Robert Pattinson talks The Batman with Total Film whilst Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas sets us straight about Tenet not being an Inception sequel

Games Radar has shared a snippet from Rob’s interview with Total Film about his reaction to The Batman being shut down due to COVID-19:

We’d really gotten into a really good rhythm as well, so it’s kind of strange to be pausing. But, again, it’s a hard movie. I mean, obviously it’s Batman, so it’s kind of nice,” Pattinson tells Total Film while promoting the release of Tenet. “I basically went straight from Chris [Nolan’s] movie into that. And, yeah, I was feeling a little bit loopy anyway. So having some time off is not the worst thing in the world. But hopefully it’ll be sooner rather than later that everything is hopefully in a better place.

The actor also confirmed that he found out about getting the Batman role on the first day of filming Tenet. “The morning of the first day,” he says. “It was kind of insane. It was a very, very intense weekend. That was a crazy way to start Chris’ film. [laughs] I think I was doing the screen test, as well, on the Saturday before I started.”

Meanwhile Christopher Nolan and producer Emma Thomas tell Total Film the following about what to expect from Tenet and whether Tenet is a sequel to Inception. From Games Radar:

“It’s a film of great ambition and great scale that takes a genre, namely the spy film, and tries to take it into some new territory, and tries to take the audience on a ride they might not have had before, and might not be expecting,” he tells Total Film in the new issue. “But it uses the conceits of the genre to do that – not unlike the way with Inception we took the conventions of the heist genre, and used the audience’s familiarity with that to try to go into some more unusual, surprising areas. 

“With Tenet, we’re looking at first and foremost giving the audience an incredible ride in the spy movie genre, but using the audience’s facility with following the conventions of that genre to push it into some interesting and unexpected territory.”

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Emma Thomas – who has acted as producer on all of Nolan’s features – concurs, albeit with some hesitation due to some inaccurate online scuttlebutt. “It’s very much its own thing,” she says. “It’s in no sense a re-tread. But I think that there are elements of Memento. I think the obvious film I would compare it to is Inception, because it is a similarly globetrotting, mind-bending, huge… spectacular. 

“But I read a bunch of stuff early on when people were speculating about what it was, and speculating that it was a sequel to Inception. And it’s very much not that. So I almost hesitate to compare the two. But when you look at where it sits in Chris’ body of work, I would say it’s in that vein.”