The Spring/Summer 2019 issue of Dazed features a new conversation with Rob and Claire Denis on their movie “High Life”. A short excerpt is below. You can read the article in its entirety on the Dazed website.
Monte is confronted with his transgression at the end of the film. Robert, it feels as if you are consciously downplaying this moment on screen.
Robert Pattinson: The relationship between Monte and (his daughter) Willow, and the movie as a whole, is so gentle. But when I first read it, I saw it as the story of a guy who’d had a daughter because he was raped, and who ends up, essentially, in a relationship with her. It doesn’t really feel like that when you watch it, but that’s what happens! Right at the beginning of this process, Claire said to me, ‘I don’t believe in morality.’ She is saying that morality is a personal thing and that we should all, individually, confront it. I thought the story (of High Life) was so interesting, because when you take away all the world’s mechanisms of judgment, how would you behave? How would you act if you knew that no one could judge you? How does this affect our understanding of love, what our relationships are, what the relationship is between a father and a daughter? When you only have one other person in your life, do you search for every relationship that you need in them? Willow becomes his mother in a lot of ways, as well as his daughter and girlfriend. And I guess that’s the thing with taboos as well, why would something seem perverse if there’s no one else around?
