Violence, obsession, trauma, unspeakable secrets and Nirvana songs: ‘The Batman’ is exactly the kind of project that makes an actor like him feel at home. FRAMES interrogates to the new Dark Knight to learn some clues about how a legend is reinvented.

Like the millionaire Bruce Wayne, Robert Pattinson (London, 1986) was for a long time a man motivated by an obsession. My agents got tired of me asking them all over the years if there was new news about Batman, he confesses to FRAMES at the beginning of our conversation, unable to suppress a smile. I needed to know if the role was vacant or not, but I didn’t want to do too many illusions… I know these things are complicated. The case is I was never sure if I was taken seriously, believed. That was nothing like the roles I usually chase and what interests me the most, but the truth is that it seems to me just the opposite. It is the jewel in the crown, the character most interesting you can aspire to as an actor.

So after years of daydreaming about getting under the cape of the Dark Knight, Pattinson gets exactly what that he wanted in The Batman, spectacular and almost operatic blockbuster with which he and Matt Reeves want to reconceptualize the character for a new era. Or, said of otherwise, respect their legacy as they approach to him as if they were the first to adapt it for the big screen, as if everything in his universe was yet to be reinvented. It is such a fresh and challenging vision that we needed talk to your interpreter about what you have needed to bring it to fruition. This is what such a demanding actor such as Robert Pattinson does when his obsession becomes reality. Or when they guarantee access to your particular jewel in the crown.

SYMPATHY FOR MR. HYDE

It is understandable that someone who launches his career in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (M. Newell, 2005) and later dedicates five years to a saga like Twilight takes a decision of the most conscious after the premiere of Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (Bill Condon, 2012): no franchises for a good season. Instead, Robert Pattinson has built meticulously a filmography full of great filmmakers and roles in which he has been able to demonstrate his almost supernatural ability to inhabit all kinds of characters, either in independent projects or in blockbusters as sophisticated as Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020). His return to franchise cinema should take place, therefore, on his own terms. And with the right company. From my first meeting with Matt (Reeves), he explains , it was clear to me that we both had the same idea of ​​what Batman should be, or what we wanted to do with him. He told me that his goal was not to make an action movie, that he didn’t understand Batman as an action hero. Instead, it should be a detective story, film noir, but with that cynical and paranoid angle that movies had like The Conversation (F. F. Coppola, 1974). It was obvious that we were on the same wavelength. The director agreed: his was a direct crush, motivated by a shared understanding of how superhero mythology created in the late 1930s by Bob Kane and Bill Finger could and should adjust to our daily reality, thus offering a commentary in the form of a deformed mirror.

Batman lends itself to countless interpretations, explains Reeves, to great stories mythological, so it is easily adaptable to any historical context. what we we wanted was to connect with the essence of the character while offering an approach able to resonate with today’s audience. that has been our way in The Batman, and I hope Let the public follow us. The most important of our version, Pattinson continues, is that he tries to run away from that duality between Bruce Wayne and Batman that appears in other film adaptations. Since others had treated before, we wanted to offer a point of view different: the character is no longer some kind of doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, an ordinary man who becomes a vigilante nocturnal at nightfall, but is comfortable with his facet of Mr. Hyde. In fact, he hates having to go back to being Jekyll… What intrigued me most about this project was the possibility of playing Batman, not Bruce Wayne. My character sees himself as Batman, that’s his true identity. He has devoted so much of his life to this crusade after the murder of his parents who, if it were up to him, would he would spend the day in the suit and working as Batman. The few times you need the personality of Wayne… That’s when he really feels like he’s using a costume, and so I decided to interpret it. It’s only really free and really himself when he’s Batman. Pattinson assures that the suit helps to understand that feeling of power: The dress rehearsal was absolutely terrifying for me. It’s like something happens when you get under all that armor, you put on the mask and see yourself in the mirror with the cape. Suddenly you feel more powerful never. There is something really powerful in that costume, yes.

NIGHT EXPERIMENTS

The Batman makes the most of that strange mix of authority and vulnerability that its protagonist felt when see himself inside the suit, because the character is, in words of Pattinson himself, someone who is still figuring out how to do what you feel you need to do. Everything is still quite new to him, he only has a couple of years patrolling the streets as Batman. He feels that he has already made his big presentation, but the city is still not quite familiar. No one understands what the long-term consequences of the change supposes its mere presence in the equation, much less himself. You still need to understand how can you keep this little experiment in time. At the same time, continue the character is emotionally frozen. He’s still that 10 year old boy he saw how his parents died in front of him and he felt helpless. Somehow everything you’re doing responds to an illusion: the impulse to think that, if you devote all your efforts as an adult to end crime, you will be able to reverse that situation, go back in time and prevent the murder of their parents. It’s a great boost human, actually. A very human trauma. To help maintain this atmosphere, The Batman uses an oppressive architecture, a debtor lighting of seventies neo-noir and a soundtrack that takes advantage of very clever way songs like Something in the Way, by Nirvana, or Ave Maria by Schubert. Everything contributes to creating the delicate psychological state that Pattinson wanted for the character: Since I don’t We were going to discuss Wayne’s life as a billionaire playboy, I was very attracted to the idea of ​​someone who is weird and dark in all facets of his life. is on the brink of mental breakdown, so it makes no distinction between what What do you consider work and what doesn’t? In fact, I don’t think consider Batman a job, if not a vital calling. But everything is too frustrating for him. Carry two years doing this and still no real results. If anything, Gotham City is getting worse and worse… Try to force a change throughout his experiment, but he is not running. There is a kind of desperate nihilism that runs through it from start to finish

ULTRAVIOLENCE SESSIONS

Why do you repeat the word experiment so much? oh smile again. Because it is. It’s his little private experiment, but he is doing it in full view of the whole world. He tries to save the city, but also to save himself in addition. It is as if it had passed last years trying to build a personality emergency room to deal with your trauma. And the result of all this process is to disguise bat and go out every night to play literally life. He and Reeves were inspired by the true story of an American police officer that, shortly after starting to patrol, began to write a blog where he narrated the impact of that job on your life. talked a lot about how becoming in a nocturnal animal, you could tell he was afraid of losing control. That’s why it was so important that the character also write in a way compulsively in her diaries at the end of each night, Pattinson clarifies. Take careful notes of everything he does as a way to control the experiment you are conducting, to prevent get out of hand. However, it nuances that is something that has already happened. The Department police sees him as a freak, as a threat. The very people he saves every night mistrust him! he! We wondered what would happen if someone like that emerged from suddenly in our reality, and the result would be that everything the world, criminals and civilians, would be scared. They see him almost like a monster. A werewolf. Another way Pattinson felt that could express the deep imbalance of the character was in his conception of violence: During the first rehearsals, we realized that his way of fighting had to be dirty and desperate So when you see how prevents a robbery at the beginning of the film, you realize that not only tries to disarm to the thieves. No, he’s giving them a beating. He gives them three hits, when in reality the first he had already knocked them down. The other two are completely unnecessary, but he is channeling all his inner rage through violence. The suit quite limits your movements and your expressiveness, continues, but it was important that I take it for as long as possible. So I had to learn to communicate my emotions through of gestures, of physicality. I didn’t want to take off my mask for emotionally important scenes, but just the opposite. In the end, he and Reeves have made their film of detectives, but also his film of masked It deals with corruption concludes the director, both of the institutions as of people. And about how our society has been losing confidence in the system, which leads us towards a decadence terrifying. Something with which Pattinson I couldn’t agree more: Bruce is trying to find some hope in half of all that vengeful chaos. But no only hope for his city, but also for himself. afraid of how far can lead him down the path of nihilism, so try to create that change in the only way he knows how. Maybe not be the right one, but you can’t stop trying. He just can’t stop.