‘Twilight’ star’s new film gets weird
Robert Pattinson lost a button on his shirt on the way to the Mill Valley Film Festival, but he’s been through worse.
The actor was in the Bay Area on Oct. 5, for a screening of his new film, “The Lighthouse,” a moody 1890sset horrorthriller that pits the “Twilight” star against Willem Dafoe in the isolated title structure. In Robert Eggers’ film, Pattinson gets beaten, rained on, splattered and windblown while being photographed in Ingmar Bergmanesque black and white amid crashing waves.
Sans button, Pattinson jokes he’s falling apart.
“I think I feel worse (now) than I did then,” Pattinson says, fresh off the plane from Los Angeles. “I still don’t understand, to this day, how I didn’t get sick the entire time. Just being in a rain machine in subzero temperatures for months has definitely improved my whatchamacallit … immune system.”
Pattinson, 33, has a quieter kind of fame than he did 11 years ago at the height of the fandemonium around the birth of the “Twilight” film franchise. His role as vampire Edward Cullen skyrocketed him to the kind of celebrity that caused nearriots, including a notorious incident at San Francisco’s Stonestown Galleria where a fan meetandgreet led to one young woman apparently getting her nose broken.
We talked to Pattinson
about making “The Lighthouse,” including eating mud, the Stonestown fiasco and whether he’s ready to step back into the franchise spotlight with his recently announced role as “The Batman.” For the complete interview, download the Datebook Podcast. Q: I was worried you were going to lose more than a button seeing your physically demanding performance in “The Lighthouse.” How did you get to a place where you could portray that type of isolation and insanity? A: The script was so kind of audacious, there were moments with things in it I’d never seen anything like it in any other script. You realize you had to take a kind of running jump to kind of even reach any of it. I’m attracted to scripts where you first read it, it’s very engaging and you feel, “Wow, this has got some kind of totemic qualities, something really primal and powerful about it.” And it’s also working with Willem, I’ve seen the amount of energy that Willem can bring to a performance, so I kind of knew that it was going to be an adversarial type of relationship.
Q: Did you and Willem do any kind of exercises to get to a place where you were comfortable enough to do some of these very physically intimate scenes?
A: We rehearsed for a week, Willem loves rehearsing and I really dislike it, which is kind of handy for our relationship. We did five days of rehearsing and I just found it to be the most incredibly stressful thing in the world. By the time we were shooting with each other, there was already this weird tension, it’s the opposite of what’s supposed to happen from rehearsals, normally it’s supposed to get people relaxed with each other. I love Willem, he’s such a lovely personable guy but there was this strange energy.
Q: What did you do to get into the physicality of this character? I read your Esquire interview … do you want to elaborate on any of the points in that?
A: Whenever I read stuff I just think, “Wow, I just come across as a psychopath.” I read that article and was like, I did say those things, but now they look really weird.
Q: One of the things you said is that you ate mud.
A: I did eat a lot of mud. I do that on a few different movies. I think that comes from “Gladiator” having such a big effect on me as a kid, there’s one scene where he’s about to go into the arena and he picks up the sand and rubs it between his fingers. I always used to do that before scenes when I first started as a teenager, I added a little bit to it where I’d just eat it afterwards. Robert Eggers loves to shoot in one take. Some of the scenes are seven, eight minutes long and you need to be psyched. It’s almost going into a boxing ring or something.
“Throwing fecal matter in my face, that was probably the hardest scene.” Robert Pattinson on acting in “The Lighthouse”
There’s so much energy expenditure. There’s a sort of strange reverse meditation where you kind of just invoke some kind of massive amount of rage inside you. I was reading that article and it sort of makes out that I was drunk for it. I thought about getting drunk for the drunk stuff, but it’s absolutely impossible to get drunk in any of these scenes.
Q: Especially not on kerosene, we hope.
A: Do people actually drink kerosene? That’s crazy. I think it was really just a question of trying to block out absolutely everything else that was going on in your life. I was isolating myself quite a lot, which isn’t particularly difficult in Nova Scotia, you can literally just walk down to the ocean and there’s not a soul around.
Q: There are moments I laughed out loud in spite of this being a very moody, very atmospheric film. Is it any different playing moments of humor in the film? I’m thinking of a moment in particular when you’re trying to dump something in the ocean and the wind changes directions.
A: I guess I’m one of those people who thinks, “Is something going to be truly funny if it hurts quite a lot?” I think everything can only be real if it hurts, like a compliment; I was talking about this other day — if you compliment someone, it has to give you some real pain to be a true compliment. I think throwing fecal matter in my face, that was probably the hardest scene in the entire movie and also terrifying. The cliff which I’m on was on the side of the cliff in galeforce winds and pouring rain, and I couldn’t really see anything. That was one of the more terrifying things I’d ever done in my life.
Q: Was Robert Eggers’ previous film, “The Witch,” a reference point for you?
A: “The Witch,” I thought, was just really stunning. Robert makes movies that really stand alone, they’re very singular . ... His production design, everything, he has a level of detail that I don’t really know other filmmakers who are doing anything like that. ... And with “The Lighthouse” as well, I remember reading it for the first time and just thinking it actually moves really quick, the script. It seems so impenetrable on one level and so … it’s pretty accessible on another level. The first time I saw it, I guess I really underestimated the audience.
Q: You took to the Bay Area 11 years ago at the height of the first “Twilight” movie to the Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco. They were anticipating a few hundred people; I think they got something like 3,0004,000 people that day.
A: I remember the girl getting her nose broken because they tried to close it down. I think that was one of my first promotional things for any of the “Twilights,” and I was going to the Hot Topic store in the mall. That was a big deal to me. They almost shut down the whole thing
and then … I remember seeing the girl on the news. (Speaking as girl) “I love ‘Twilight’ so much,” blood coming out of her nostrils. It was spectacular, you couldn’t have paid for better promotion.
Q: A lot of your film choices since then have been movies that don’t have the big kind of franchise quality to them that “Twilight” had. Was that intentional?
A: If you look at interviews I was doing about “Twilight,” I’ve always seen the weird in everything . ... I guess when you get more of an option in picking what direction you want to go in with the jobs you choose, I guess my eccentricities become a little bit more exaggerated. But at the same time, even now doing bigger movies, I want to find the weird parts to it . ... I always say actors who want to play heroes all the time are just hiding terrifying skeletons in their closet. The whole point in acting is you have a safety net to be a weirdo in a movie so you don’t have to be a weirdo in your real life.
Q: Speaking of heroes, you’re taking on the iconic role of Batman. Were there any hesitations entering another big fan franchise?
A: Nah, it’s a great part. I think when you’re older, it does feel a little different. I think once you’ve already dealt with it a little bit, I’m better at navigating it, I think. Maybe I’m not, maybe I’m completely unprepared.