Holy …. Moly

From DCFandome

Rob’s intro

BTS

Panel

Thanks Cyn for BTS and panel vids

Cavan Kilbey from Muse. (UK) wrote an article entitled “Atypical Performance: Reinventing Actors” and has this interesting comment about Robert Pattinson:

Aside from comedians, the other class of actor that is not usually expected to deliver a serious performance is the child star. There is a snooty assumption from most audiences that once you’ve been in something akin to Twilight, you’ll mostly star in complete dross for the rest of your career, but that isn’t always the case. Most of these performers go on to be in interesting projects that capitalise on and subvert their popular image; Daniel Radcliffe alone has been in such a weird range of films that his career deserves its own thesis. The one who has arguably succeeded most from this trend has been Robert Pattinson, who became a household name thanks to his turn as Twilight’s Edward Cullen, but is now lauded as a star of the arthouse scene. You can pick any number of films that feature him ‘playing against type’, including 2017’s Good Time, but the one that sticks out the most is Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse from 2019. Pattinson’s breakout performance as Cullen was often quiet and reserved, resulting in his typecasting as the awkward but well-meaning love interest in films like Water for Elephants, or as the snarky upper class lead in Cosmopolis. But The Lighthouse allows Pattinson to just let it all out and play a character full of guilt, anger, and frustration; he’s a volatile individual who beats up seagulls and tries to gain power over the dominant lighthouse keeper played by Willem Dafoe. Pattinson captures the Promethean struggle perfectly with the way he slowly bottles up rage across the opening acts of the film before exploding in the final third as he buries his friend alive and realises that the knowledge he’s been seeking the entire film has amounted to nothing.

With the exception of Garbo, none of the actors discussed have received Academy nominations for these roles and are seldom talked about in relation to their oeuvre, aside from Pattinson who currently enjoys a career revitalisation and has managed to stop himself from being typecast as Edward Cullen-type romantic leads.

Rachel Smith from ETonline spoke with Jeffrey Wright during promotion for James Bond’s No Time To Die and this is what Jeffrey had to say about Rob and The Batman:

“Robert is gonna do his thing, and we were working within a Matt Reeves vision, so you know, Robert is doing what Robert does and it’s gonna be pretty badass I think,” Wright said of Pattinson’s portrayal of Gotham’s most famous superhero.

Wright shared that the pair fed off each other to create that infamous dynamic between Batman and one of his most trusted allies.

“I loved working with him, I love his take and his energy and the way that he kind of brought different levels to different parts of the story,” Wright shared. “And we work off of one another.”

“I just tried to give him Gordon things, and he did his Batman thing,” he continued.

Batman is Coming and we can’t wait.

Variety interviewed Rob today at the Premiere Party for the Academy Museum and this is what Rob had to say about what surprises were in store for Batman fans at DC Fandome:

“Me and Zoë [Kravitz] did some stuff. It’s a fun little thing,” Pattinson told Variety’s Angelique Jackson. “There are lots of little surprises for it.”

The actor also confirmed that he has watched some portions of his DC film during the interview.

“I’ve seen some of the movie now and it’s kind of really cool,” Pattinson said. “It’s really cool.”

This is what Rob had to say to Associated Press and whether it’s sunk it that he’s The Batman and what it’s like wearing the suit:

“I mean it’s a strange feeling. I had moments when I was shooting when you just catch a glimpse of yourself in a reflection and you’d be like ‘wait am I actually doing this, this is crazy’, but it’s been really fun and it’s really exciting so far.

It’s hard, I mean it’s a combination of the suit does a lot of the work for you but then when you need to do some work you really have to fight it. It’s a very special feeling to put it on though.”

Jeffrey Wright spoke to Haute Living about his latest roles and this is what he had to say about The Batman:

“It’s nice to see that Wright’s sense of humor is still intact, especially given the hardships of his last year, and given that there wasn’t much to be found on his last production, The Batman, a concurrent topic throughout all three of our interviews, as it was ongoing. “There was a bit of levity here and there [on that set], but it was a pretty dogged workplace, I have to say. I do my best to kind of undermine the seriousness, but it was reasonably pressurized. Still, I think we managed it pretty well. We did what we had to do, and we were there to do it.”

That included much more strict Covid-19 protocols. No one outside the cast or crew was allowed to do a drive-by on set. Each person was tested every single day, and N95 masks were required by everyone at all times, outside of the actors filming a particular scene. There were ten-minute breaks for ventilation, which prolonged the process, and very controlled movements around the studio. Entirely new facilities were built to mitigate the spread of the virus, and each actor had his or her individual pod to do hair and makeup.

And the hard work paid off; the production was safe post-Pattinson testing positive, and the film has managed to stay relatively under wraps. Just like its cast and crew, in a sense. “I have not seen Matt Reeves’, our director’s, face since March of last year. He was fully covered and protecting himself, because he has that responsibility on his shoulders,” Wright says.

While some parts of The Batman were a nightmare, others were a complete dream. “I think [this film had] the X factor, which was being unified around a common purpose,” Wright says, adding, “The thing we haven’t seemed to crack here in the States, and in certain parts of the U.K., even now, is that idea of being unified against this pathogen, so it was gratifying to recognize that we were all in it together — we were united around this thing — and we looked after one another and got through it together, at least on that set.” He hastens to add, “I don’t think I would like to do another film in that way, but we got through it together.”

We can’t say we’re surprised. Life imitates art sometimes, no? The film revolves around Batman’s second year of fighting crime and rallying the citizens of Gotham City against the corruption around them. They, too, are in it together.

The film, like so many of Wright’s projects, boasts a truly fabulous all-star cast that also includes Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, John Turturro, Peter Sarsgaard, Andy Serkis and Colin Farrell. And while there’s been a big to-do about the decision to cede previous Batman Ben Affleck’s cape and cowl to Pattinson, it isn’t the only casting choice fans are buzzing about: much has been made of Wright being cast as the first Black Commissioner James “Jim” Gordon in the DC Comics universe. Which, quite frankly, he finds to be asinine. He hasn’t reinvented the wheel, and he doesn’t feel this is a conversation we should be having in the 21st century.

While promoting The French Dispatch in Telluride, Jeffrey Wright also spoke about The Batman. Below are excerpts from IndieWire’s interview:

Jeffrey Wright remembers the moment last year when the UK production of “The Batman” shut down. The 55-year-old actor was a few months into playing police commissioner Jim Gordon for director Matt Reeves’ reboot of the DC Comics character when suddenly, in between takes, one of the actors coughed.

“Every head in the room swiveled toward that,” Wright said during an interview from a picnic table at the Telluride Film Festival, where he was promoting his role in Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” which screened earlier in the weekend. “And I was spraying that whole room, so if I had it that particular day, everybody would’ve had it. We shut down the next day.”

Production on “The Batman” proved to be a constant rollercoaster for everyone involved, as the temporary delay last March turned into a six-month halt; three days after it resumed in September, an actor tested positive. (Most reports indicated that star Robert Pattinson was the one who got sick, though neither Warner Bros. or Pattinson’s representatives ever confirmed it.)

Wright said that he felt an immediate panic during the initial shoot and reached out to producer Dylan Wright with his concerns. “I was having conversations with him where I was like, ‘Hey, man, what exactly are we going to be doing here going forward?’” Wright said. “At that time, there were no travel restrictions from the UK, but the numbers were rising. I called my agent and said, ‘We have to get out of here. We may be isolated here. There’s no way in hell we’re going to be shooting. It’s about to go down.’”

Despite the hiccup with the positive test last fall, Wright said he was impressed by the new set of safety measures when the shoot got back into full swing two weeks later. “We went back to testing three times a week, then it became three times a week and N95 masks required at all times except when we were filming,” he said. “There were breaks and ventilation requirements and separate spaces for hair and makeup. We took it very seriously and were respectful. We got it done safely.”

…

Despite the differences in scale, Wright said he detected a lot of similarities between Anderson and “The Batman” director Reeves. “While one film is perhaps perceived as having more of an arthouse vibe and the other is anything but, there are similarities that exist between them. Both very specific and very clear in their visions,” he said. “They are demanding in the best way. Same shit, different set.”

Wright said he responded to Reeves’ ability to inject real-world events into the superhero genre. “I saw the themes around corruption and class tensions and all of the things that he wanted to bring from the outside into this world so it had some relevance,” he said. “It’s bringing fiction into non-fiction in a way that’s balanced and really cool.” He described the script as presenting a Gotham “unlike Gothams we’d seen before. It was a Gotham we could touch. The way the Batmobile was described, I understood the aesthetic we were going for was something really palpable. If you squint your eyes in some backstreet of New York, you could see it appear.”

Wright was mum on details about the next Anderson project (“Give me your email and I’ll send you the script,” he joked) as well “The Batman” itself. “Everything has become super-secret,” he said. “On ‘The Batman,’ we had like five layers of encryption to figure out what we were filming the next day.”

… For now, though, it’s the 2022 release of “The Batman” that he’s anticipating as an antidote to the challenges of the past year and a half. “We can have faith in the Batman when we can’t have faith necessarily in each other,” he said. “In the history of human events, it seems that it’s always the end of the world. But I think perhaps that’s because we predicated it. We have met the enemy and it is us.”