Robert Pattinson first talks about the time it took to shoot Tenet

“The Batman too, it will last 6 long months. Nolan’s film started in March 2019 and ran until mid-November. And the next day I went to the Batman rehearsals, physical preparation, costumes… In total, I had only two days off.”

“I had been approached for a  serious project around Chet Baker. I read a lot about his life, reviewed ‘Let’s Get Lost’, listened to his records, studied his voice. When you immerse yourself in this chaotic and sad life – we’re talking about a trumpeter who lost his teeth because he owed money to his dealers and had to relearn his instrument like a beginner – you first want to play it. It’s a tragic and beautiful character, Chet. […]”

You are the age of Christ…

“Yes, I am 33 years old… This year will be the year of my resurrection. No, let’s get serious for a second: there’s something strange about my age. Since I’m 30, I spend my time saying that I’m turning 40. It’s pleasant to watch, to see different projects take me away from those of my vampiric youth. It’s also nice to feel more stable every day. Yes, I was certainly looking forward to getting older.”

When did you enter the film industry?

“When I was 15 years old. Which means that I’ve spent exactly half my life in it. I was a child, then I was an actor. It’s so strange. I got into it almost by accident. The first real role was already pure madness: I was 15 when I played in Harry Potter. 15 years old… Before that, I had been modeling and trying to make movies for four years, at my mother’s instigation. I even played in that movie, Vanity Fair, but I ended up getting cut in the editing, which didn’t bode well for a great start. Then there was Twilight, for four years full time, from 2008 to 2011. Four years… only four years… but with what it meant, all of a sudden… I was 21 or 22 when the first Twilight came out. If I was lying alone on a couch right now, I could see every moment of it again. There’s not a second of the Twilight madness that I don’t remember. But very quickly, around the age of 25, I felt that I couldn’t go any further in popularity. The game was being played elsewhere for me; with the challenge of becoming a real actor, for example.”

Did you like this moment?

“Yes I did since it was all quite unexpected. The pleasure was here because it wasn’t guided by any ambition of the type “to be the master of the world”. Now my ambition changed: I want to act in films that I would like to see. When I do Good Time with the Safdie brothers or when I do High Life with Claire Denis, I know I’m starting to get closer to myself. I tell myself that there’s finally an actor emerging in the shots of these films. And I want to push him even further. I don’t really care if he becomes as popular as Twilight’s Pattinson. Somehow, we know the answer: no. It can hardly go any further, and besides, it’s not meant to. If only because a 33-year-old man doesn’t trigger the same kind of fever in an adult audience. It’s more thoughtful as a relationship, less hysterical, less fetishistic. My relationship to career is simple: I see a lot of films, especially at night. Some of them excite me so much that I sometimes write e-mails at 3:00 a.m. to those who made them for to say that  I have a “desire to be an actor for them”. There it is, my luxury.”

Incise: We can testify to having seen a young emerging Spanish director, living in Berlin, working as a waiter in a vegetarian restaurant while waiting to finance his first feature film project, receive one night a message that he initially thought was false. Put yourself in his shoes: Pattinson had just flashed on his self-financed short film seen on an independent microplatform and told him how delighted he would be to accompany the rest of his career.

When you arrive on the set of an independent film, is your attitude still the one of the adulated star?

“No, quite the opposite. I become an amateur who has to relearn everything, start from scratch, forget what he knows, who has to listen. If I came as a deigning star, with a lot of condescension, to meddle in a less spectacular project in order to gain a little artistic credit, I would miss the approach but also the chance to be welcomed on demanding films before which there is no star-system that counts anymore. On the contrary, one needs to be humbled in front of people who make cinema progress.”

Are you afraid of filming?

“It’s diffuse. When I read a script, I often know after a few pages how to play. The anxiety usually starts exactly one month before shooting. Suddenly, my confidence is gone. It’s replaced by doubt. I no longer have any idea of anything, of how I should do it, until the moment of shooting.”

How many days do you need to find the character?

“There is no rule. It depends on what I can find inside me. The biggest danger in my daily life would be not feeling excited about what’s around me. It’s still within my own life that I will be able to find the elements to refine my technique. These things are often very intimate, sometimes they are even dreams that I summon up in order to be able to play the scene the way I think it should be played.”

Can you give me an example?

“To start, The Batman, I’m using things at the moment that seem fragile compared to the importance of the project. Conversations I’ve had with close friends, embryos of dreams. This is the secret and sensitive part of the actor facing the heaviness of the project. On The Batman, on Tenet, a gigantic team of technicians surrounds you and when you say, “Let’s go Robert…Action!” you have to forget this mass of people and play in front of your own thoughts, your own demons. Yes, I have an actor’s excitement to face the tension of the set, the inordinate expectation of all these people and to transform it into a dialogue between me and myself. It’s an exciting and horrible feeling to be that “little shit” who risks planting all the heavy artillery, all that war infrastructure, because she wasn’t able to go and get it… I think about that, a few days before a shoot.”

Are you still able to surprise yourself?

“I invented a pressure that ended up going crazy. And I like it. The duty to surprise, my audience and above all myself, has become the only worthwhile challenge. And it’s much more difficult, believe me, than the box office challenge. With The Batman and Tenet, you could always say that I’m trying to get back to those heights – we’re talking about millions of entries. But Tenet is also an experimental film. As for The Batman, I look first at the character and what I have to do with it, how I’m going to have to invent nuances in this shell, making it more complex, more complex all the time. Batman is a role in which I have to learn how to play ambiguity better. It’s out of the question to interpret a character of a single color. It’s beautiful, people who seem to live in two states at the same time. And then, imagine: you love to cook and after years you succeed in obtaining the perfect dish, the healthiest, the most balanced, the tastiest, the most subtle; would you honestly eat it at every meal? No! What would you secretly dream about? To make you a nice fat cheeseburger, ah ah ah ah. He took a long drag on a cigarette in silence and gets lost in the panorama. You know, when we shot The Lighthouse, I went nuts about where we were shooting. The lighthouse, nothing around, stones. In the film, it’s supposed to represent hell itself, the precipice to madness. I really wanted to go on vacation there. Simply because I love solitude. I love it so much that I don’t leave the hotel when I’m shooting. For weeks on end, locked up in my room. I watch movies, look at the window for hours, the ballet of people walking in the streets.”

What advice would, Robert Pattinson, the man, give to Robert Pattinson, the actor, the legend?

[Silence] â€œI have no idea. Probably because I’ve never made a separation between me and the actor. I don’t believe your version that there’s a real me and the star. On the contrary, I believe I tried to reduce the gap between my private person and the public person. Of course, when I see myself on a magazine cover, I can’t say to myself: “Ah, there, that’s really me.” But I’m looking for coherence. And it comes through a desire to be myself as much as possible while trying to explore characters who are not me. My roles are not like me. They are not at all like me. It doesn’t disturb me too much. Around me, some actor friends are worried about how they are perceived on the outside because of their characters. I’m not. What would bother me would be doing the same thing over and over again. Always the same roles, the same films. Always the same Pattinson.”

What does modernity mean to you?

“It’s about adapting. Everything moves too fast, everything is always on the verge of chaos. But we shouldn’t be afraid in front of this speed. And then, there is a certain beauty in contemplating chaos, isn’t there?”

Photos via @Gossipgyal | Translation: RPOnline

Full scans thanks to Robert Pattinson Brasil + Portuguese translation HERE