Robert Pattinson talks The Batman with The Hollywood Reporter

Piha Sinha-Roy recently interviewed Rob for The Hollywood Reporter and this is what transpired about The Batman:

Your choices are really interesting in that you always veer towards these unconventional roles that require you to be quite fearless – then you sign on to be Batman, which requires you to be fearless in a whole new way, but what drew you to the role after you’ve been taking on a lot of smaller and riskier projects?

I had it in my head that there’s something about that part, I had my eye on it and I don’t know why, for a while and then there’s something about the part itself which I always kind of liked – there’s one part of me, the competitive part of me that I really like doing a small movie and helping it find an audience when audience doesn’t know if they want to watch it or not, but it’s also fun to have that anticipation and when there’s doubt or whatever from an audience, it triggers that competitive thing in me. But also there’s something, I did want to do a big thing and there’s something about Batman, his motivations in every iteration of the story are always a little shady. He has this centerpiece backstory of his parents being killed but I think that’s the interesting part of the story, like your parents are killed in a mugging but then … it’s a pretty big leap to become Batman afterward and it allows for quite a lot of scope in what you can do with the character. And also, the Batman is always really cool.

Have you been working on your gravelly deep voice? How are you hoping to put your specific spin on a character that has been previously played by so many great actors as well?

We’ve got a couple of ideas but I’m still finishing Chris Nolan’s movie but I’ve been reading a lot of the comics. I didn’t realize there were like, a hundred thousand Batman comics, it’s really astonishing so I’m reading as many as I can. The line of where the character’s gone in the comics, there’s a kind of strangely, there’s a storyline you can follow the whole way through, a macro storyline from the inception of the character in the comics, which is slightly different from the movie, and I think you can get quite a lot out of it.

What did you think about Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker as that spun a new direction for the DC universe? Will the Batman film be following that tone and feel or going a different direction?

Joaquin is one of the best actors working, he’s always great in everything, I’m always amazed when people are surprised that he’s really great, I’m like, “he’s Joaquin Phoenix, what else did you think he was going to be?” I thought he was great. And about the tone and stuff, those are all Matt Reeves questions – it’s above my pay grade! 

Rob also talks about The Lighthouse – extracts below, but you should click on the link above to read the full interview:

There were so many surreal scenes in this movie, but were there any particular ones during which you felt most challenged?

Some of the drunken stuff. The type of script I always really like has no upper limit to where you can go — you know, drinking kerosene until you have no idea who you are anymore, the page is really blank about how you can do stuff, but I think some of the stuff, that scene with Willem where I’m criticizing his cooking, and Robert loves to shoot these long shots that’s almost an entire scene, so the movie seems to have this massive crescendo. It’s fun because you really have no idea where it’s going to go, and also the camera’s locked in so you can use the whole set and go crazy, smash stuff up and everything.

The self-abuse [masturbation] scene has been the headlines so far. What is it like to perform a scene like that?

When somebody asks me what happens in the movie, I love being able to say these things about the most extreme moments that are intense and bizarre. Even that it’s called self-abuse, I think self-abuse should be the norm (laughs). But the crazier something is, I just think it’s really funny. I remember watching it for the first time, and I think that was the first part I had seen of the movie, I had just seen that little sequence, and I just thought it was phenomenal. Each individual piece was shot at totally random points of the movie, so I couldn’t really imagine what it was going to look like all put together – having shit sprayed in your face, the mermaid, there’s all these terrible images and I just thought it was kind of hilarious and the audacity of ‘that’s what you’re thinking about when you’re having a wank? It’s pretty amazing.

Where did you draw your Lighthouse accent from?

It’s literally — no one believes me — but to my ear, it’s a very particular Maine accent, and if you listen to people from these coastal regions of Maine, it’s this really weird accent that came from sailors, there’s a bit of Liverpudlian in it. It’s such a strange amalgam. So when you’re doing it, it sounds like a fake accent. People will say ‘you’re messing up the accent’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah? What accent am I doing?’ There was this guy who was a fisherman, and he sounds very strong Bostonian at times, and then at other times it doesn’t sound anything like Boston. We had three people from Maine listening to it and they were like,’ yeah,’ and I was like, ‘Yes! I didn’t mess it up!’