Team Edward may not swoon over Twilight star Robert Pattinson's role as a cold Wall Street predator

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Robert Pattinson

Fiction becomes fact

DAVID Cronenberg started working on the script of Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis about three-and-a-half years ago, before Occupy Wall Street protest broke big. DeLillo's novel was published in 2003, before the Wall Street meltdown of 2008.

The movie, which depicts anti-capitalist rioting and miscellaneous social unrest, seems to be a prophetic glimpse into the present.

Cronenberg says the timing seems topical on the surface.

"Occupy Wall Street was happening while we were shooting, as well as the Rupert Murdoch pie-in-the-face (incident)," he says.

"Paul Giamatti (who stars as an assassin stalking Robert Pattinson's billionaire) texted me at one point: 'I can't believe this! Rupert Murdoch just got a pie in the face.' We had just shot the scene with Rob getting a pie in the face, also by a 'pastry assassin' who was protesting abuse of the power of capitalism and all of that."

But Cronenberg says the movie is not meant to be prophecy.

"It's as though the world had caught up with the book -- and that might bring more people into the theatre and it might give people interesting things to write about," he says. "But it's not really the essence of why I made this movie.

"I would have made it anyway, even if the world was in great economic shape, because the stuff that's interesting is the character stuff... the whole idea of a character who lives in such an abstraction. He barely knows how to talk to his wife, and all that's interesting."

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David Cronenberg

TORONTO -- When Robert Pattinson showed up to attend a screening of his new movie, Cosmopolis, at the Bell Lightbox cinemas in downtown Toronto on Monday night, the streets were predictably blanketed with hundreds of teen girls, straining for a glimpse of the 26-year-old, London-born actor known to them as Edward Cullen, vampire hunk in the Twilight film franchise.

The irony is that the film being mobbed was pretty much the antithesis of the teen-pleasing pop-supernatural romance. Cosmopolis is an adaptation of a cult novel by Don DeLillo, scripted and directed by Canadian director David Cronenberg. The movie is largely set in the customized stretch limousine of Pattinson's character, billionaire Wall Street boy wonder Eric Packer, a cold young man steeped in the abstractions of high finance.

Suffice it to say, Pattinson is as removed from the role of hero here as the film itself is removed from the typical three-act drama. Indeed, a couple of key moments in the film are positively jarring in the way Pattinson parts ways from the conventional protagonist, in much the same way James Woods threw us for a loop in Cronenberg's 1983 film Videodrome.

The actor, attempting to blend in to the background of a 10th-floor suite in a black baseball cap and a Bad Religion T-shirt in Toronto's Thompson Hotel, allows that the shift to this kind of movie was intimidating.

"When I read the script, I thought that I couldn't do it. And I kind of realized afterwards, that should be the way you choose projects right there," he says. "The projects you should go after are the ones you don't understand or you're scared of. You'll probably end up better afterwards."

Pattinson says that his approach to the role was ultimately staying with the script and collaborating with Cronenberg on the look of the character. Cronenberg says it's unnecessary to psychoanalyze the character or put him under a microscope.

"For the actor, it's: 'First we'll figure out what shoes you're wearing, and we'll figure out what you've got on and how should your hair be and what does that suggest about you?'" says Cronenberg, 69.

"Now you say the first line. It's very much a matter of a phenomenological reality, detail by detail. And if the script is good, it's all there. You just have to do the script and do it well and do it sensitively."

A David Cronenberg film is not typically one that invites actors to change the script as written to suit their rhythms.

"I don't do a movie unless I'm sure the script is exactly the way it should be, in terms of dialogue," he says. "Changes that were made on A Dangerous Method were one or two words, literally. That's it. And on this one, probably not even that."

Playing the music of the screenplay suited Pattinson.

"I like the poetry of it," he says. "I liked saying it. I still like saying it.

"You don't need to analyze things that much, and you don't need to understand it.

"I would love to approach everything like that," he says. "But there are certain conventional ways you have to do things."

Cosmopolis opens at the Grant Park Cinema tomorrow.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 7, 2012 D1