COSMOPOLIS NEW ROBERT PATTINSON STILLS – As we get closer to Cosmopolis starting it’s US release at the Los Angeles Landmark Theater, Indiewire has released three new exclusive pictures of Robert Pattinson from the movie. The first picture features Robert and Paul Giamatti in a situation. To find out what that situation exactly is, you are just going to have to see the movie to find out.

PLOT: Unfolding in a single cataclysmic day, the story follows Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) – a 28-year old financial whiz kid and billionaire asset manager – as he heads out in his tricked-out stretch limo to get a haircut from his father’s old barber, while remotely wagering his company’s massive fortune on a bet against the Chinese Yuan. Packer’s luxe trip across the city quickly becomes dizzyingly hellish as he encounters explosive city riots, a parade of provocative visitors, and is thrust into a myriad of intimate encounters. Having started the day with everything, believing he is the future, Packer’s perfectly ordered, doubt-free world is about to implode.

SOURCE: Indiewire

See the pictures below:

COSMOPOLIS OPENING LOS ANGELES – On August 17 David Cronenberg‘s Cosmopolis will open in Los Angeles at The Landmark Theater. The movie stars Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon, Mathieu Amalric, Jay Baruchel, Kevin Durand, K’Naan, Emily Hampshire with Samantha Morton and Paul Giamatti. The movie is rated R for some strong sexual content including graphic nudity, violence and language. Based on the novel by Don DeLillo, comes Cosmopolis, a contemporary thriller that turns into a wild, hypnotic odyssey through our new millennium’s obsessions with power, money, control, information, technology, violence, sex, mortality, revolution, destruction and ultimately, redemption.

PLOT: Unfolding in a single cataclysmic day, the story follows Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) – a 28-year old financial whiz kid and billionaire asset manager – as he heads out in his tricked-out stretch limo to get a haircut from his father’s old barber, while remotely wagering his company’s massive fortune on a bet against the Chinese Yuan. Packer’s luxe trip across the city quickly becomes dizzyingly hellish as he encounters explosive city riots, a parade of provocative visitors, and is thrust into a myriad of intimate encounters. Having started the day with everything, believing he is the future, Packer’s perfectly ordered, doubt-free world is about to implode.

SOURCE: The Landmark Theater

COSMOPOLIS INTERVIEWS - Our friends at HeyUGuys recently did an interview with Cosmopolis director David Cronenberg and star Robert Pattinson in London. They spoke about the story, Pattinson’s character and the differences between the book and the movie. Cosmopolis follows Eric Packer (Pattinson) as he crosses Manhattan in a stretch limo in order to get a haircut. Cosmopolis also stars Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon, Mathieu Amalric, Jay Baruchel, Kevin Durand, K’naan, Emily Hampshire, Samantha Morton and Paul Giamatti.

Source: HeyUGuys

Robert, your character in the film, Eric Packer, is a not a very nice person – he’s a selfish and nihilistic. How do you approach playing a character like that?

Pattinson: I don’t think I approached it as being a nihilist. I think there was an energy there, but I think the energy of being a nihilist is something different. He’s not really throwing things away consciously, he’s just getting more stressed. He thinks he’s getting closer to something, and everything just starts falling away – he’s not consciously destroying it.

How do you think Eric Packer compares to other David Cronenberg characters?

Cronenberg: I don’t really think about my other movies – I said this before. You’re asking me to be an analyst of my own movies, but I won’t, because that’s your job! What I can say is that I don’t think about my other movies when I make a movie The joy for me is middle of the night, on the street, with your actors, nobody else around. You’re not thinking about Twilight, you’re not thinking about Scanners, you’re thinking about Cosmopolis. That’s beautiful and that’s very pure. When I’m putting the movie together I do think about the star value of the actors I get, I have to think about Robert’s passport as it’s a Canada/ France co-production, all of that stuff – but that’s all irrelevant to the actual creative making of the movie. So I try to be pure that way.

Eric Packer’s only real goal in the film is to get a haircut. Why is he looking for something so trivial?

Cronenberg: The trivial thing is not at all trivial. He even sets it up. He says “A haircut is what? It’s calendars on the wall, its a barber’s chair, it’s the neighbourhood”. It’s his past, where he was somehow pure, and somehow innocent. There’s one thing Robert did, and he probably didn’t even know he was doing it, but when he’s sitting in the barber’s chair he becomes a child. And the old barber becomes like his father or grandfather. There’s a great moment where he says “You were four at the time”, and Eric say “Five, I was five,” and it was just gorgeous. I’m getting chills just thinking about it. And this is beautiful stuff that was in every line of his dialogue, there’s a real intuitive understanding of that stuff. So as I say, it’s not trivial, you understand eventually that this movement to his childhood is what the haircut is all about.

People aren’t going to expect to see Robert Pattinson in a film like this – how do you think the Twilight fan’s who just come to see Robert will respond to the film?

Pattinson: I dunno. I mean, I hope people come to see it! (laughs). Get them into the cinema anyway you can! The Twilight fanbase is very much maligned for their tenacity for sitting out in the rain. Like in Germany yesterday, there were all these people sitting on a miserable day in the middle of nowhere, waiting. Everyone’s always screaming and that, but you go down the line, people give you books. Somebody gave me a Lawrence Ferlinghetti book, even. They give you all these different things, and it’s not like they’re giving you teddy bears. People,for some reason, have some kind of… (pauses) I don’t know. Twilight has attracted such a broad spectrum of people, and they have all kind of been lumped together because it’s much easier to get these images of people screaming and stuff. It’s quite a strange spectrum of people. A lot of people who’ve been coming to the premieres in Europe have seen the movie four or five times already, and they all have interesting critiques of it.

Cronenberg: And a lot of those girls in those lines actually had copies of Cosmopolis and they were asking us to sign them. And they’d read them, or truly intend to read it. The websites that were made by girls, young girls, Twilight fans, while we were shooting, they all had read the book – and they were still excited about the project. Some of the websites were gorgeous, really sophisticated and great. Ok, maybe they’ve only read Harry Potter and Twilight – and now they’re reading Don DeLillo! What’s wrong with that?

Read the rest of the interview here (may contain spoilers)

COSMOPOLIS SUPPORTING CAST – As everyone knows by now that Robert Pattinson plays Eric Packer in David Cronenberg‘s Cosmopolis. What they might not know is who is Rob’s supporting cast. From the masterful Paul Giamatti, and the fresh talents of Sarah Gadon and Jay Baruchel to French luminaries Juliette Binoche and Mathieu Amalric, Cronenberg has assembled an impressive cast. Pattinson sums up the ensemble cast: “All the actors come from different backgrounds, have different personalities and have all done completely different kinds of movies. They didn’t know a lot about the film, but everybody wants to work with David and that’s why they’re here.”

Eric Packer is protected by seen and unseen forces. Kevin Durand plays Torval, Eric’s head of security. At 6’6” he is an intimidating presence, and his character is armed and dangerous. Torval is constantly warning Eric away from his journey, especially as he receives information about “credible threats.” But Eric ignores the warnings and subverts his own security.

Durand sees his character “as a frustrated, ex-Military, father-figure to Eric.” He likens Eric to “his teenage son; I can try to guide him in the right direction, but he will ultimately do what he wants.” Torval’s assistants are Kendra (Patricia McKenzie) and Danko (Zeljko Kecojevic), whose intense encounters with Eric function to further reveal his emotional emptiness.

Enroute to his haircut, Eric meets with his business advisors. First to visit the limo is Shiner (Jay Baruchel), Packer’s trading partner and Chief of Technology. Packer depends on his electronic interface with the world and his expectations are high. Shiner is charged with delivering on those expectations, but the character is more casual and less business-like than we might expect. Or would we? Baruchel describes his character as “One of the dot com kids… a slacker who became a millionaire.” He is entrusted with Packer’s technical security, and it has made him rich, but he doubts the meaning of it all.

Vija Kinski (Samantha Morton) is Packer’s Chief of Theory. Specifically, Vija theorizes about the philosophy of finance, one devoid of humanity. Morton embodies a woman so much in her head that she barely notices the riot going on outside the limo as angry protesters spray graffiti and bounce around the limo. Reality and theory are at odds all around her, but she is unwavering.

We meet Packer’s Chief of Finance, Jane Melman (Emily Hampshire), as the single mother diverts her jog—on her one day off—to meet with Eric in the limo about a crisis with the yuan. His disregard for her personal life and preoccupation with his own concerns exasperates Jane, yet there is an odd excitement between them. She talks to him in the limo—and confirms his dangerous financial position—while he has his daily medical tests, even during his prostate exam.

Knowing Eric is a fan of artist Mark Rothko, Didi Fancher (Juliette Binoche) visits Eric in his limousine to tell him that she’s found a painting she thinks he should buy. After they make love, Eric tells her he’s not interested in a single painting; he wants to buy the entire gallery. Binoche notes that “Didi is conflicted because she is obviously attracted to Eric and wants his business, but offended by his vulgar greed.” When asked what Binoche brings to the role, Cronenberg smiles: “She brings her French-ness, talent, humor, sensuality, all the while illuminating a side to our lead character that we may not otherwise see; that he is someone who’d be involved with a mature, strong, opinionated woman.”

Sarah Gadon, the Toronto actress who played Carl Jung’s wife in Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, appears in Cosmopolis as Eric’s new wife Elise. She is a contemporary New Yorker with rich parents and a boarding school drawl, but she isn’t all about money. “Elise has a veneer of an Upper East Side woman and talks a lot about sex, but underneath she’s very much an intellectual and artist,” Sarah observes. “I think Eric and Elise are just young kids trying to be so much more evolved than they actually are; Elise loves Eric, but he’s very much a symbol of wealth while she is more a symbol of art and intellect—or she thinks she is—and the two together create friction which is exciting… but can’t last.” As for resemblance between the character and the actress, Pattinson affectionately notes: “Elise is kind of an ice queen, but Sarah’s really funny and sweet.”

Mathieu Amalric’s anti-capitalist activist Petrescu delivers a pie in the face to notoriously ultra-capitalist Eric, in a rare unprotected moment on the street. This scene was shot just days before an activist and comedian gave Rupert Murdoch a similar treatment in a British parliamentary hearing, an intriguing example of art anticipating life. Amalric acknowledges the humour of his role but also the disturbing element: “It’s a funny but scary moment that only David Cronenberg can master.” Paulo Branco describes this same moment as “terrible but real.”

K’Naan appears on screen in an open-air hearse. He plays the murdered rap star Brutha Fez, a spiritual musician who is treated as a god by the masses. Off-screen the Somali- Canadian collaborated with Howard Shore on the single for which his character Brutha Fezis remembered, entitle Mecca, based on DeLillo’s own lyrics from the novel.

Benno (Paul Giamatti) is a mysterious character ultimately revealed to be a bitter former employee of Packer. He has been quietly stalking Eric with complicated motives and intentions. When they finally meet, Benno provokes a vulnerable side to the billionaire that was barely glimpsed before. Cronenberg describes Benno as “the conscience of Eric Packer. Benno confronts him over his ultimate lack of humanity and remorse and his sole concentration on pursuit of wealth.”

Giamatti has long wanted to work with Cronenberg, and he agrees with the director about his character: “Benno’s a kind of moral compass—even an alter ego—to Eric, who shows more emotion in this scene than any other in the film.”