Rob talks Remember Me, Bel Ami and Sex Scenes in Interview with TimeOut

The hum of ner­vous excite­ment buzzing around Robert Pattinson’s hotel suite this morn­ing is such that you half expect him to walk out with golden skin and alarm­ingly sharp teeth. But in the flesh, the ‘Twi­light’ star is warm, earnest and posher than you might imag­ine, with some­thing of the teenage school­boy to him, even down to the frayed cuffs on his jacket. In our closely mon­i­tored chat (20 min­utes! No ques­tions about Kristin!) Pat­tin­son talks about his role as chain-smoking stu­dent loser Tyler Hawkins in the US indie movie ‘Remem­ber Me’, about cre­at­ing ‘mys­tique’ as an actor and about suck­ing blood off his co-star’s lip.

You looked scared stiff when you were hand­ing out a Bafta award last month. Are you get­ting shyer?

 
‘I think I am, yeah! The more inter­views you do, the more stuff you say to peo­ple. You sud­denly get wor­ried that peo­ple are more likely to judge you. If no one knows any­thing about you, then you can say what­ever you want — and just con­tra­dict your­self later. But the more con­tra­dic­tions you make, the scope gets nar­rower as to what you can say before peo­ple get pissed off.’
 

Where does ‘Remem­ber Me’ fit into the ‘Twi­light’ crazi­ness?

 
‘I’d read tons of scripts after the first “Twi­light” movie and this was one of maybe two that I liked. I didn’t work for the whole year after “Twi­light”. What did I do? Noth­ing! [Laughs] It was really nice. I was still so used to hang­ing around most of the time when I was in Eng­land. And now that I’ve been work­ing a lot, I can’t imag­ine going a month with­out fret­ting. So now, I’m doing job-to-job-to-job. Which is a dan­ger­ous thing to do because you have a film com­ing out every three months. It’s over-saturation. You have to work a bit on cre­at­ing some kind of mystique.’

Mys­tique? Is that what you feel you need? Or what you feel peo­ple want?

‘I see peo­ple who are in news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines all the time. If they’re in every sin­gle week, I’m far less inter­ested in their movies. So, yeah, I am always a lit­tle bit wary.’

Your new film ‘Remem­ber Me’ is set in the sum­mer of 2001. Did you have any reser­va­tions about fic­tion­al­is­ing 9/11?

‘When I first read it, I didn’t think it was con­tentious. I thought it flowed organ­i­cally; it’s anchored in real­ity. It hit hard for me so I wanted to por­tray the same emo­tions that I felt the first time I read it. I’m ter­ri­fied of peo­ple think­ing it’s manip­u­la­tive. I read the script and I felt this should be made.’

You get beaten up a lot in ‘Remem­ber Me’. Was it fun to act like a real per­son for a change?

‘Yeah, it’s always enjoy­able smash­ing things up. I guess that’s one of the fun­ni­est things about it — from the first fight, which is such a severe beat­ing, there are all these wounds on his face, for two thirds of the movie [laughs].’

And then your screen girl­friend [Emi­lie de Ravin] kisses you and she’s got a split lip…

‘There was a big moment, which is in the script, where there’s a kind of kink­i­ness with the cut in her lip but that got cut from the movie – where I’m suck­ing a lit­tle bit of blood off it [laughs]. I think it was a lit­tle bit too weird.’

Is this your first sex scene?

‘No. My first sex scene was in “Lit­tle Ashes” when I was about 21, and it was with a guy. And I’m sup­posed to have a kind of ner­vous break­down in the mid­dle of it as well. So that was a nice intro­duc­tion to it!’

Do you feel like you have some­thing to prove, ‘Twi­light’ hav­ing been so bank­able?

‘I think peo­ple are really harsh about any­thing that becomes suc­cess­ful. It’s really weird. I was look­ing at this arti­cle about “Lit­tle Ashes”. “He still hasn’t proved his box office poten­tial. ‘Lit­tle Ashes’ bombed.” Could it have been the gay theme? Or, er, the fact that it was only released in 16 cinemas?’

There’s a lot of fags, booze and sex in this movie. What about your younger fans?

‘That’s the least of my con­cerns. I think it’s so ridicu­lous, peo­ple putting pres­sure on the arts. I think par­ents should be the ones who teach kids. The more you try to hide things like that, the more excit­ing and appeal­ing they are. [Grins] The absti­nence move­ment is only a reac­tion to every­body being so obsessed with sex for the past 20 years and it being so open to every­one. It’s crazy to think that young peo­ple, when their hor­mones are most rag­ing, that they’re sud­denly like, “Oh, I don’t want any of that.”’

You’re cur­rently film­ing ‘Bel Ami’ with Uma Thur­man. You play a real swine.

‘I thought it was one of the fun­ni­est scripts I’d ever read. When they made the movie in the ’50s with Angela Lans­bury, they had to change the story. The novel is about this guy who screws every­body over and seduces all these women and com­pletely gets away with every­thing. And in the first film, they had to have him shot because they thought that audi­ences wouldn’t be able to accept it. In this one it’s the total oppo­site. This guy is a com­plete arse­hole, so arro­gant and stub­born and self-righteous about every­thing. He remains an arse­hole to the end and every­one con­grat­u­lates him for it.’

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