Robert Pattinson has proven to be an incredibly versatile actor

 

The Young Folk spoke to the Safdie Bros about their film Good Time and talked superheroes, street casting, Robert Pattinson, casting developmentally disabled actors and more!  Here’s the extract concerning Robert, but you should click on the link to read the full interview:

Your films tend to consist of first-time or lesser known actors, and Good Time still sort of holds true to that with the exception of bigger stars like Robert Pattinson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Barkhad Abdi. Would you consider this film as dipping your toes into a more mainstream market?

JS:  I think that you could argue that the dip into the mainstream market is more working with a genre. A genre is a way to tap into a larger audience because people like to experience things through that lens. People like to be engaged and to be thrilled. This is a thriller, an action crime thriller. So when Rob reached out to us, we wanted to fuse movie stardom with a genre and see what we could do, but also take everything we’ve learned with our other features and bring them into the movie.

BS: There are certain things you have to do. You have to show how this happen and show the process of this. If you don’t, people won’t follow it. The moment somebody dips out you’ll lose the audience and we are very aware of that.

Robert Pattinson has proven to be an incredibly versatile actor and he was fantastic as Connie. You said he approached you for the project?

JS: Yes.

Did you end up creating the project around him?

JS: We wrote the project for him. He said, “I want to be involved.” I told him i wanted to do a crime thriller, but I don’t know what the plot is yet. The only thing I had was the title, Buddy Duress, who he loved in Heaven Knows What, and we were going to cast a lot of street cast people. It was going to be about a guy who wanted to buy a piece of land, no matter how shitty it was because he thought that was his road to freedom.

With the street casting, is that where all the non-career actors came into play?

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BS: Yeah. We wanted to bring this idea that we didn’t have permission to do certain things, even though we had all of the permits. So when he’s running through the mall, it feels like we just stole that shot. We just wanted to bring that energy to it. Like mixing Rob with certain people who hadn’t acted before because they add a realness to the situation. When we were shooting at the mall, the cop said that we had permission to shut all of it down to film, but we wanted to keep it open for the energy. He just said to make sure not to hit anyone.

That’s impressive. So everyone’s reaction to Rob’s running is genuine?

BS: Not everyone. That’s when we put some of the street cast people into the scene that are perfectly enmeshed into that world.