“Wait, Pattinson is really beautiful in the real world”

Vanity Fair France included this article/interview with the Safdie Bros in their September issue as promotion for Good Time which hits French cinemas on 13 September 2017.  Below is the translation via Google:

The young directors of the vibrant Good Time tell how Robert Pattinson accommodated their feverish methods. And vice versa.

He Was Prepared to Go To the End

Even if we work in a certain confidentiality, we have “fans”. We often talk with celebrities, but we never felt a commitment of real commitment before Rob contacted us. It was clear that he was ready to go to the end, that he was even more committed than some of the non-professional actors that are used to recruit. Robert has a high degree of professionalism and is totally involved. Even when he was filming in the jungle in Colombia for James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, we exchanged emails daily.

His fame did not freeze the casting

The challenge for Rob was not to face non-professional actors, but that some played more or less their own role and that he himself had the burden of merging into their lives. The celebrity of Pattinson never freezes the rest of the casting. It was the opposite. When Taliah Webster, the teenager whom Pattinson seduces in the film, was cast, it was believed that she did not even know him: she had an audition with Robert and was interacting with him with such composure … Then we discovered that she had seen the series of “Twilight” fifty times!

No One Has Recognized

Initially, Robert was worried: how to shoot a movie under the cloak of New York when one is also identifiable? We told him, “You know, we’re not going to turn to Times Square, but to outlying neighborhoods where real people live and work.” That said, he had to be disguised. We did tests for makeup, costumes and hairstyles. One day he enters a supermarket making a run. Nobody recognized him. It was there that he understood that he was ready to give life to Connie. But, basically, Connie is not so different from Rob. He also tries to move from one place to another without being noticed

His Physique has a direct influence

We had seen Rob in Cosmopolis and The Rover … Not in “Twilight“. We were not really measuring what he represented. During the writing, we said, “Wait, Pattinson is really beautiful in the real world. So Connie is himself very handsome and given his profile, it is obvious that he uses his physique to manipulate people.” When you have a scene where Robert is in a room with a teenage girl, you have to take that in account. His physique has a direct influence on the script.

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