Don DeLillo, Robert Pattinson, David Cronenberg and Paulo Branco introduce Cosmopolis to an enthusiastic crowd

Cosmopolis is holding a special premiere in Paris today after a successful reception in Lisbon, Portugal yesterday.

@RobPattzNews here's my photo with Rob at the Cosmopolis premiere in Monumental cinema in Lison http://t.co/SCrxT6Ok—
Inês Sousa Amorim (@InesAmrm) May 30, 2012

Press interviews from Rob and Paulo + Inside the theater after the cut!

Paulo Branco & Robert Pattinson doing press on the red carpet

Videos from inside the theater – David, Rob, Paulo and Don introduce the film

Next stop…back to France!

Photos: Source | Source | Source | Source

From eOne’s facebook:

It’s time for the big reveal eOne fans! Head to the contest tab because we are giving YOU the opportunity to win an exclusive pair of tickets to the Canadian premiere of Cosmopolis on June 4! Let us also mention that joining us for the premiere will be director David Cronenberg, cast Sarah Gadon, Kevin Durand, Emily Hampshire and… Robert Pattinson!!!!! Good luck everyone

Click HERE to enter to win tickets! Good luck! There are also other contests that will be launching through the week so keep a look out and listen in your area, Canada.

Hey #Cosmopolis Fans, don't forget 2 listen to @KidCraig on @999VirginRadio (7pm-12am) all week & win double pass to the Premiere (Like me)—
Ghoulish Glenn (@sajak551) May 29, 2012

Indiewire/The Playlist had an opportunity to sit down with David Cronenberg and talk about Cosmopolis. Here is an excerpt from the interview:

You’ve said that the novel proved prophetic, but economies do wax and wane so there must be some room for coincidence. What is it about this 2003 book that resonates with you as both a cinematic and contemporary text?
“Cosmopolis” was never meant to be analysis of world economics situation, you know? That is almost gravy. The fact that the world suddenly seems to be caught up with Don DeLillo’s book and it’s as though we were making a documentary instead of a fiction film. Things were happening: Occupy Wall Street, the pie in the face of Rupert Murdoch. We had shot scenes with Rob [Pattinson] that were so similar to that it was quite bizarre. But no, it didn’t need that contemporary reality to make it interesting to me because it was the characters, it was the philosophy, it was the structure of the novel itself that was really interesting to me. And I thought it would be…you know, as an artist you’re always looking for universal realities, truths, not absolute truths, but something that has some universal meaning and yet, you have to deal with particular characters, particular moments in time and so on. And so you need the particular to be universal and I thought that was very strong in Don’s novel and as I said, the world could have been peachy keen economically and I still think the book would have been resonant.

The novel has a device referring back to the stream-of-consciousness confessions of Benno Levin, played by Paul Giamatti as one of the many people out to get Eric Parker. As one of the most complicated characters in the story, what does Benno Levin represent to you?
Well, I don’t think in terms of symbols and schematics. I think of Benno as a real person. I have to approach my characters as real people and with my actors we, as I’ve often said, you cannot say to an actor, “You will portray this abstract concept.” I can’t say to Rob Pattinson, “You are the symbol of capitalism.” Because an actor doesn’t know that. How do you act that? What do you do with that information? It doesn’t help you. You have to say, “You’re a character who has this past, who has this barbershop he goes to, who has this desire, who has this job.” That’s how an actor works and that’s actually how I work. So I can’t say, “Benno represents this or that.” I can say Benno is a character who has a bizarre love for the Rob Pattinson character. He’s in love with him. But he’s also repelled by him and is also intimidated by him, to the extent that he actually must connect with him. Just the way some crazed fan has to connect with some celebrity — that bizarre distant emotional connection. And that’s the way I deal with it, so in essence, I can’t answer your question the way you asked it.

You’ve said the film is not a treatise, and you don’t like to talk in abstractions, but the great tragic comedy of the movie is that the rich and the poor are equally clueless and helpless… 
Well, you know, we just talked about a Rothko that sold for $71 million dollars. Talk about abstract expressionism. The money becomes an abstraction at that point and the question that the Juliette Binoche character asks, “What is money? I don’t know what money is anymore.” I think a lot of people are saying that. When you hear of these absurd sums for these strange objects. What does it mean? Money has become disconnected from any kind of reality. It’s almost become philosophy. Money has always been technology, but now it’s becoming philosophy as well, it’s quite strange.

Do you hope this film you made provokes a pragmatic conversation that can be had from some of the ideas and themes presented in it?
Oh, I think so. We’re having one right now. That’s what you want a movie to be, you want it to be juicy. You want it to be provocative in the sense of provoking questions, concepts and ideas. So at that point, yes I think analysis and being schematic is interesting. It’s after the fact. I just have to say that’s not the way we create the movie, but after the fact, yes, art does that. It should stimulate conversation, just the same way a Rothko or a Pollock painting will provoke those kinds of conversations, even though they don’t spring like that intuitively from the artist. The fact that the movie turns out to be bizarrely timing is coincidental, but useful in a pragmatic way.

Click HERE to read more! David also mentioned the project he’s working on, uniting Viggo and Rob. Click HERE to read!

Aqui estão eles. #RobertPattinson #DavidCronenberg #Lisboa #Cosmopolis http://t.co/qnnrMkL8—
Inês Moreira Santos (@ines88) May 29, 2012

David Cronenberg e Robert Pattinson #lisbon #cosmopolis instagr.am/p/LNPv1jQ1Ku/ fb.me/Ymt7bhox—
Vogue Portugal (@VoguePortugal) May 29, 2012

David Cronenberg #lisbon #pressconference #cosmopolis instagr.am/p/LNUGmmQ1Ll/ fb.me/17eOBja4q—
Vogue Portugal (@VoguePortugal) May 29, 2012

Robert Pattinson #lisbon #pressconference #cosmopolis instagr.am/p/LNUUKzQ1Lr/ fb.me/1aWtjI5ij—
Vogue Portugal (@VoguePortugal) May 29, 2012

A few more pictures are included in the gallery.

If you’d like to watch the press conference, click HERE to view the video

Photos: Source

The Daily Beast dives right in with their article titled, The Crush for Cronenberg’s Cannes Competition Entry, ‘Cosmopolis’

Michael Haneke’s Amour may have won the Palme d’Or, but David Cronenberg’s competition entry provided plenty of intrigue: an appearance by seldom seen author Don DeLillo, a reinvented star in Robert Pattinson—and a surprisingly topical subject. Richard Porton reports from Cannes:

Before the beginning of the Cannes press conference on Friday for David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, veteran festival moderator Henri Behar warned the assembled journalists not to ask any questions about vampires or werewolves. The result of this blatant plea to refrain from barraging Robert Pattinson, the film’s star, with queries about his Twilight persona was fascinating. The tabloid press seemed distraught that they couldn’t focus on the teen heartthrob role Pattinson is known for. (When a British journalist asked Pattinson about implicit comparisons between his Twilight antics and his Cosmopolis role as a rapacious moneyman, Cronenberg assailed the question as “flawed.”) Conversely, the broadsheets appeared thrilled to ask questions of Don DeLillo, the distinguished novelist whose book provided the departure point for Cronenberg’s movie.

DeLillo’s public appearances are few and far between, and his diffident, thoughtful persona certainly was at odds with the festival’s celebrity-infatuated atmosphere. The author is known for dark fables such as Libra and Underworld that chronicle the dystopian aftermath of the 1960s, and Cosmopolis focuses on a day in the life of wealthy assets manager Eric Packer (Pattinson) as he zigzags through Manhattan in his stretch limousine. The trajectory includes encounters with various women and innumerable absurdist conversations peppered with the impenetrable jargon of high finance.

…

This is not the only sequence where Cronenberg employs large patches of DeLillo’s dialogue. Cosmopolis’s mordantly witty exchanges, which Cronenberg compares to playwright Harold Pinter’s repartee, cascade trippingly off the tongues of Pattinson, Hampshire, Sarah Gadon, Juliette Binoche, and Paul Giamatti. Some critics have complained that this dialogue-heavy film is static, theatrical, and uncinematic. But Cronenberg, who can certainly lay on the visual pyrotechnics when he feels the urge to do so, rightly believes that a restrained style is not equivalent to an absence of style and that, in any case, trenchant words can often have a more lasting impact. Celebrated early in his career for inventive low-budget horror films incorporating garish special effects, he has now pared his cinematic modus operandi down to the bone.

Click HERE to read the entire article. It’s fantastic.

Robert Pattinson, David Cronenberg and Juliette Binoche descend the famous red steps after the ‘Cosmopolis’ premiere on May 25th in Cannes. Producer, Martin Katz on the far left and author, Don DeLillo on the far right.

While in Cannes, the New York Times spoke to David Cronenberg about adapting Don DeLillo’s work into a film: “Mr. Cronenberg has taken a potentially tricky novel and worked around the problems of adaptation by merging his distinctive sensibility with the no less distinctive one of the author.”

Here is part of the interview that took place on a rooftop terrace, Saturday:

Q: I understand it was the Portuguese producer Paulo Branco who had the rights to “Cosmopolis” and contacted you. How did that come about?

A: I think it’s an interesting intuition because it’s a bit like casting. I’ve never been in the position of having to choose a director for something. But I imagine it’s a lot like choosing an actor for a role. Paulo came to Toronto with his son Juan, who had apparently told him that I was the right director for “Cosmopolis.” I knew of Paulo, but had never met him. Actually when I was the president of the jury here, we gave a prize to Manoel de Oliveira for “The Letter,” a film Paulo had produced. I’d read a lot of Don DeLillo but not that book. I read it and two days later said I would do it.

Q: What was it about DeLillo’s book that you responded to?

A: Mainly it was the dialogue. I knew from Don’s other work that his dialogue is very special, in the same way that Harold Pinter’s dialogue is unique. You can recognize it from a mile away: it’s the way Americans speak but also very stylized, in a really intriguing, hypnotic way. In some books the dialogue is literary in a way that would not translate to drama, but in this case there was something that made me think I would love to hear actors speaking it.

I also liked the structure, that it mostly took place in the limousine — I’m comfortable in cars — and in fact I moved one scene, the one with Juliette Binoche’s character, from an apartment into the limousine. The point is that he forces everyone into his environment, this airless, silent aquarium he’s created.

Q: Some people would say that DeLillo’s book isn’t obviously cinematic precisely for those reasons: the confined setting and the heightened, not exactly naturalistic dialogue. You have a track record for taking seemingly unadaptable novels and turning them into fully cinematic works. Can you say a bit about your approach to adaptation?

A: I don’t have an overall concept of cinema that’s so exact that everything has to fit – the dialogue in “A Dangerous Method” is pretty much taken from the letters of those people, so in that sense it’s not naturalistic even for their time, it’s more epistolary. The idea that I might have dialogue presented as naturalistic that is not naturalistic is kind of an exciting and provocative challenge for me.

You have to know that each adaptation will be different. What you’ve done before will not help you on the next one. I’ve said before you have to betray the book in order to be faithful to the book. You have to recognize that literature is not cinema: they both do different things well, and there are certain things they cannot do that they other one can. I’m pretty ruthless about discarding things from a book that will not work cinematically.

One the first things Don and I talked about – he had just read my script and he said, “I was wondering how you would handle Benno’s journal.” In the book the character writes a journal and it’s Chapter 3, and Don said, “The way you handled it was you left it out.” Which he did not mean as a criticism. It was totally noncinematic, and to me it would be an admission of failure to do a voiceover with somebody reading the book. However what I do give you in place of Benno’s journal is Paul Giammati [who plays the character in the film], his face, his eyes, he way he moves, that’s my swap.

Q: You seemed a bit exasperated at the press conference yesterday with some of the questions that were trying to connect Eric Packer to Robert Pattinson’s real life or his “Twilight” role.

A: It’s the British press that tends to do that — it’s this Rupert Murdoch, News of the World thing that I hate. When that question came up for Rob [about the challenges of living a public existence] I felt like I had to counterattack a bit.

This was a great Q&A. Read the rest at the NY Times HERE

The Cannes Film Festival will be wrapping up a little later today with award announcements.

LIVE TWEET! #cannes2012 / Tonight, live from the closing Ceremony, follow the award winners announcement around 7:15pm !—
Festival de Cannes (@FdC_officiel) May 27, 2012

Live stream HERE and HERE. Remember to switch your computer to GMT +1 time (Paris) to view.

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Left to right: producer Martin Katz, Sarah Gadon, Emily Hampshire, David Cronenberg, Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Don DeLillo, Paul Giamatti, producer, Paulo Branco

We only spoke to Martin to congratulate him on the successful premiere but he shared the news we’ve all been talking about. How long was the standing ovation at the conclusion of Cosmopolis? Here’s a cap from his email:

8 1/2 minutes! Congratulations to the Cosmopolis family!

You can see lots more Cannes moments by visiting Cait’s photo diary HERE.