I’ve added new high quality tv stills of Robert Pattinson on “The Jimmy Kimmel Show” on April 21, 2011.

GALLERY LINK:

• (x005) The Jimmy Kimmel Show: Stills – April 21, 2011 [HQ]

There are lions and tigers, and then there is Robert Pattinson’s very own “Bear.”

Sipping on coffee with milk on a sunny morning at the Four Seasons, Pattinson describes attempts to housebreak the “German shepherdy-mix” he recently adopted from a shelter in Louisiana. “He’s called Bear,” Pattinson says matter-of-factly.

“I was trying to potty-train him to go on the balcony of the hotel room,” he says. “It was so windy in Vancouver, the door slammed in his face, and I was just like, nooo.” He sighs: Before Bear was adopted, the pup was found in a trash can outside a bar and has since almost had a run-in with a wolf and a seagull in Vancouver. “He’s got a door phobia anyway.”

Clad in a plaid button-down and jeans, and minus screaming fans, paparazzi, managers and studio minders, Pattinson lets go of his shyness in the time it takes to recap an “unbearably irritating” game of Words With Friends. It’s only in front of a video camera later that he noticeably shrinks, adopting a hunch that matches his quick-to-draw sheepish grin. But one-on-one, conversation spins like cotton candy as Pattinson, 24, discusses hanging up his trademark vampire fangs for the 1930s-set Big Top world of Water for Elephants, a movie he calls “definitely bigger” than any other he has done outside the Twilight franchise.

In Water for Elephants, which hits theaters Friday and is based on the best-selling book by Sara Gruen, Pattinson plays Jacob, a veterinary student who abandons his studies and jumps aboard a steam train for the Benzini Bros. roughshod circus. Jacob quickly falls for star performer Marlena (Reese Witherspoon), who is trapped in a marriage with the circus owner (Christoph Waltz).

Blame it all on the selling power of an gentle giant named Tai.

Cowboys and trains

Director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend) banked on Pattinson’s love of animals to sell him on the script.

“The first time I met (Lawrence), we went to meet Tai the elephant at her house,” says Pattinson of the 42-year-old elephant who plays lumbering Rosie, the Benzini Bros. main act. Tai showed off tricks the studio originally thought could be accomplished only by a computer-generated elephant.

Charmed, Pattinson read the script on the ride back. Plus, “I always wanted to do something in the ’30s in America,” he says. “It’s kind of my idea of what America really is, that period, kind of the best time to be in America. You’re still kind of a cowboy, but there’s this huge energy. The future was being created then.”

The love triangle complete, Pattinson, Witherspoon and Waltz headed for Piru, Calif., where the desert set was bursting with circus tents, steam trains, hundreds of extras, spangled costumes, circus performers and animals. “There was something about the ruggedness of it, which I hadn’t really done,” Pattinson says.

Lawrence saw immediate chemistry between Pattinson and Witherspoon. “I think he’s never been quite as charming as he’s been in this,” he says. “I think he feels like a real leading man.”

The film put a newly clean-cut Pattinson in the center ring with two Academy Award winners (Witherspoon for 2005′s Walk the Line and Waltz for 2009′s Inglourius Basterds) and a coterie of more than 600 animals. “I’m sure Rob had some insecurities coming up into scenes against Christoph and Reese, but he never showed it,” Lawrence says. “I think he watched and learned and listened.”

And there were distractions. Witherspoon, who occasionally brought her kids to the zoolike set, laughs as she talks about Tai following Pattinson “sort of like man’s best friend — even though she’s 9,000 pounds.” Pattinson recounts “insane” days, including one when the script finds Waltz taunting Pattinson to hand-feed a hungry lion. Pattinson opens the cage, and the lion pounces.

“We did the first take, and sure enough, the lion just ripped the (prosthetic) arm in and wouldn’t give it back,” Pattinson says. “He didn’t even care about the meat. He just wanted to eat the fake arm. I was absolutely terrified.”

“Both Rob and Christoph coined the term ‘no acting required’ in the lion scenes,” Lawrence adds with a chuckle. “You didn’t have to pretend to be afraid when you were around the lion.”

Scarier still was the scene where Pattinson is knocked down by a stallion. “That was terrifying,” says the actor, who admits to a fear of horses.

In Elephants, Pattinson’s name receives equal billing with Witherspoon and Waltz, a nod to his international success with filmgoers.

Yet this is not the first time Pattinson has worked with Witherspoon; seven years (and a pop-culture lifetime) ago, Pattinson was an unknown fresh from the U.K. who scored a role as Witherspoon’s, uh, son in 2004′s Vanity Fair. His role ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Pattinson acknowledges how far he has come. “It’s such a different world, for me especially,” he says. “Then, I literally got (the role) by accident. I got an agent. A week later, I got that job.”

“He was very young, like 17 or 18,” says Witherspoon, who describes him today as “very quiet and introverted” and uninterested in fame.

As The Twilight Saga comes to a close with the two-part feature Breaking Dawn (based on the last book in the Stephenie Meyer series), the question looms as to whether the public is willing to pay to see Pattinson play anyone besides vampire Edward Cullen.

Lawrence acknowledges that the majority of the country knows Pattinson as Edward. “He definitely has more to offer than just what he does in that role,” he says. But “when you head up a big franchise like that, that becomes so popular and the characters become kind of iconic … it’s tricky to break out of that.”

Especially as those films continue to make money. The Twilight films, including New Moon and Eclipse, have made more than $1.8 billion worldwide. In his months off, Pattinson began to expand his résumé, first with last year’s romantic drama Remember Me.

Elephants “is arguably a better vehicle for Robert Pattinson than Remember Me was, which was arguably a box-office flop,” making roughly $19 million in the USA, says Box Office Mojo analyst Brandon Gray. (Eclipse made more than $300 million in the USA.) “This will be a good test of Robert Pattinson’s bankability.”

The actor is not immune to the criticism. “I always see these things like, ‘Can he act or not?,’ ” he says. “It’s like, I’m nothing like Edward. What do you think I’m doing in that?” He dissolves into laughter, gesturing with this hands. “So (when a new role arises), everyone’s like ‘It’s very different.’ ”

‘Breaking Dawn,’ breaking out

He just wrapped Breaking Dawn‘s final chapter. “It’s completely nuts,” he says. “There are some days on set just watching you go, ‘How is this going to be PG-13?’ ” He laughs. “The whole first movie is like a straight-up horror film.”

Summit Entertainment is releasing Breaking Dawn, Part 1 this November, but Part 2 will not be released until November 2012. Meaning, no matter what other projects Pattinson takes on, the fandom and furor that surround the franchise are Pattinson’s to keep until roughly early 2013.

Would he do a franchise again? “Only if I could have a lot of say in the development of it,” he replies, noting the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” creative mentality of the series.

The spotlight is just as hotly focused on Pattinson’s relationship with girlfriend andTwilight series co-star Kristen Stewart, 21. “I try my best to avoid it happening by never being seen or not saying anything stupid in interviews, but it doesn’t seem to matter,” he says of the rumors and headlines about them.

But his Elephants co-star says his life is more normal than it looks. “He’s very much a 24-year-old guy who has a girlfriend and is enjoying himself and his friends,” Witherspoon says.

It’s hard to convince the fans of that: When paparazzi caught Pattinson kissing Stewart last week after the Elephants premiere, the blogosphere exploded.

“I just don’t like it,” Pattinson says; the rabid attention has forced him to unload his L.A. home and instead live out of hotels. “That’s not part of my job. It’s embarrassing, people using your life as entertainment.

“If people are already using your life as entertainment and they get their fill in magazines, they’re never going to see your movies.”

Aside from answering an interviewer’s question, he vents only to his parents. “They always think I’m completely depressed because I don’t really say it to anyone else. So they always think (being famous) is the most miserable experience in the world. They’re funny. Whenever I sort of complain about it, they go, ‘Well, just quit. What are you talking about, if you hate it so much?’ ”

Cue his explosively hot career.

“You’ve just got to remember why you’re doing it in the first place — which is quite hard sometimes,” he says, chatting about his next projects, Cosmopolis with Paul Giamatti, “a departure from everything I’ve done,” and period piece Bel Ami, which has no release date set.

And so the circus, aided by a bit of technology, must go on.

“The only time I ever follow Twitter is if I’m in a restaurant or something, just before I leave, to see if people are waiting outside. It does make you a bit of a loser, especially when someone asks you, ‘Hey, you want to go to dinner at this place?’ and I’m like, ‘Can we have dinner at this (other) place? It has three exits.’ ”

Source: USA Today

I’ve added a new clip from “Water For Elephants” movie where the scene took place in the train.

Sara Gruen’s 2006 bestseller about forbidden love in the heated atmosphere of a Depression-era circus seemed a natural for the screen. And director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend) and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King) keep it carefully tended. So do its three stars. It’s good to see Robert Pattinson, Twilight’s pale vampire prince, with color in his cheeks in the role of Jacob Jankowski, a Cornell student in veterinary medicine about to take his final exams when his parents die in a car crash. Jacob hits the road in penniless desperation, hopping a train that belongs to the Benzini Bros. traveling circus and finding a life among the freaks, sideshows, trapeze artists and gorgeous animal flesh.

Peter Travers reviews Water for Elephants in his weekly video series, “At the Movies With Peter Travers”

Of course, there’s also a babe. She’s Marlena (Reese Witherspoon in bombshell mode), a spangled beauty atop the horses she strides in the ring. Hard luck for Jacob that Marlena is married to August Rosenbluth (another “Bingo!” for Christoph Waltz), a ringmaster with a sadistic streak when it comes to animals and people who won’t heel to his command. August is brutal on Rosie, the 9,000-pound elephant who becomes the show’s (and the film’s) star attraction, and Marlena when her eyes lock too hungrily on Jacob. Even nonreaders of the book can figure out what happens next. It’s all in the telling. Gruen provided grit and pungent detail. The movie settles for gloss. Pattinson and Witherspoon smolder under the golden gaze of Rodrigo Prieto’s camera. But the story cries out for harsh glare, sexual torment, the acrid smell of sawdust and sweat. That’s why the film’s most memorable presence is Rosie. She’s not faking it, not for a minute.

Source: Rolling Stone

“Water for Elephants” gives off an air of self-satisfaction, and you can see why. What film wouldn’t be pleased with having a No. 1 bestseller as source material, an unapologetically picturesque world for its setting and major players such as Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson and a superb Christoph Waltz as its stars. What’s not to like?

There is quite a bit to enjoy in a film that certainly qualifies as broad-based popular entertainment. But because the ingredients are so promising, there hangs over this serviceable project the wish that it had turned out better still. Director Francis Lawrence, who works in music videos as well as features, has an unmistakable gift for bravura spectacle, but the absence of convincing romantic chemistry means that the emotional connection that should be this film’s birthright is not really there.

That spectacle comes courtesy of the 1931 Benzini Bros. circus setting of Sara Gruen’s epic romance about a man, a woman and a 9,000-pound elephant. The Benzini troupe bills itself grandly, but the reality, as one of Gruen’s characters says, is that “it’s probably not even the fiftieth most spectacular show on earth.”

No matter. In the hands of veteran production designer Jack Fisk and his team, costume designer Jacqueline West and master cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, that tarnished, bawdy milieu, including the raising of a massive circus tent that could seat 800, is brought to impressive and detailed life. The romance of the carnival is strong in this film, and it’s not too much to say that it’s the element viewers will come away remembering most.

There’s something endearingly old-fashioned about a love story involving a beautiful bareback rider and a kid who runs off to join the circus. What makes “Water for Elephants” more intriguing is a third character, reminding us why Christoph Waltz deserved his supporting actor Oscar for “Inglourious Basterds” (2009). He plays the circus owner, who is married to the bareback rider and keeps her and everyone else in his iron grip.

The story, based on the best-seller by Sara Gruen, is told as a flashback by an old man named Jacob (Hal Holbrook), who lost his parents in 1931, dropped out of Cornell University’s veterinary school, hit the road and hopped a train that happened, wouldn’t you know, to be a circus train. Played by Robert Pattinson as a youth, he is naive and excited, and his eyes fill with wonder as he sees the beautiful Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) on her white show horse. The owner August (Waltz) is prepared to throw him off the train until he learns young Jacob knows something about veterinary medicine.

In an extravagant gamble worthy of the fictional Benzini Brothers Circus itself, Fox gives Sara Gruen’s grassroots bestseller “Water for Elephants” the glossy, big-budget treatment fans crave, counting on adult women — plus a younger female contingent keen on seeing “Twilight” heartthrob Robert Pattinson paired with sweet-as-pie Reese Witherspoon — to prop up a production with a cost apparently on par with a small tentpole. Unlike the story’s colorful gang of roustabouts, who dismiss ticket buyers as “rubes,” the filmmakers clearly value their public, crafting a splendid period swooner that delivers classic romance and an indelible insider’s view of 1930s circus life.

A present-day prologue finds nursing-home escapee Jacob Jankowski (played with endearing mock surliness by Hal Holbrook) reminiscing about his tenure under the big top. Taken in by a young circus worker (Paul Schneider) and then encouraged to share his story, Jacob proceeds to explain how a family tragedy on the eve of vet-school exams spared the would-be Cornell grad a predictable life, and led to his hitching a ride with the Benzini Brothers’ traveling show instead.

Here’s the interview of Robert Pattinson with “LA Times” for Water For Elephants.

Pattinson took a moment for a brief phone interview before he was needed on the set of a night shoot for the vampire mega-hit. He seemed downright exhausted. “I’m just arriving at set, thinking I’m going to work all night,” he said. “I’m kinda losing my mind.”

Question: Sorry to hear you’re so exhausted. Can you tell us what your time was like on “Elephants,” with Reese Witherspoon?

Pattinson: It’s easily one of the best experiences I’ve had making a film and it’s by far one of the best experiences in my life. It didn’t even feel like work and a lot of that had to do with Reese. She makes an effort to make it like that. I think she believes that it’s really important to enjoy your work, especially when you have to be there for so many hours every day. I made a great friend out of it.

Question: How did working with the animals impact the environment?

Pattinson: When you have totally unpredictable elements, and there are dangerous elements in every single scene, everyone is in the same boat. If you’re trying to herd up a pack of horses, it doesn’t matter who you are. There is manure everywhere and everyone was filthy all the time. It was an egalitarian set because of that. It’s quite inspiring to be around [the elephant]. It doesn’t really matter what your taste is, everyone is going to like being around an elephant. It’s not like being around another actor some people may not like.

Question: Reese mentioned that she found the paparazzi attention on you unlike anything she’s seen before. What do you think?

Pattinson: She’s trying to sound humble about all this but she’s in all these magazines every week. It’s a circus outside her marriage. Plus, I always see her [in them] buying her sandwiches and going to yoga…. I guess she’s kind of accepted it in a lot of ways…. It’s just a strange situation to be in if you’re a sane person to have that kind of attention put on you.

Source: LA Times

I’ve updated two new UK tv spot clips, “Cosmic Love”, of Robert Pattinson in “Water For Elephants” movie.

Mark Povinelli (Kinko) talks about working with Robert saying that –  ”He totally delivers”.

How was it working with Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon as costars?
I didn’t know a lot of Rob’s stuff, but I was aware of him. I’d seen the Harry Potter movies but I hadn’t seen any of Twilight films. He was a name to me, and not really somebody I could closely identify with. When I went in to work with him, I was like ‘who is this guy?’ When I started to understand the Rob fascination, it turns out that Rob is a really down to earth, sweet, kind of silly, very bright young man. That was the thing that surprised me the most. I thought of him as a Tiger Beat, Teen Beat matinee idol, when actually in this film he’s a leading man. He’s a rugged leading man with still a sweet boyish face that can really carry a film. He carries two hours of this epic story on his back and I think he carries it off beautifully. One of the charming things about Rob is that when we’re not filming, often times he’s off reading a book and he’s very well read. He understood so much about the depression era in America, so much about circuses. He would reference old movies and old pictures he’d seen and done research on. He’s not just ‘what movie am I doing next?’, he really dives into a role and I think he’s an actor. He does his work and research and he comes prepared.

People are saying this is Rob’s real breakout role. It would be great to see ‘Academy-award winning actor’ before his name as well.
I think at some point it’s going to be there, whether it’s for this or not, he’s got the chops to be able to be that guy at some point. It’s a matter of when, not if. The thing about this film, is that Rob is this film, in the sense that it is completely told from his characters prospective. He’s in every shot of every scene and knowing that, we knew that he was going to make or break this film. I really do, honestly, think he makes it. He looks fantastic, to no ones surprised, but he carries himself and is so committed to the character. He’s on screen with Reese and Christoph and he absolutely holds his own and totally delivers. Everyone has this big question of can he do this, and he’s got this big target on his forehead. He can, and he did.

Source: Reel Movie News