Few actors, over the course of their careers, have treated the humble interview question with less respect than Robert Pattinson, a man whose response to basically any journalistic query seems to be driven entirely by what would amuse him the most in the moment. So we do have to take it with at least a grain of salt when Pattinson recently declared that one film stands tall as the defining film of the entire 2000s decade that he broke into mainstream superstardom during: Michael Bay’s 2007 Transformers.
This is per A24 and Letterboxd’s The List show, which Pattinson was appearing on with his Primetime director Lance Oppenheim. Who finds himself in the somewhat unlikely position of being the straight man in the conversation, rattling off several fairly natural movies (Network, Natural Born Killers, Ace In The Hole, and several others) that served as the inspiration for his To Catch A Predator drama, while Pattinson nodded along and watched him with a grin that bordered on impish, if not outright gremlin-esque. (After Oppenheim declared that Tom Cruise’s Vanilla Sky was a film so important to him that he claims to know whether he’ll get along with a person solely based on whether they like it, Pattinson gave a long pause, before acknowledging “I kinda like it!”)
Even after praising Transformers for its “super-bright saturated colors and kind of really glossy stuff”—which seems to be him making a genuine case for the aesthetic as a defining aspect of 2000s-era film—Pattinson continues to throw curveballs. For instance: If you are on a text chain with Robert Pattinson, expect to get a lot of Braveheart. Oppenheim: “The amount of times I have a text message from Rob being like ‘Braveheart. Think Braveheart.’ And me trying to decipher what he meant by it… I think I would run out of fingers if I tried to count it.”
It’s not like Pattinson only likes populist action flicks—he cites One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and A Clockwork Orange as being incredibly meaningful to his own progression as an actor. But he clearly has a taste for those primary color pleasures, even as he ends the interview by happily blowing off Oppenheim’s attempts to get him to pitch a double-feature for 2011’s Limitless, which feels like it’d be right in his Megatron-adoring wheelhouse.
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