Robert Pattinson talks ‘Little Ashes’

by Barry Ronge (Times Live)
Never underestimate the power of fan frenzy. Director Paul Morrison made a small, highly literate film called Little Ashes, about a youthful relationship between the artist, Salvador Dali, and the poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, who met in Madrid in 1922.

Neither of them had fully defined themselves as the artists they would later become, and the film depicts their friendship as intense and ambiguous, with a strong homoerotic magnetism.

It is an art movie but Dali is played by Robert Pattinson, the haunted vampire from the Twilight series and he is currently the fan favourite of the world’s teens, so Little Ashes is attracting huge teen interest.

In the supporting interviews for the film, director Morrison commended the research that Pattinson undertook. “Dali and Lorca were very young, still in their late teens and early 20s. No one knew who they were and there are few accounts of what they were like,” said Morrison, “but Robert dug up everything he could find.”

“It was intimidating but exciting,” said Pattinson, “because at that age he was not the Dali that the world knows – the man with the pointed moustache.

“As a kid he was chronically shy but as I read, I’ve never related to any character more than I did to him. He wrote three autobiographies which completely contradict each other,” Pattinson said. “In one of them he says that his mother was abusive. Then in another he says she was the greatest mother in the world and he had the best childhood. There are chapters called Truth and other ones are called Lies and it’s just really funny.

“Everyone sees Dali’s image as a mask but he was not hiding.

“It was something he created with great care and he was so much more complex than just this bizarre clown image that he became at the end of his life,” said Pattinson.

The film also stars Javier Beltran as Lorca and Matthew McNulty as film director Luis Bunuel who is the observer of this strange relationship.
thanks to Thinking of Rob