Showing posts with label Declan Donellan. Show all posts

Source | Via | Via

Robert Pattinson has made a generation of girls swoon, and brought in millions of dollars for the producers of the Twilight phenomenon, where his portrayal of Edward Cullen means he needn't get out of bed again if he doesn’t feel like it.

So, it would be understandable if such adulation had gone to his pretty tousle-haired head, and made him a bit difficult to work with. How did the directors of his new film Bel Ami deal with such an idol on this, their very first film?

"He was delightful," insists Nick Ormerod, one half of the directing duo along with Declan Donnellan - established theatre directors with a body of stage, ballet and opera work more than three decades in the making, but novices when it came to film.

"He did insist on rehearsing for a whole month before we did our first shoot, which is apparently unheard of in Hollywood, but he was passionately attached to the project."

"He wasn't that famous when we offered him the part," remembers Donnellan. "He'd done Harry Potter, Twilight was just starting, and I remember seeing his face on the side of a bus.


"Our film took so long to get going because it was art house, that he went off and did Twilight, so we were watching this phenomenon take place."

So how is the film world treating you?


Donnellan: The red carpet in Berlin was absolutely amazing. We'd never had much intrusion from Robert's fans, and Rob's really serious - he insisted on rehearsing for a whole month before we started to shoot. There was no intrusion on the set. The thing they had in common - all the principles came from completely different background in cinema. They all had one thing in common, in that they were doing something they'd never done before - the roles stretched each of them. Then we hit Berlin... [laughs] It was incredible fun.
Ormerod: We expected something fairly extraordinary, and it was amazing.
Donnellan: Nick burst out laughing one morning when he was reading the emails. He couldn't stop laughing, saying "we had a letter from Hugo Boss, asking permission to dress us in Berlin!"
Ormerod: This is a Hugo Boss jacket!

'Bel Ami' directors, Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, present/talk about the movie at the screening at Institut Français du Royaume-Uni' in London tonight (March 7)

They talk about casting/working with Rob at 3:30. The whole video is very interesting, they talk about theater/movie, working with the actors and more.





Via: Chrisska | PattinsonLadies | RPLife

“He read the novel and also a book I wrote about acting,” says Donnellan, 59, “and he insisted on four weeks of one-on-one rehearsal before we shot anything, which is unheard of in Hollywood. He wants to expand as an actor and he takes it very seriously. He has genuinely never said anything negative about Twilight but no one wants to be in a franchise for ever.”

Patterson clearly relished the chance to stamp on the romantic image of Edward Cullen, and Ormerod’s camera picks up something lizardly and quite ruthless in his handsome features. “He was determined to keep it tough,” says Ormerod. “That’s why he did it,” adds Donnellan. “He said, ‘I’m playing a character with no redeeming features’.”

Source | Via: RobPattzNews

As the winner of several Olivier awards, British director Declan Donnellan is used to the odd coup de theatre, that moment when events on stage take a turn for the astonishing.

But what happened on the red carpet in Berlin for Bel Ami, his feature film debut, had even Donnellan thinking he had lost the plot.

"There was one moment when I thought I'd gone mad," says Donnellan, who was in Glasgow last month for the film festival premiere of Bel Ami with the movie's co-director, the theatre designer Nick Ormerod.

"I was convinced I heard some people scream 'Nick', 'Declan'. I thought this is really pathetic, you've gone mad. But we looked round and there was a group of about six people who had photos of us taken from the set, pulled from the internet. We were so grateful," he says, laughing. "We threw them in Rob's face."

The "Rob" to whom he refers, and the reason why Donnellan and Ormerod were amazed to receive any attention at all, is Robert Pattinson, one of the stars of Bel Ami but best known for playing Edward Cullen in the Twilight saga. For Twihards, as fans of the vampire films are known, Pattinson is a one-man Beatles, or a taller Daniel Radcliffe, take your pick. When he walks a red carpet it gets very noisy, very quickly.

It's possible to see a certain irony in Pattinson, a young actor largely known up to this point for his good looks, playing a character who has little else to offer but his handsomeness. Donnellan is having none of that. "I've worked with actors for 35 years and some very, very good ones. Rob is unbelievably talented. He is not Georges Duroy."

On set, Pattinson just got on with the work. "He's very much his own man," says Donnellan. "He's very quietly serious. All of that Rob hysteria you see is completely absent from the set. There's no sense of that at all, he's a nice guy from Barnes."

Source | Via: Robsessed