many takes do you do?
One or two. The whole last shot was a long take with Giamatti, three minutes in that last 22-minute scene.

Read the full interview here.

Thanks to RPLife
Source: Indiewire

Rob comments on how be obtained the role of Eric Packer in Cosmopolis:

“Out of the blue,” he says. 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.

Further into the interview, Rob talks about how intimidating it was to take such a different dialogue style. DeLillo is known for this odd flow in his work.

The stylized language and atypical nature of the film made it a risky and intimidating choice for Pattinson.

“I couldn’t hear the voice of the character at all. There was nothing,” he says. “It was scary to say yes to something which you didn’t know what it was. I knew it was interesting, I knew there was something special but I had no idea how to do it or what I could add to it. But when you start saying no to Cronenberg because you don’t think it’s good enough, it’s a stupid decision to make.”

Cronenberg commented on the business perspective on casting Rob as the lead in Cosmopolis, 

“The fact that somebody who has clout is willing to do a movie that’s difficult is a gift to a director because you’re not only getting the right guy as an actor, but you’re getting financing interest and you get to make the movie. This is not an easy movie to get made.”

Rob talks about moving on from Twilight, focusing on whether this new freedom has allowed him to explore is acting talent:

Asked if he now feels certain he’s an actor, he quickly replies, “No. As soon as you start existing in a certain world, you feel like you have tremendous amount of baggage all the time. You get stuck in this rut where you want people to think you’re something else, but you’re too scared to do what that is to actually be the other person. Then you get a gift like this movie where it’s way easier than I thought it was. You just do it. It doesn’t really matter if you fail.”

Read the article in its entirety here.

Thanks to RPLife
Source: The Washington Times

Here’s an excerpt from the GILT interview where Denise Cronenberg talks about how it was like dressing Rob for Cosmopolis. One thing that she seems to emphasize in this interview is how well Rob wears a suit, and I think I can speak for all of us when I say that I most definitely agree with her

We would have tried to take the wardrobe home after shooting wrapped. Does that ever happen? 
Yes, people do take, or try to take, clothing home during and after a film. Rob did take one of his suits home (we had seven of them), but I asked him if he would like one. He has so many suits personally that he really doesn’t need any more.

You did one hell of a job dressing Rob for the film. What advice would you give him, if any, for dressing for the red carpet?
It’s not difficult to dress Rob and make him look terrific. He wears suits so well, and Gucci fits him so well. My advice to him is to keep doing exactly what he has been doing—wearing Gucci. You can’t go wrong.

And how about for daily life?
Rob’s off-camera look is very relaxed, and it’s his personal taste. There’s also an element of trying to hide, with something like a baseball cap, but really, it’s comfortable. That’s who he is.

Picture Source: eOne Entertainment
Source: GILT

Cronenberg talks about why he chose Rob for Cosmopolis, what it took to get him to accept the role, and Queen of the Desert with Rotten Tomatoes. Here is a brief excerpt of the interview:

Robert Pattinson. There were plenty of people who were a little surprised when you picked him for the role, but I have to say he gives a really sublime performance. You knew what you were doing, clearly — so what was it that drew you to Robert?

Cronenberg: Well, casting always starts in a very pragmatic way. It’s, “Is this guy the right age for the character?” “Does he have the right sort of physique, the right screen presence?” “Is he available, and if so, can you afford him? Does he want to do it?” You know, all of those things. But then you do your homework as a director, more specifically, and you watch stuff. I watched Little Ashes, in which Rob plays a young Salvador Dali; I watched Remember Me; I watched the first Twilight movie. And I watched — interestingly enough, I suppose, because people wouldn’t expect it — but you watch interviews with the guy on YouTube, you know. I want to get an idea of his sense of humor, his sense of himself, the way he handles himself, his intelligence — all of those things you can’t really tell from watching an actor play a role in a movie. I suppose in the old days you meet the guy and hang out, and go to a bar or whatever — [laughs] — but these days nobody has time for that, or the money, and so you do it some other way. And once I’d done all that stuff, I thought, This is the guy I want. I thought, He’d be terrific and I actually think he’s a very underrated actor — and it would be my pleasure to prove that by casting him.

I think a lot of people will share that opinion after seeing the film. Was he difficult to get? I mean, he’s clearly up for it, based on his performance, but how do you go about getting Robert Pattinson?

Cronenberg: Basically, I wrote the script before I went into production on A Dangerous Method, so Rob got the script about a year before we were really shooting. He’s a very down to earth guy, and he was surprised that anybody would want him. [Laughs] It sounds odd, I know. Of course, he knows that his name adds value because of his star power, but he knew my movies, and he knew I was a serious director, and I think he was nervous, you know — I think he was afraid, because he knew it was good. He immediately loved the script, especially because he thought it was very funny — and the movie is funny; a lot of people maybe don’t see that the first time around — and the script was funny as well. But also he had seen enough of the now conventional stuff that he gets offered to see how different this was, and how it stood out — and the quality of Don’s writing, because the dialogue is really 100 per cent from the novel.

So I really had to convince him that I knew he was the right guy and that he could do it. And you’d be very surprised that a lot of actors, and very experienced ones, too — not just young ones — they worry that they don’t want to wreck your movie. They don’t want to be the bad thing in your movie that brings it down. They need to be convinced that they’re good enough, especially if they know it’s good. He said — and I know this ’cause of interviews that we’ve done together, and I hear him saying these things — that usually the dialogue is so bad that you, the actor, figure that you are responsible for trying to make it interesting, just by the way you spin it. But in this case the dialogue was great, and it’s a completely reversed worry: “Am I good enough to get the best out of this?” So it took me about 10 days, and Rob said he was afraid to call me back because he’s used to bullshitting directors, like all actors do — but because I’d written the script he couldn’t do that with me. [Laughs] You know, actors can really tie themselves in knots, when really he just should’ve said, “Yes, I’ll do it.”

Read the full article here.

Thanks to RPLife
Source: Rotten Tomatoes

Rob talks about his next projects, more specifically, The Rover:

“It’s a kind of a western,” Pattinson explained. “It’s very existential. It’s really interesting. I couldn’t really explain to you what it’s about but it’s sort of about how much pain can the world take and how much disgust and cruelty before love dies. I think that’s kind of what it’s about.”

“David Michôd’s going to read this and be like ‘What the fuck are you talking about? It’s a crime movie,’ ” he said with a laugh.

As we all had thought, The Rover was supposed to film this fall, but has since changed, according to Rob:

Pattinson admitted it is later than he originally wanted. “I wish it was shooting this fall,” he said. “I was supposed to be doing this movie this fall but that was pushed to after ‘The Rover,’ which is a good thing because it needs a ton of work. But I really wish I could move ‘The Rover’ up. I’ve got to find something else to do.”

Read the full article here.

Source: The Playlist