Even MORE... David Cronenberg about Rob...

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from CinemaBlend...

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Working with Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis, is it that same process of really focusing on your actor and giving him a lot of freedom?
He's in every scene. It's quite a different structure from A Dangerous Method. I think the only similarity really is that there's a lot of dialogue, but it's a very different kind of dialogue, a completely different kind of movie. I did shoot it even more ascetically. We finished 5 days early, and I did my director's cut in two days. That's a record for me. And yet it seems to work really well. Basically you're not giving your editors much to work with. At moments he was begging me to do coverage and I wouldn't. I said I don't need that closeup, I don't want that. I'm confident that letting it hang in the long shot is the way to do it. There are classic mistakes that young directors make, they get so enamored of this tricky dolly shot or steadicam shot, then they don't want to do closeups because they think they've done this genius shot, then in the editing room they realize all the emotion, they can't see it. You have to do closeups. But that's a lesson you learn very early on in your career as a director. You have to have unshakeable confidence if you're not going to do that coverage. You have to know this is exactly what I want it to be.

from  Huffington Post

(extract)

Why did you want Pattinson for the part in "Cosmopolis"?
Cronenberg: Well I'd watched a movie that I think not too many people have seen called "Little Ashes," where he plays Salvador Dali, and he plays him as a young man and plays him with a Spanish accent. So I thought, well that's really interesting, I mean this was before he was a "Twilight" star, because, it takes a particular handsome young man to decide to play that role. And then I did watch some of the "Twilight" stuff and I watched "Remember Me" and I felt that he had a lot going on. He's supposed to be a super smart billionaire at a young age, 28 he says in the movie. It's intuition. I didn't know him as a person, but I'd figured from the movies that I'd seen, like "Little Ashes," that I could maybe interest him in doing something that's not "Twilight" obviously.

source: CinemaBlend