Robert Pattinson Talks to Movieline About Risk, Reward and Remember Me

Robert Pat­tin­son prob­a­bly didn’t want to spend his Sat­ur­day at a press jun­ket any more than the jour­nal­ists who greeted him there, but we’re all pro­fes­sion­als here. Espe­cially Pat­tin­son, whose new film Remem­ber Me fea­tures the young megas­tar in a search­ing depar­ture from his Twi­light turn as Edward Cullen. There’s still the young tor­ment, the dilemma of first love (with a fel­low NYU stu­dent played Emi­lie De Ravin) and, well, that awe-inspiring hair. But in deter­min­ing what makes his char­ac­ter Tyler Hawkins tick, there’s also a some­what shock­ing aware­ness of mor­tal­ity beneath all that gor­geous sulk­ing. Between his aloof father (Pierce Bros­nan), his com­pas­sion­ate mother (Lena Olin), his con­fi­dante lit­tle sis­ter (Ruby Jerins) and the ghost of his dead older brother, Tyler is always just on the verge of some dis­cov­ery — and despite what Pattinson’s fans may crave, it’s not quite catharsis.

I’d love to be more spe­cific, and I will be as Remem­ber Me’s review embargo drops prior to its March 12 open­ing. Until then, Pat­tin­son helped Movieline make at least a lit­tle sense of it all at last week’s press gath­er­ing in New York:

Speak­ing about your role in this film, your co-star Pierce Bros­nan said, “[h]e’s coura­geous to find a piece like this, know­ing that he has the Twi­light fran­chise breath­ing down his throat, and you know it will be up to him to go out there and seek these films between these mega-movies he’s about to do.” How do you respond to that?
I don’t think it’s coura­geous. I think it’s more coura­geous to do some­thing to try to com­pete with it. They’re so huge. Like, the idea of doing a mas­sive film, [for] which every­body says, “This is going to make tons of money,” and the whole point of it is to be huge or a sum­mer block­buster or some­thing like that? The idea of doing some­thing like that between the Twi­light films is ter­ri­fy­ing because your­self out way more on the line. I mean, I keep want­ing to do ensem­ble pieces where all the other parts are great, and you can get really great actors in so you don’t have to bear the whole bur­den of the movie. If I could do sup­port­ing roles in things, then I’d love to do that. But it’s dif­fi­cult to get sup­port­ing roles because it would be really weird most of the time. “Well, there’s the guy from Twi­light play­ing the park­ing war­den,” or some­thing. But I would love to do that.

One of my maiden prob­lems that I’ve been try­ing to learn about is how to pace a per­for­mance to drive the film for­ward instead of just con­cen­trat­ing on char­ac­ter. I mean, I just want to con­cen­trate on char­ac­ter all the time, and I don’t really know how pac­ing works. Yet. So I try to choose lit­tle ran­dom projects where I can com­pletely relate to the story — so I don’t have to take any par­tic­u­lar risks for it.

Shoot­ing in down­town Man­hat­tan noto­ri­ously became a kind of cir­cus atmos­phere, to say the least. How did that that affect your psy­chol­ogy — and thus the kind of angst-y psy­chol­ogy of the char­ac­ter? That dis­com­fort in your own skin?
There are some parts — like the part I’m play­ing now (in Bel Ami) — where it would have really helped hav­ing loads of paparazzi up in your face all the time. He’s sort of such a self-contained, very, very con­fi­dent man. But it was really annoy­ing for Tyler, because there’s some­thing about… He’s always look­ing for things. You wanted to be free to look around. He kept look­ing around, and if you looked up from the pave­ment you can hear all the shut­ters accel­er­ate all of the sud­den. So I’m look­ing down all the time. It’s always going to be dif­fi­cult if you’re play­ing a nor­mal guy and you walk around the cor­ner and everyone’s tak­ing pic­tures. Because you’re going into it with the men­tal­ity that it’s a strug­gle to not go into the scene with that men­tal­ity. But it got bet­ter through­out the shoot. As soon as you get used to it, it just becomes like any other job. It’s just part of the furniture.

Did you have a favorite scene, then?
On this? [Con­tem­plat­ing.] If I think of it after­ward it’s prob­a­bly not the one, but I love the scene where he goes into the school to con­front [his sister]’s bul­lies. Mainly because it’s just a fan­tasy! Being the older brother, you always want to do stuff like that. It sounds like the most unpro­found thing, but it did feel really good doing it. But there were tons of things in this. I think the movie sort of works as… I don’t know if “cohe­sive” is the right word, but it’s all part of one big thing. It doesn’t really feel like set-piece scenes. It’s really weird, and I was really con­scious of that when I was film­ing it. It seemed like every­thing was very con­nected. There are some movies you do where you say, “Oh, this scene was really good to do, and the other ones are just sort of, you know, fill-ins.” It seemed like every­thing came from the same place.

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