Robert Pattinson Was Convinced He’d Be Fired From ‘The Lighthouse’
Robert Pattinson’s movie The Lighthouse was a film that the actor would’ve felt annoyed not being able to star in. Despite his passion for the project, there were times he was worried he wouldn’t last in the movie very long.
Why Robert Pattinson thought both his director and co-star were angry with him in ‘The Lighthouse’
The Lighthouse was one of Pattinson’s more experimental films. The 2019 feature saw the actor and his co-star Willem Dafoe portray lighthouse keepers on a remote island. The Batman actor was attached to the project after meeting with the film’s director Robert Eggers. Pattinson was impressed by Eggers’ 2015 horror feature The Witch, and wanted to work with him on a similar project.
“You could see that he was a master, technically. I liked that it seemed as if they built a world — where if the camera were to move in any direction, it would seem just as full. But I didn’t think I wanted to do a horror film,” Pattinson once said in an interview with Screen Daily.
“We talked about a couple of things which were more conventional, but also big and kind of gothic. I’m always a little wary of playing in an English period [production], so I said to him, ‘I just want to do something weird.’ And then he sent me this,” he added.
Pattinson further shared that The Lighthouse script gave him everything that he was looking for in a potential project. The only problem was he had a difficult time fully understanding the film.
“I couldn’t really get my head around it at first,” Pattinson said. “It’s such a feat of maintaining multiple different tones that when I read it, I thought, ‘I can’t actually imagine how it’s going to gel together.’ I could see that it was really good, but I did feel a bit of a risk doing it.”
Another issue with shooting the movie was the rehearsal process. Pattinson wasn’t a fan of rehearsing for films in general, feeling that it risked stifling more natural acting. But according to an interview he did with Empire (via Femalefirst), Pattinson feared that his attitude towards rehearsing would get him fired.
“It almost certainly was in my head. I think I foster a terror of failure,” Pattinson said. “And I really allow it to build anxiety in my mind coming up to shoots. I guess a lot of actors have that imposter syndrome thing. But that fear of messing up, and the fear of being humiliated – actually, I find it a really big drive, a catalyst.”
Robert Pattinson had an emotional breakdown in every scene of ‘The Lighthouse’
Both Pattinson and Dafoe were very candid about how taxing shooting The Lighthouse could be. Pattinson even quipped that he was close to getting into a fight with the director for the movie’s grueling shoot. One of those scenes involved Pattinson getting sprayed in the face with a firehose. Speaking with Vox, the Twilight star compared his brutal Lighthouse scenes to a breakdown.
“I was doing a lot of crazy things. Pretty much every scene is a high-intensity psychological breakdown. I stayed in that zone a lot of the time when I was shooting it, a lot of walking around in circles kind of muttering to myself,” he said.
But at the same time, the conditions on Lighthouse was exactly what Pattinson normally looked for in the project. If only because at times it made him feel like he wasn’t really acting.
“I guess it was pretty cold, but I think in terms of just giving you loads more to react to, I’m always looking for any way to act less. The more water is sprayed on you and poo is shoved in your face, you act less and less and less. It all just becomes really real. It makes it a lot easier,” he said.
