David Sims tries to interview Rob and Claire Denis for The Atlantic
I love this interview and how David Sims just lets Rob and Claire’s conversations flow. Here’s an extract from his attempt at an interview, but you can read the rest over at The Atlantic:
Pattinson: I never understand when people have a really hard time [working] with a director. If you know you wanna work with someone, you kind of have to accept that that is how they work.
Sims: You mean that, if they have a worthwhile body of work, however they’re behaving must be how they accomplish it.Pattinson: That’s how it is. If someone’s really crazy or whatever, it’s kind of up to you to figure out what your own boundary is. I’ve worked with some quite bullying directors. When I was younger, it was a lot harder to do. But now I could work with a total psychopath, and it would be totally fine.
Denis: I understand what you mean … It’s a chemical thing, you know?…
Pattinson: Who’s the guy—I read something the other day—who directed Dead Poets Society?
Sims: Peter Weir.
Pattinson: Peter Weir had a thing about casting, that you cast the person so the character they’re playing is the opposite [of] themselves. So you’re disguising the real self in the performance, and then you can have the reveal of the true self be the “climax†of a character.Sims: Because Ethan Hawke wanted to play the extrovert [in Dead Poets Society], right? And Robert Sean Leonard wanted to play the introvert …
Pattinson: I thought that was really interesting.
Denis: If you’re mentioning Peter Weir [who is Australian], I would mention [the director] Jane Campion, because she’s also from the southern hemisphere. I always believe people from the southern hemisphere are different, are better than we [from the northern hemisphere] are. I remember [the film] An Angel at My Table by Jane Campion—I remember when the main character, this writer, when she is no longer a little girl, when she’s in London and her first novel is going to be published. Suddenly, she knows she has to win this terrible fight against fate. And there is a single shot of her swimming in the sea in Spain. I thought, “Aha, now this is someone who believes, as an audience, we are happy to see her swimming in a warm sea because the book is going to be published.†And I thought, “That director, Jane Campion … she is someone. I can meet her.†And we met!
Photo Credit: The Atlantic