“He’s amazing in LOST CITY OF Z. I wish his character was bigger”, Josh Safdie on Robert Pattinson in The Lost City of Z

Steve Prokopy (aka Capone) from Ain’t It Cool News recently sat down and chatted with the Safdie Bros.  Below is an extract of what they had to say about Robert:

Capone: Josh, you were the one that told the story yesterday about just how Pattinson found you via a still from HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT. Did he ever tell you what it was about that still that drew him to you?

JS: He saw the still, and then saw the movie, obviously. We got him a private screener.

Capone: But, after he sent the email saying he wanted to work with you?

JS: Yes, after. In hindsight, we’ve since talked about it. He thought that the energy of the still, and remember it’s just a still of Arielle Holmes looking off screen, covered in pink neon.

Capone: I know the exact image, sure.

JS: He said that it somehow, in one still, is was able to capture a nuance and an energy that he had never seen in one image before. Also, the casting decision, because when I first saw Arielle on the street, I think he was drawn to the image the same way I was drawn to Arielle. She was just so uniquely beautiful. It’s great when you can see someone redefine what beautiful can be, and she was that. I think that he just saw this confluence of casting, energy, cinematography, and lighting in one image, and he was just like, “I want to be a part of whatever that is. Whatever I’m feeling in this image, I want to be a part of it.”

Capone: Were you at all hesitant to get involved with an actor that had a certain amount of baggage?

JS: To be completely honest, I had only seen him in one movie at the time, and it was THE ROVER.

Capone: That’s a good one. 

JS: Yeah. But I had known that he was—because I had missed the whole TWILIGHT thing—this international mega-star, that he was all over the tabloids. One time, I walked by a huge crowd, and I was like, “Why are you guys here?” They’re like, “Robert Pattinson’s in that building,” but that was like years before I met him. Were we worried about it? No, I mean…

Benny Safdie: The only hesitation we had was the fact that he wasn’t right for the movie we wanted to make at the time. So it was like, “Do we contact him? What are we going to do?” We didn’t have anything.

JS: Because we knew that whatever we wanted to make after HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT was going to be something heavily genre oriented. The Diamond District film is a genre movie; it’s more of a comedic thriller. We wanted to do something in the genre world, something that had a grandness to it, and we knew that with a star of that stature, with just him, we could just do whatever we want with complete freedom with the rest of the cast, and we would have a certain budget that would allow us to basically have these dream scenarios. We can do action sequences. We could do a chase sequence. We could do a car crash.

BS: Shoot at Adventureland.

JS: We could shoot at Adventureland.

Capone: I gotta say, having just seen him in THE LOST CITY OF Z a couple months ago, he’s doing the best work he’s ever done right now.

JS: He’s amazing in LOST CITY OF Z. I wish his character was bigger.

Capone: But I think he kind of liked it because it was a smaller character, almost unrecognizable.

JS: Yes, yes. Well, that was his initial reach out, his initial olive branch, was he was looking to be a supporting player. Right now, after COSMOPOLIS, I think he was really interested in disappearing into movies and being the supporting characters, but see him as a leading man. I think that he’s a star in that way, and that things should revolve around him. I made that very clear to him when we started working together.

Capone: Let me ask you about the opening scene. Much like writing the perfect first line in a book pulls you in, that scene is that line in the book. You have no idea what’s going on, and there’s that tight closeup on your face—too close.

BS: He doesn’t want you inside.

Capone: Talk about developing that moment. How early in the process did you come up with that, because you could have written that without even having Robert be a part of it.

JS: Yeah. I’ll let Benny speak about where that scene really started, but in the writing process, we always knew we wanted to introduce Connie in way that you would meet someone like Connie, that he just gets involved in your life and now you’re like, “Whoa, now I’m in this guy’s life.” In a weird way, it’s almost like a meta thing, we’re making this movie that is very much like a movie we would have made before—small, almost [documentarian Frederick] Wiseman-like movie about institutional mental illness, mental disability, and then this movie star comes in and grabs us, and we get involved again and embark on a genre film.

Click on the link above to read the full interview, but it does contain some spoilers for those who want to remain spoiler free.