A new interview appeared in Vanity Fair Spain. Below is an extract (thanks to Google translate). Interesting to read about Harmony Korine and I am beside myself that Rob has been pursuing Almodovar:

The man who sits down for this interview has nothing to do with the character that the press sold during [the Twilight years] (surly, provocative, hating his existence), to begin with because he smiles. Smiles constantly. The only thing that Robert Pattinson has in common with R-Patz, of course, is the hair: he is constantly touching, as if he were angry with it, and before each shake the mane acquires an even more impressive position than the previous one. That’s the only special effect in Pattinson’s career right now.

“There are already enough fucking movies in the world,” says the actor to explain why he pursued the French director Claire Denis, after being impressed with A Woman in Africa , to give him work in High Life . “I do not have any power to get funding for a movie, unless it’s a vampire movie. In that case maybe they would give me $20 to do it.” Pattinson writes personally to authors who stimulate him emotionally or intellectually without telling his agents. He did it with James Gray (The Lost City of Z), Antonio Campos (author of the indie Christine  phenomenon, with whom he will shoot The Devil All The Time ), Werner Herzog (The Desert Queen ) or the Safdie brothers (Good Time ), to whom he was attracted after seeing a single photo of Heaven Knows What : the close-up of his protagonist, the heroin addict in real life Arielle Holmes , illuminated in magenta tones. 

It does not always work for him (he contacted Harmony Korine , but his role in Beach Bum has been done by Zac Efron and he confesses that he has been “working” with Almodóvar for years), but Robert Pattinson is building a career not based on his fame but against it.

“After Twilight appeared David Cronenberg [Pattinson admits that he felt very insecure to fear that the director only hired him to attract investors] and I had not considered that he had the option of doing that kind of cinema. But I did not feel any prejudice on the part of the indie community either.  I found the experience of filming Bel Ami very satisfying, because it was a movie that did not try to please the audience, not even find an audience. There are movies that everyone will see and everyone thinks the same: ‘meh, it’s not bad’. But with [movies like Bel Ami], there will be one person in the world who will feel that it is their favorite movie. If your favorite movie is a commercial movie that is designed to please everyone, you’re a jerk . And once I experienced that feeling I wanted to keep looking for it constantly, ” he recalls. That addiction replaced another one that suffered ten years ago, that of reading bad reviews (and it must have turned purple in the Twilight era) and when at the Toronto festival several people left the room during the screening of High Life to Pattinson. worried. “Because the people who liked it, really liked it,” he says.

“High Life” is a depressive science fiction drama in which several scum of society are sent to the space mission to save the human race, become their last hope. Spoiler: something goes wrong. The first critics were shocked by sexual abuse (two characters abused two others while they were sleeping; one of the characters is the heroine Juliette Binoche trying to get pregnant from the hero Pattinson), but “High Life” is a romantic comedy compared to what was expected of her Pattinson. “When I first read the script, I thought: ” Amazing! This is a story about incest.” While in the film it is not so, but my initial interpretation was such that my character clearly maintained a love affair with his daughter. The fact that this could have been a happy ending seemed funny to me. While we were working on the film, I went to the art gallery in Cologne and saw the sculpture, and thought, “This is my character,” so I took the picture and sent it to Claire. She said, “Yes, this is your character. “  Obviously he was just giving me the reason because I had understood the character seeing a sculpture that evidently meant nothing

What attracts Pattinson the most as an artist are the taboos and the possibility of empathizing with a character that seems horrendous at first, because he considers that “we live in a society in which if you try to explore something that bothers you, you will be considered a problematic person and they will expel you from the community. “Pattinson has been ahead of that rejection, in an exercise of “I’m leaving, but because I want to”but he does not consider his career as the classic strategy to show that he is more than a pretty jaw (although, on the other hand, that jaw has a perfect angle), but that he is carried away by his instincts. He still continues to be surprised by the number of people who, before knowing him, assume that he is stupid and if he does not do superproductions, it is not because he believes himself above them, but because he believes that you have to be very confident in yourself to lead them. “If you want to be an actor starring  blockbusters you have to like sports a lot, because working in large productions requires that team sportsmanship. But I do not know what is commercial, there are about three actors who continue to make commercial films systematically: Mark Wahlberg and a couple more. The probability of getting a job as an actor is so small that I would like that, if this movie is going to be the last one I do, I will tell a story that aspires to achieve something. I prefer to work with directors whose movies have changed my life. ” …

But Pattinson is having the last laugh and is now a symbol of contemporary auteur cinema. “In the United States there are no alternative movie theaters, the two I did with Cronenberg did not go to see anyone but before the public did go to see strange films. The other day I saw Killing Zoe, which starts with 40 minutes in a foreign language without subtitles. Well, at the time, that was a commercial movie. I do not know what’s happening to the public now, it seems like they are stupefied. “ After emitting a grunt, he concludes: “I probably should not have said that.”

Robert Pattinson laughs that he does not know how to sell himself or his films, but he does not want to give the same answer over and over again although that would be the best option. “It does not matter what counts in the interviews, because the headlines end up not being about the movie. In Toronto I had a full press day and all the headlines were ‘Robert Pattinson does not believe incest is wrong’ “. With the legs raised to the sofa and without stopping to vape, the actor looks at his future with enthusiasm: he has a film with Robert Eggers (The Witch ) and another with the Colombian Ciro Guerra (The snake hug , Summer Birds). If I could go back and know all that it entailed, would I appear again in Twilight? “Absolutely. One hundred percent”. .