Robert Pattinson Talks Good Time at New York Premiere

Below are print interviews from Robert during the NY premiere.  I’ve updated the post to also include some interviews with the Safdie Bros during NY promo.

From WWD:

“We were shooting so much outside that I literally could not afford for anybody to find out we were shooting a movie the whole time and no one ever did,” the 31-year-old actor related at the film’s New York premiere Tuesday. “After three months of being in New York, literally not a single person even said ‘hi.’”

In spite of the character’s shaggy haircut and goatee, Pattinson attributed his ability to go incognito to the attitude he projected while in character, which continued even when cameras weren’t rolling: “If you put a very aggressive energy into the world, people don’t really come up to you.”

“I didn’t know that most of the time he was in character until being in Cannes [for the film festival earlier this year] and he was having a conversation,” noted co-star Taliah Webster, a native New Yorker. “I thought he was just so quiet and didn’t know what to do and was always frantic.”

Working with local actors — many of whom had little experience in front of the camera — helped the Brit fall into the challenging role. “I was just kind of thinking there were so many first-time actors who are from Queens and sort of playing versions of themselves that I thought it would be weird and uncomfortable for them if I’m faking it and they’re not, so I wanted to blur the line a little bit.”

From Variety:

“I think I’m more confident now; this was a challenging role and I learned a lot about my abilities as an actor,” Pattinson told Variety at the film’s New York premiere on Tuesday evening, held at the School of Visual Arts Theatre. “Every single time I get to do another movie, I get a little more confident. You always want to grow in some way and challenge yourself. I feel like this one has helped me become a better actor.”

…

The writing in this — the dialogue felt so real and different,” explained the 31-year-old British star on the red carpet. “It’s set in New York and I’ve been here in New York a million times, but it just felt alien to me. There was something different and original about the characters and the story. I immediately knew the world of the performance that I wanted to do and I knew the energy I wanted when I saw Josh and Benny’s work. This was special.”

Now that Pattinson has received acclaim for his work in indie films and broken any preconceptions about his acting abilities, would he consider taking on another role in a tentpole franchise series like “Twilight” or stick to art house films?

“I look across the board every day,” he said emphatically. “The only thing I do is read script after script waiting for something to hit me. I like stories that feel authentic and it’s just difficult to find. There are a lot of scripts that feel like the writer read a newspaper article and then tried to use their knowledge from film schools to adapt it. That doesn’t interest me. Once I find something and feel really obsessed with it, I feel like I can really connect with the character and bring them to life.”

From RollingStone:

Pattinson stumbled upon a promotional still for Heaven Knows What, a gritty, unsparing 2014 New York indie about a homeless woman ravaged by heroin addiction.

“It really struck me,” he says softly, sitting in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, remembering the moment. “You normally see really striking imagery in a lot of European movies. But it’s rare to see that coming out of American independents.”

Pattinson knew nothing about the movie – he hadn’t even seen a trailer. Nor had he seen any of the previous films by its directors, the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie. But, looking at that image, he knew: He had to be in business with these filmmakers. So Pattinson emailed them.

“When I like something, I get unbelievably enthusiastic,” the actor explains with a warm, ingratiating smile. “The first email I sent was like, ‘I’m completely certain that we’re supposed to do something together.’ And they’re like, ‘Have you seen any of our stuff?’ I said, ‘Nope, don’t need to see it. I know.'”

From THR:

After shooting the adrenaline-filled film, “I’m more confident in my body than I used to be,” Pattinson told The Hollywood Reporter at the SVA Theatre. “It’s something about growing up as an English person — you’re very physically inhibited. I’ve done a few movies where I’ve actively tried to be more physical and break through my levels of inhibition and self-righteousness. It’s difficult. But as soon as I saw their last movie [Heaven Knows What] — it’s so kinetic — I just knew I wanted to do something with them.”

The directing duo usually don’t work with established stars, but spoke highly of working with the actor. “He said to us, ‘I’m willing to do whatever it takes,’ and we took him at his word times a hundred,” said Benny. Added Josh, “He didn’t complain once, and his trailer was a minivan that sometimes doubled as a Steadicam dolly.”

From The New York Guardian

“It really struck me,” he says softly, sitting in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, remembering the moment. “You normally see really striking imagery in a lot of European movies. But it’s rare to see that coming out of American independents.”

Pattinson knew nothing about the movie – he hadn’t even seen a trailer. Nor had he seen any of the previous films by its directors, the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie. But, looking at that image, he knew: He had to be in business with these filmmakers. So Pattinson emailed them.

“When I like something, I get unbelievably enthusiastic,” the actor explains with a warm, ingratiating smile. “The first email I sent was like, ‘I’m completely certain that we’re supposed to do something together.’ And they’re like, ‘Have you seen any of our stuff?’ I said, ‘Nope, don’t need to see it. I know.’”

From Deadline:

“When we got Rob’s email that said, ‘let’s do something together,’ there was no project,” explained Josh Safdie during a post-screening conversation of Good Time at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “[On the news] at the time, these two guys had just broken out of prison in upstate New York. We watched as people were rooting for these two people. Out of a conversation about that, we all agreed we wanted to make a movie that was dangerous — and was ‘pulp.’”

There was some consideration about Pattinson being a part of their long-time thriller Uncut Gems, which begins production in 2018, but he didn’t fit into that movie’s particular environment. So the brothers developed a new story with the Twilightactor in mind, co-written by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein.

Ben Safdie had developed a mentally challenged character for a project that never took off, but he reintroduced it for the younger brother character, Nick.

He then began an email relationship with Pattinson who was working on The Lost City of Z. The two would write each other as Nick and Constantine to develop their brotherly rapport. Explained Safdie: “Rob would email me his ‘letters’ from ‘jail’ and I’d respond as ‘Nick’ and then Josh and Ronnie would see these emails. That’s when he had the experience of talking to Nick and I’d have the experience of responding.”

Ahead of filming, Pattinson said he would try out his make-up and overall look as Constantine — or Connie as he is called in the film — and would walk the streets of upper Manhattan near Josh Safdie’s apartment. He said that an underworld of people would approach him because he looked like “a crackhead,” as he described it, adding about filming Good Time: “The locations gave a lot to play off. My understanding of New York is different. I wouldn’t think of it as a New York movie. It feels sci-fi. Right from the beginning when you’re playing a character that’s on the fringe — and not just a film version of fringe, but actually fringe — it feels like you’re an alien.”

Safdie Bros

This is not from the premiere but I thought I would add the Safdies from The New York Post:

““Rob saw the photo and thought we captured so much in just one frame,” Benny, 31, tells The Post. “He said, ‘I don’t know what it is, but I need to work with these guys.’ ”

In 2015 Pattinson e-mailed the brothers, who until then had cast only little-known, sometimes amateur talent. The Safdies flew to Los Angeles for a meeting with Pattinson after the actor had a chance to watch “Heaven Knows What.”

As Josh, 33, remembers it, “He said, ‘Listen, I am throwing this out there: Whatever you are doing next, I want to be a part of — even if it’s catering.’ ”

I fell in love with the photograph,” Pattinson told Jimmy Kimmel earlier this month. “We took a meeting and I was just overwhelmed with these guys.”

The Safdies responded with Big Apple arrogance. “We told him, ‘What we’re doing next, you don’t fit in.’ ” Benny says.

From Slant Magazine

Tell me more about your style of filmmaking as investigative journalism.

…I remember this case about a con man who posed as different people, including a Village Voice critic! The photographer shot the contents of the con man’s bag, and it was insane—one little Jansport backpack with a MiniDV tape, a lot of different IDs, weird essays photocopied from the library, and this cheap, crummy-looking book, Disguise Techniques. This guy’s walking around with a handbook on how to con people? I thought that was fascinating. So I buy the book, and it’s, like, one of the great manuals, like an acting book. It ended up informing the wardrobe of Good Time, and I gave it to Rob to read. I’d known some con men in my life, and sometimes they were friends and sometimes they weren’t. But when I read this thing about how to truly get away with crime, to use municipality to its advantage, sometimes the best way to blend in is by standing out. That’s where the orange jackets in the movie came from. These investigations end up being really fruitful.

From IndieWire: (you can listen to a podcast by clicking on link)

The brothers believe that the strongest performances come from trained actors when they take on roles where they are tapping into who they are as a person. With Pattinson, they were intrigued by a side of him they hadn’t seen publicly.

“When we met him for the first time, what we were interested in this mania that we saw that I had never really known about, it’s not a public part of who he is,” said Josh. “Another part that was really kind of exposing was this element – he had like this Vietnam War vet quality, like he had been through something very traumatic. If you put duck-tape on a cat they think they are up against a wall, he kind of walks like that. He thinks everybody is watching. He has this on-the-run quality to him and that was like, ‘OK, we can definitely work with that and work that into the character.”

…

The Safdies liked the idea of building a fast-paced narrative around what they were sensing from the famous actor in real life. First, though, they let Pattinson know what would be expected of him, by describing what actor Caleb Landry Jones went through in preparing and filming “Heaven Knows What.”

“I was like, ‘Listen, if we’re going to agree to do a movie right now, I’m letting you know we’re going to leave here and in six weeks we’re going to be getting ready to make this movie,’” said Josh. “He told his agents, his manager, don’t counter, just take the offer. I’m doing this movie, I don’t want to hear anything. You can’t slow it up in any way.”

That was the ultimate sign for the Safdies that they had found the the right actor to build a movie around — because the one thing they won’t tolerate is sitting around.

From MovieMaker:

MM: You’ve mostly worked with nonprofessional actors in the past. Did you approach working with Robert Pattinson any differently?

BS: We like to think of them as first-time actors, as in, this is the first time they’ve been given the opportunity to act, as opposed to nonprofessional actors. But we approach each person like an individual. There’s a certain directing style that you use with a first-time actor because you really need to go out and show who the person is. There are certain people that just get it right away, and you can just tell them, and they’ll do it. Rob was so game to go the whole distance. He really wanted to dive deep. He gave us a lot of time before production started to develop the character. Josh had Rob write me an email, as Connie, from jail to Nick. So I responded in kind as Nick. We had this month-long back and forth of letters, developing a history between us, and Josh and Ronnie would take those and add them into the writing. And when Rob and I were acting together, we would have that to pull from.

Josh Safdie (JS): I wrote a biography for Rob, so he would know where Connie stood. We were thinking, if this person hasn’t lived this experience, how can we get them there? And Rob was really able to go the extra mile.