L'interview : (en anglais)
The Lighthouse is a delirious, black-and-white horror drama about two 19th-Century lighthouse-keepers fending off seagulls, mermaids and their own rum-fuelled madness on a tiny island off the coast of New England. To put it another way, it is a typical Robert Pattinson film. Just over a decade ago, the British actor shot to superstardom by playing a sparkly-skinned, lantern-jawed vampire in the Twilight series. Before that, he set young hearts a-flutter as Hufflepuff hunk Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
But ever since then, Pattinson has rejected pin-up roles and mega-budget franchises in favour of the weirdest experimental indie movies possible. Whether he is having his prostate prodded in the back of a futuristic limousine in David Cronenberg’s Don DeLillo adaptation, Cosmopolis, or getting lost in space with a sex-obsessed mad scientist in Claire Denis’ High Life, or exploiting a teenage girl and his own disabled brother in the Safdie brothers’ sleazeball crime farce, Good Time, he gravitates towards, in his words, “things which are a bit perverse and a bit crazy”.
It’s tempting to feel sorry for Pattinson’s agents, who must have spent the last decade begging him to play a stammering fop in a romantic comedy or a suave secret agent in a spy movie – anything, really, except a taciturn, masturbating, sewage-splattered lighthouse-keeper. But Pattinson laughs at the idea. “I think they’ve known about my taste from the beginning. My agent always says that if they like a script, and if the character is in any way normal, they want to edit it before giving it to me so that the first character description would be, ‘John, 31 – psychopath.’”
Pattinson, 33, doesn’t seem too psychopathic in person, when we meet on a December afternoon. Dressed all in black, from his shoes to his backwards baseball cap, the actor formerly known as R-Patz perches on the edge of a low sofa in a London hotel room, with that famous chin resting in his hand, and launches into elaborate anecdotes and theories with disarming openness, offbeat humour, and plenty of cheerful English public-school self-deprecation (see also: Olivia Colman, Hughs Grant and Laurie).
His bold post-Twilight choices, he insists, weren’t so bold, after all: attempting to trek to the top of the Hollywood A-list would have been “much more dangerous” than going down the independent road. “You can see quite a lot of examples of it not really working out for people,” he says, naming no names, “so I just thought it would be a silly idea to try to do a massive action movie or something.” He was also aware that his stratospheric celebrity status might plummet down to Earth at any moment. “I always think that whatever movie you’re doing, there’s a potential that it’s the last movie you’re ever going to get, and so I don’t want to end my career on a ‘transitional’ movie.”
