Christina Ricci, Directors Ormerod and Donnellan talk about Rob and Bel Ami



Rob mention at 1:20 and 1:45
via via

Christina's Interview with the IrishTimes
“We had movement classes and lessons,” she says. “There was a lot about the way women sat and held their hands out. The hardest part was you had to sit without using your hands to steady yourself. I am bit clumsy. So that was tricky.”

(...)The fragrant Robert Pattinson plays the cynical accidental journalist whose adventures drive the plot of Bel Ami. They must have had some interesting conversations about the pressures that early success can bring. There are few idols more hotly pursued than the star of the Twilight films.

He’s wonderful,” she says. “He’s handling everything very well. He never brought any of what he was going through to the set. He was always incredibly well prepared, very professional and a very great actor. I loved working with him. We joked a lot. Made fun of each other and had a great laugh.”


Did she have advice for him? “Not really. He seems to be handling it all very well. I can’t imagine being as famous as he is.” pattinsonladies

Director Declan Donnellan talked about Bel Ami, mentions Rob - The Herald Scotland/Alison Rowat

(...)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." (David Cronenberg, who directs Pattinson in the forthcoming Cosmopolis, also praised the Pattinson acting chops when I interviewed him recently-A.Rowat)

(...)As for the possibility the film will attract the type of audiences not normally drawn to adaptations of 19th-century French novels, their attitude is that everyone is welcome. That said, they acknowledge that when they began working with Pattinson the first Twilight film was just opening. "The whole mania hadn't started yet," says Donnellan.

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."  Read in full
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Directors Ormerod and Donnellan talk about Casting Rob
At 3.15 Watch HERE

via RPLife
On the cast, Nick Ormerod said: “Rob came very early on. He read the script and absolutely loved it, and really related to the character. We met him, and that was like a marriage immediately. He has always been wonderfully committed, and is a terrifically serious actor.”

Declan added: “Very interestingly, he insisted on rehearsing for a whole month in London before we shot one single piece of film, which is very, very unusual for somebody who has as busy a schedule as he has. He was incredibly committed, and couldn’t have been a nicer guy or a more talented guy to work with.”

Nick also said of the Twilight star’s involvement: “I think the reason that Rob was attracted to this role is that it’s the complete opposite of everything that he’s played so far. The character of Bel Ami is talentless, vacuous and really totally selfish. Rob is very talented, but he completely understood the part, completely understood the character.”

“At the risk of sounding po-faced or pretentious, all artists will grapple – I do – with insecurity about your own talent,” Declan explained. “It’s a very dodgy artist indeed who says ‘I know exactly what I’m doing; I’m a genius, I’m talented’. Nobody I know who does good work thinks like that at all. I think that’s one of the reasons why this character is so fascinating to us, really, because he gets to the top with nothing, and it’s very much a parable for our time.”