Josh et Benny Safdie parlent de leur collaboration avec Robert Pattinson dans les médias

Nous vous proposons un tour d'horizon de ce que Josh et Benny Safdie ont pu raconter à propos de Robert durant cette promotion américaine :

Avec le magazine GQ : 

On getting Robert Pattinson to star in your movie:

Joshua: Rob Pattinson just reached out to us and said, "Hey—whatever you’re doing next, I want to be a part of it." His initial impetus to reach out to us came from just a photo still, on the internet, from Heaven Knows What. He felt this kind of inner, innate connection to his… purpose.

Ben: He said he would do catering for us. He didn’t say, "I need to be the star of a movie."

Joshua: We met with him. I wasn’t interested in using him as a cameo or a supporting player. He has the face of a star. He doesn’t want to be a star; he just is one. And that’s the best type.

Ben: The goal, for Rob, was to disappear. He said, "I want to disappear. That’s why I want to work with you guys. I don’t want people to watch saying, 'Oh, that’s Rob Pattinson.'" And when people watch the movie, they go, 'Oh, my God. Is that Rob Pattinson?'"

Joshua: [During the opening scene], this movie star comes in and throws the door open—almost like he did to our lives. "Hey. Let’s get moving." And then, literally, the movie doesn’t stop.

On whether or not they’re maniacs:

Josh: Rob was on Howard Stern. He was probably a little flustered. And he put out an impression of us that sounded like insanity. Like he’d been thrown to the Tasmanian Devil. He thinks we induce mania and chaos into our set. We don’t induce anything! I mean, we do… but we don’t want chaos.

Ben: There was one day when we didn’t have a permit to shoot a shot when Rob was running away. We had permits for the street, but not permits to drive in the street, with a car driving alongside him. But we were like, "Ugh, we need this shot."

Josh: And we’re working with union guys who are like, "We can’t do this." But we can.

Ben: So we grab the monitor, and stand in the middle of street, and we’re blocking all the traffic.

Josh: It was like three blocks of traffic just honking their horns.
"The way he performed that running… the look on his face… pure fear."

Ben: And Rob takes off and runs, and we got the shot. We got three shots! We did it, we got it, we moved on, and that was the end of it. Great day! And then we read Rob saying, "God, these guys. They just… block traffic. Risk their lives!"

Josh: We weren’t risking our lives. Nobody was going to hit us. Having 20 cars laying on their horns does actually induce a certain level of chaos. But we were like, we had to get this. No fucking up. All he had to do was run.

Ben: For us, it was a practical thing—but for Rob, it added this energy.

Josh: The way he performed that running… the look on his face… pure fear.

Pour lire le reste de l'interview, rendez-vous à la Source

Avec Playboy : 

So let’s start with the Robert Pattinson-dog controversy. How did you guys find out that he’d gone on national television and mentioned that you asked him to jerk off a dog while filming?

JOSH SAFDIE: I was watching it live and I thought it was hilarious. I thought ‘Wow Rob is really going there with story.’ I don’t even know where it came from. Then When I woke up in the morning and saw the PETA was investigating I thought it was even funnier. But when it got anti-Semitic and people were like ‘Look at what the two heathen Jews have done to our goyim,’ that’s when it started getting ugly. It’s so ridiculous. The reality is I didn’t ask Rob to give a dog a handjob, but he actually gave a parrot a rimjob.

Did Robert text you to apologize?

JOSH: I sent him a screengrab of somebody who tweeted something really nasty at me and I put a laughing emoji and he was like ‘Oh my god I’m so sorry, are you angry with me?’ And I was like, ‘No I don’t care!’ The only thing I didn’t want was for the movie to become ‘The Dog Dick Movie’.

[...]

It kind of gives you a window into what Robert has to deal with on a daily basis. What was it like being in his orbit? Did you ever feel sorry for him?

BENNY SAFDIE: It’s kind of insane that he has that ability. He needs to be aware all the time. In a way that did inform the character of Connie because here’s this guy on the run who’s hyper aware of where he is and what he looks like and where he’s going to go. That element of Rob’s personality really spoke to Josh for the writing process. Here was this guy who was kind of living the life of a guy on the run except he’s very famous and people recognize him. But he’s always trying to escape.

[...]

Did you guys have any trepidations about working with a star of his magnitude or was there a sense that having him in your movie will help get it funded and seen?

BENNY: The one thing we were very aware of was we didn’t want him to be recognized while we were shooting. We didn’t want to disrupt the world we were creating, so we were very aware of trying to stay ahead of the people who were tracking us. It was an achievement for us when we saw a tweet saying that we were in Adventureland 10 days after we left Adventureland. We were always moving really fast and were aware of the people who were trying to find us. But for the most part nobody recognized him or suspected anything because we weren’t presenting ourselves as a movie set on the streets. We were presenting ourselves like a construction site.

You guys are used to working with non-actors and people you find on the streets. How did you approach working with someone like Rob? Did he require a lot of direction?

JOSH: Part of the challenge of working with someone who’s appeared in a lot of films and comes with a lot of baggage is you can’t ask the person to play themselves like you can with a first time actor, where you just play with the performance and mold it to the movie. With someone like Rob you have to do a lot of work to establish him as a first time actor. So we spent a lot of time developing a character background that was meticulous in the way it spanned every three months of his life up until the moment the movie starts. We had to link him up with a lot of people who Connie might have been friends with, people who Connie would hate, people he would love, people he did time with, people who were Connie in another world. We went on weird walking tours of local spots in Long Island, Benny and Rob hung out in a garage up in Yonkers for eight hours, we went to a Dunkin Donuts. Basically a lot of real life exercises that raised the stakes of performance for Rob. A failure in performance doesn’t result in a bad review. It results in an embarrassment where someone is looking at you and asking why you’re pretending to be someone you’re not.

Pour lire le reste de l'interview rendez-vous à la Source

Avec Ain't it Cool :

Capone: Josh, you were the one that told the story yesterday about just how Pattinson found you via a still from HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT. Did he ever tell you what it was about that still that drew him to you?

JS: He saw the still, and then saw the movie, obviously. We got him a private screener.

Capone: But, after he sent the email saying he wanted to work with you?

JS: Yes, after. In hindsight, we've since talked about it. He thought that the energy of the still, and remember it's just a still of Arielle Holmes looking off screen, covered in pink neon.

[...]

JS: He said that it somehow, in one still, is was able to capture a nuance and an energy that he had never seen in one image before. Also, the casting decision, because when I first saw Arielle on the street, I think he was drawn to the image the same way I was drawn to Arielle. She was just so uniquely beautiful. It’s great when you can see someone redefine what beautiful can be, and she was that. I think that he just saw this confluence of casting, energy, cinematography, and lighting in one image, and he was just like, "I want to be a part of whatever that is. Whatever I'm feeling in this image, I want to be a part of it."

Capone: Were you at all hesitant to get involved with an actor that had a certain amount of baggage?

JS: To be completely honest, I had only seen him in one movie at the time, and it was THE ROVER.

Capone: That's a good one.

JS: Yeah. But I had known that he was—because I had missed the whole TWILIGHT thing—this international mega-star, that he was all over the tabloids. One time, I walked by a huge crowd, and I was like, “Why are you guys here?” They're like, "Robert Pattinson's in that building," but that was like years before I met him. Were we worried about it? No, I mean…

Benny Safdie: The only hesitation we had was the fact that he wasn't right for the movie we wanted to make at the time. So it was like, "Do we contact him? What are we going to do?" We didn't have anything.

JS: Because we knew that whatever we wanted to make after HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT was going to be something heavily genre oriented. The Diamond District film is a genre movie; it's more of a comedic thriller. We wanted to do something in the genre world, something that had a grandness to it, and we knew that with a star of that stature, with just him, we could just do whatever we want with complete freedom with the rest of the cast, and we would have a certain budget that would allow us to basically have these dream scenarios. We can do action sequences. We could do a chase sequence. We could do a car crash.

[...]

Capone: I gotta say, having just seen him in THE LOST CITY OF Z a couple months ago, he's doing the best work he's ever done right now.

JS: He's amazing in LOST CITY OF Z. I wish his character was bigger.

Capone: But I think he kind of liked it because it was a smaller character, almost unrecognizable.

S: Yes, yes. Well, that was his initial reach out, his initial olive branch, was he was looking to be a supporting player. Right now, after COSMOPOLIS, I think he was really interested in disappearing into movies and being the supporting characters, but see him as a leading man. I think that he's a star in that way, and that things should revolve around him. I made that very clear to him when we started working together.

Capone: Let me ask you about the opening scene. Much like writing the perfect first line in a book pulls you in, that scene is that line in the book. You have no idea what's going on, and there’s that tight closeup on your face—too close.

BS: He doesn't want you inside.

Capone: Talk about developing that moment. How early in the process did you come up with that, because you could have written that without even having Robert be a part of it.

JS: Yeah. I'll let Benny speak about where that scene really started, but in the writing process, we always knew we wanted to introduce Connie in way that you would meet someone like Connie, that he just gets involved in your life and now you're like, "Whoa, now I'm in this guy's life." In a weird way, it's almost like a meta thing, we're making this movie that is very much like a movie we would have made before—small, almost [documentarian Frederick] Wiseman-like movie about institutional mental illness, mental disability, and then this movie star comes in and grabs us, and we get involved again and embark on a genre film.

[...]

Capone: Now that you've sort of been through the process with Rob, what did he bring to this whole thing that you've never really experience before? What did he teach you?

JS: He taught us basic that with a veteran performer—at this point he's been acting in films for over a decade, big, big stuff too, obviously—there’s a certain level of things that we could lean on, in terms of a professionalism with his blocking. A certain actor knows how to find their light, and our lighting in this movie was very slight and subtle, so when there's a one-slash light, he knows exactly how to turn into it because he knew. That was something that I saw and I was like, okay, that's something you can depend on. With a first timer, you're literally just trying to catch them doing these things.

BS: He also would say things almost exactly the same, and certain ways that he would speak, he would say it the same way every time, so that you'd be able to just like use the audio from other takes. What I also realized is that, being in the mind of an editor also while we're making the movie, I could see that he let his performance just be wild, in the sense that “I'm going to give you as many possible options for a specific thing, emotionally, and then you could edit it.” He knew. He’s very aware of the editing process that you're going to be doing when you're going through it, so that was interesting to see too, to see him acting for movies.

JS: He also gave me faith. I've always had faith in my dialog, because I pride myself on the dialog we write, but we've always been so gung-ho to throw it out the window with basically just a major scratch track. A lot of times with first timers, the script is daunting to them, and they feel the need to try to memorize things beat for beat, but he was really obsessed with the dialog and the beat for beat, so he said them, and it was a new thing for us. Same thing with Jennifer [Jason Leigh].

Pour lire le reste de l'interview rendez-vous à la Source

Avec Vanyaland :

That’d be one hell of a movie. So how exactly did this come about?

Josh Safdie: It came about from Rob Pattinson basically seeing a still of Heaven Knows What on Indiewire, and [when I was checking] my email at South-By-Southwest, and receiving a super-cryptic kind of weirdly obsessive email from this guy named Rob Pattinson, who I — I never saw Twilight, but I’d seen The Rover and Cosmopolis at that point, and I knew he was involved with this musician whose work I really dug, and I realized that this guy was interested in cool things. His drive is not a commercial one. So I was like, “Okay, what does this guy want?” And basically, he wasn’t right for the project that we were looking to make, and I said to him, “Hey, I’ve got this deep well of interest and inspiration, and I want to make a thriller with you.” A crime thriller. So that’s where it started, with him. And Buddy Duress, too, to some degree.

[...]

So you started with this spark, and then you went into the writing. Was he involved much in the initial writing process?

Josh Safdie: So, in order to write the genre elements of this thrilling narrative stuff, because this was by far the most plotty narrative movie that we’ve ever done, and we were excited about that, but we really needed to know who Connie was. So I wrote a very extensive character background that started when his character was born and ended when he enters the movie. And he was involved with that, not necessarily writing or bringing specific things [to the background], but he’d question these landmarks in his life in a very particular way that would force me to go even deeper into that digression, and then weirdly, it’d become really helpful when we’d get to the fork in the road of the movie and we’d need to know exactly what this guy would do or say because we’d developed exactly who he was. So he was very involved within the development aspect. When he was on Lost City of Z, we’d talk a lot, and I would send him script pages occasionally and then I sent him a first draft, and then I was like “hold on, I’m going to send you a new draft,” and basically change the entire movie, and then I’d send him another draft three weeks later. So, he was involved way more than he is in other stuff, because most of the time people just treat him like a name to get some cash. Not speaking [badly] of all the movies [he’s been in], but he was surprised to see how involved he was.

Benny Safdie: But also he gave us the time to develop his character [independently]. He came to New York and we did camera tests and character history-building, between him and I for the brother. We wrote letters — Josh had him write a letter to me from jail, and then I would respond in kind as Nick. And so, just having this ability to build this character kind of from the ground up really allowed it just to be real. You feel all that texture in everything, in the sense that when he enters the movie, he’s not entering as Rob Pattinson, he’s entering as Connie Nikas. And that’s something special.

What kind of research did Pattinson do here? Did you help at all?

Josh Safdie: Well, I guided the research. I completely guided the research. I sent him Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, I sent him In the Belly of the Beast, I sent him a bunch of documentaries by John Alpert, one of which we’re doing a Q&A for tonight called One Year in a Life of Crime. I sent him an insane amount of Cops episodes, where I pinpointed certain things, and then he came to New York, and I introduced him to our casting department who helped us find — I mean that’s the amazing thing about our casting department is that they not only were casting the film, but they would, through their casting tentacles, they would be like “Hey, we met this guy and he seems really interesting, like a Connie character, you should meet with him.” So then I’d meet with him and be like “Oh, this guy’s great, let’s have Rob meet with him.”

So we brought Rob to this place called the Fortune Society, and the three of us met for hours with a guy who taught us what it was like to do time at a medium and a maximum security prison. And we brought him to —

Benny Safdie: We played pool with this other guy.

Josh Safdie: Yeah, we were just hanging out with who we thought Connie would hang out with. Maybe not to emulate, but just to suggest to him, “Hey, this would be your friend. This guy would be one of your friends.”

Benny Safdie: “You knew these people.” Like I was saying before, this is like a history-building for this character. You knew these people, you spent time with these people, you maybe did time with these people, and it would build not his character, but an idea of who his character hung out with, which would then in turn relate to who he was.

Josh Safdie: Because with a lot of people, you are the company you keep.

Benny Safdie: Yeah.

Josh Safdie: So we would… I mean, we did something once. Benny and Rob were in character working a gas station, working a car wash, and we filmed that. I brought Rob and Benny up, and Benny stayed in character the whole time, which kind of forced Rob into being a prototype version of Connie as well, just at a friend’s car shop in Yonkers. And then we met this guy who said “actually, Connie’s very similar to my brother who died last year, tragically,” and then he told us this crazy story, and [we loved it]. And he said, “Why don’t you come out to Rocky Point and I can show you where all this stuff happened.” So we got this walking tour of this very local, regional story, but it was this awesome crime story too.

Benny Safdie: And he’d be like “And there’s the house,” and we’d be like “that’s the house?” It had such a huge attachment in his head, but here it was just like a little house in this neighborhood, but this guy had such a big attachment to it, and in the way he told it in the story, it made you go “huh.” So then this idea of these little regional landmarks meaning so much to these people, like it would for the people in the movie…

Josh Safdie: Furthermore, we brought Rob, when we were developing the look of Connie, to an active jail. I had become friends with the warden, this woman Raylene, who is actually in the movie as the voice of the operator at Elmhurst. And I befriended through this interesting character who I knew, the commissioner of jails. So we had this unfettered access, and I was constantly doing research by going and getting these insane, completely unauthorized tours of jails, where while I’m walking through, I’d always walk through with my hands behind my back in case I saw somebody I knew, who’d be like “Oh, he’s with the warden!” And I’d see this guy who’d be like, “Aww, man, this fucking sucks.” And I’d be like “I’m good.” The warden would ask “Do you know that person?” and I’d say yeah, and we’d keep walking through the jails.

So when I bring Rob there, you know, he didn’t say a word because his accent wasn’t down yet, but he’d be able to walk around and see what a real jail looks and feels like and what it’s like to be going through the system. The guy who plays the psychiatrist at the beginning, Peter Verby, he’s actually a low-end criminal lawyer, and used to be a public defender, and he’s represented a lot of people like Connie in the past. So he can sit and talk about his experiences with people like that. What kind of questions would Connie have [for a public defender]? I mean, we did this, and it went far and deep. You know, he had people who he’d heard their accents from Queens sit down with him and read the script and he’d record it so he could just listen to it when he was going to sleep at night. So it was very, very extensive research on his behalf. But we were going and guiding him through it because it was also helpful for us to see him learn and craft [with it].

Pour lire le reste de l'interview rendez-vous à la Source

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