Robert Pattinson Australia

*Print Interview* David Michôd Talks To Twitch

This is such a great read. David talks about many things including casting Rob in The Rover, showing the film in Cannes & the difference between the reaction at Cannes Film Festival & Sydney Film Festival. Have included some excerpts below & you can read the rest here at the source.

How was it showing The Rover to the Cannes audience?

[It was] pretty overwhelming. In a strange way, I can’t even really remember what emotional state I was in when that was happening because that state seemed to change every five minutes. It went from pure exhilaration to feeling like I’d been hit by a Versace truck, to constantly trying to work out what the hell people were making of this movie that I’d made.

This is very different than your last film, and I think Cannes in particular is a festival confined by expectations. What drew you to this kind of story?

I knew at the outset that I didn’t want to just try and make Animal Kingdom again.

What I loved about the idea of The Rover is that it would give me the opportunity to work in a very similar tonal world to the world of Animal Kingdom and yet give me the opportunity to make a film that was very different formally.

Animal Kingdom was such a dense, sprawling character drama. I really loved the idea of making a movie that was much more lean, [one] that would function almost as a dark, violent fable with very elemental, almost archetypal characters and a small number of them moving through a vast, empty, almost moonscape. I have no idea really what other people’s expectations will be, and I found that any second I spent thinking about expectations was going to make me crazy and so I just decided to ignore them and make the movie I wanted to make.

In contrast, there is Pattinson’s character, who I think is extraordinary in this film. Can you talk about bringing him into the role? How did you work with him on attenuating his performance, making sure it didn’t get too broad?

In a way, the answer to both questions is that Robert came in and tested for me and his tests were just extraordinary.

I, like everyone else, didn’t know what he was capable of. Certainly his previous work didn’t give you a clear indicator.

I met him before I even knew I was going to make The Rover, and there was something about him that I really liked. He’s obviously intelligent and really wonderfully emotionally available.

When [Pattinson] came in to audition for me, he came in with a really beautifully defined and sophisticated reading of the character that seemed from the outset to avoid all of those possible moments of caricature that that character could so easily slip into.

How did Pattinson get hooked into the project?

I had a meeting with him maybe a year before I made the movie and it became immediately apparent to me in that meeting that he not only loved Animal Kingdom but had seen all of the shorts that I had made with my friends. He had beyond that a really eclectic, sophisticated interest in cinema. He was actively looking for interesting things to do and actively looking to meet interesting filmmakers.

Had he done any of his Cronenberg work when you first started working together?

Yes, I had seen Cosmopolis. I had even had a phone conversation with Cronenberg to see what working with Rob was like generally. [With] Cosmopolis, that is another character that is quite brooding and still in a way that’s not similar to the stuff he does in Twilight. It didn’t give me a clear indication that he could do the 180 degree shift that I was going to ask him to do on The Rover.

I always needed to see an audition. He was willing to do it because he knew that he wanted to play the character and that he needed to work hard to get it.

I love that whole notion of you as a director in Australia just calling up Cronenberg and asking him for advice. Is that a common thing? I picture some secret handshake between directors where you exchange private numbers.

I think in the world of filmmakers and generally those kinds of phone calls are reasonably easy to facilitate because they’re reasonably important. I didn’t want to ask David whether or not Rob was a good actor. I felt that I had seen that in the tests and long auditions that he had done for me. What I wanted to know was what he was like as a human being on set because those things can be important. David shared his experience which turned out to be much the same as mine, that he was delightful and hard-working.

Have you been able to play your film for a local audience yet and how will it play differently in Australia than it will within the batshit bubble of Cannes?

Weirdly, I was just talking to Guy about this about five minutes ago. We just premiered the movie in Sydney about a week ago and the film did play very differently to the way it played in Cannes.

In Cannes, it felt all about stillness and tension and silence in the room. In Sydney, the room was bubbling with life, people were making noises and giggling all the way through it, which felt good and might have had something to do with an access to the vernacular or a familiarity with the landscape, but it was fun and we’re having our premiere in L.A. tonight and I have no idea really how it’s going to play for an American audience.