GQ talk to Robert Pattinson and Claire Denis about #HighLife

GQ sat down with Rob and Claire recently and discussed High Life. Below is a few extracts, but you should read the full interview at GQ:

Claire, how much work did you do in terms of like, the physics of space, or did you not really worry about that? This is a very dreamlike movie, after all.

Denis: I did care. I met with this astrophysicist who was like a teacher for us. Yeah, otherwise no, it was great to be able to know that twelve years aboard on that ship meant maybe two hundred and fifty years on Earth.

Isn’t that terrifying?

Denis: Of course. And the idea of going up eighty percent at speed of light makes you insane, I mean all this is great, it’s great.

Pattinson: I love that the thing about the space-time, that it’s non-linear. It goes one year is two years, three years, four years. Then it kind of goes up gradually when it gets to seven years and then it’s suddenly two hundred thousand. It’s like, that’s absolutely—

Denis: “Exponentiel,” we say in French.

…

Did you talk to prisoners, did you research that aspect of it?

Pattinson: With this, I watched a lot of interviews with people on death row. There was one, I can’t remember who made the documentary now, but it’s about the youngest people on death row. I think there was one kid who was thirteen, who got put on death row. All of the characters in High Life, they must have been… Mia [Goth]’s character, for instance, must have been put in that when she was extraordinarily young, and I always find it quite interesting to see that. You don’t know who you are at all at thirteen, so just to see what people’s eyes look like when you know you’re not gonna, you’re never gonna be let out of jail, ever. And trying to figure out how you construct some kind of life for yourself.

Denis: It’s linked to the belief that someone can change. He is bad. She or he will stay bad. Some people are so fucked up that probably there is no way to change. But it’s so great to think someone can change. To decide death penalty means there is no change possible. “You’re bad, you’re bad.” I think, for me, to believe that there is always a hope that someone could change is really a good reason to live.