"The world’s favourite vampire is in Berlin for a whirlwind visit and,
true to bloodsucking type, Robert Pattinson isn’t eating. Tonight, he
will do the red-carpet thing for the world premiere of his new film, Bel
Ami, but in the private hotel lounge allocated for this interview —
“This is classy,” he comments as he strolls in — he barely makes a dent
in the chicken salad he has ordered, despite his professed hunger.
Pattinson
isn’t known for playing characters who do much smiling or laughing,
either, so the first thing to notice is how readily he does both in
person. Decked out in a black-grey ensemble and sporting a new cropped
haircut under his black cap, he has barely sat down, with a pack of
Camels by his side, before he’s folded up in mirth, talking about the
KitKatClub, a notorious Berlin sex joint, and his desire to patronise
it with his family. Is he joking? I hope not. “I was telling my dad
about it last night, and he sounded really into it. ‘I’m coming over —
let’s go to the orgy club.’ ”
The 25-year-old actor has been
to Berlin many times. One of the best holidays he ever had was a stay in
the east when he was 17, “before it was so gentrified”, frequenting
bars that took up illegal residence in abandoned buildings. Such
footloose times are seemingly in the past for the star of Twilight,
although his desire to hit the KitKatClub may indicate otherwise. The
other observation to make is that Pattinson is a very handsome man, but
his face is less wide and flat than the camera makes it appear. And
there are enough imperfections to separate him from the standard
Hollywood pretty boy.
Nobody wants to see a dickhead succeed — that’s why I wanted to do it
It
is easy to see why he is ideal casting as a heart-throb vampire, but
equally why he got the role of Georges Duroy, the insatiable
money-and-lust monster at the heart of Bel Ami. This adaptation of Guy
de Maupassant’s belle époque novel marks the directing debut of two of
our most acclaimed theatre practitioners — Declan Donnellan and Nick
Ormerod, the founders of Cheek by Jowl. Of the projects Pattinson has
chosen with the Twilight safety net in place, the first two, Remember Me
(2010) and Water for Elephants (2011), were unadventurous romantic
excursions, unlikely to perturb even the most rabid Twihard. Bel Ami is
where it gets interesting.
Georges Duroy is essentially the
anti-Edward Cullen, an opportunistic cad who deploys sex for ruthless
gain, screwing people — literally, in the case of the rich society wives
played by Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott Thomas — on
his rise from impoverished soldier to powerful Parisian. Cullen is the
charming, soulful vampire who gets the girl; Duroy is the charming,
soulless parasite who gets everything but his own comeuppance. Pattinson
nails his repellent, empty charm, sneering as he seduces.
Sticking
closely to the Maupassant source is one of the many strengths of
Donnellan and Ormerod’s gorgeously realised vision, and Pattinson
admits that tweaking Twilight-fuelled preconceptions was an original
lure. “But my ideas about it changed as I was doing it,” he says.
“Georges keeps getting beaten down by the world, but he never learns. He
succeeds because of the bad points of his personality. Nobody wants to
see a dickhead succeed — that’s why I wanted to do it.”
For their
part, Donnellan and Ormerod are predictably effusive about their star:
the former praises his “passionate attachment to us” during the film’s
difficult financing, and credits him with “edge and intelligence”.
“There’s a huge difference between Georges and Rob,” Donnellan says.
“Georges rises to the top with no talent. Rob has masses of it.”
(Donnellan sees Bel Ami as a parable on modern celebrity culture.) They
also attribute the idea for a five-week theatre-style rehearsal process
to the actor, a savvy move that allowed him to soak up their reservoir
of knowledge about performance and period. He showed up every day for 10
or 11 hours. “I ended up doing mime and crazy improvisations, because
you run out of stuff to do,” he says. “One day, Holliday [Grainger, his
co-star] and I ran around screaming at each other for four hours.”
Pattinson can’t articulate how the process fed into his performance,
although when he arrived on set in Budapest in February 2010, he was
worried he had overcooked it.
Meanwhile, Ormerod and Donnellan
were taking the baby steps that come with being debut film-makers. The
former focused on the design tapestry, the latter on the actors.
Pattinson recalls them putting a row of audience heads at the bottom of
the monitor, but the graceful storytelling they bring to Bel Ami bodes
well for their move from stage to cinema. “We’re now rather bitten, I’m
afraid,” Donnellan says.
Published in 1885, Maupassant’s
masterpiece was shocking in its day. The author knew he was on borrowed
time while writing this, his second novel — he eventually succumbed to
syphilis — and it is infected by a spirit of nihilistic hedonism, of
indulging base instincts while you can because, as the antireligious
Duroy puts it: “This is the only life; there’s nothing after.” Pattinson
wishes they had kept a shot near the end where Georges turns to a
crucifix and thanks God for his good fortune. “It was done in the most
blasphemous way,” he says, “thinking of God as Father Christmas, which
was funny. There’s a lot of misery in the movie. It’s not as funny as I
thought it was going to be.”
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