When we meet in a London hotel, Pattinson is in the middle of filming High Life, the English-language debut of French director Claire Denis, who he has wanted to work with for years, and is finding it a struggle to shift his mindset from filming one movie to promoting another. Pattinson is so convincing that at first I didn’t even click when I saw him on screen.
His character is a frenetic but charming con artist called, helpfully, Connie. He breaks off, and when he speaks again it is with a sort of helpless matter-of-factness: ‘You just can’t shoot.’ĭespite the constant pressure that lurked in the back of his mind throughout filming, in Good Time Pattinson delivers a formidable performance. People in the street start looking, then everyone starts taking photos and the entire energy is…’ ‘You walk down the street and there’s like, one person, and you can see that even if they don’t really recognise you, there’s a kind of flicker of something.’ After that, someone might send a tweet, and then a photographer arrives having been tipped off, and then ‘within hours the entire situation changes. Pattinson describes being recognised while filming as an accumulation of small but significant moments that lead to a great conflagration: an initial spark that lights the keg of gunpowder. ‘Looks just like the dazzlingly beautiful vampire Edward Cullen,’ the packaging claimed. Vanity Fair named him ‘The Most Handsome Man in the World’ in 2009 and Barbie produced a doll with his features painstakingly rendered in plastic. The Twilight movies, in which he played a chisel-featured teenage vampire locked in a hopeless love affair opposite his then real-life girlfriend, Kristen Stewart, catapulted him into the realms of teen heart-throb megastardom in his early 20s. I was constantly worried.’ But trying not to be famous is tricky when you’re Robert Pattinson. He spent a lot of time ‘trying not to think about being famous. The movie in question was Good Time and its directors, Josh and Benny Safdie, are known for their gritty social realism, so the shoots were often clandestine, set against a busy urban backdrop, and Pattinson’s primary concern while filming was that he would be spotted and attract a crowd. It posed some practical challenges, not least because Pattinson has one of the most recognisable faces in show business. More specifically, he had to act the part of a criminal narcissist, on the run from the law with his mentally disabled brother after a failed bank robbery on the streets of Harlem. Robert Pattinson was recently required to film in New York.
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