Earlier this year, Robert Pattinson completely shed his cover-boy dashing looks to challenge himself as a dramatic actor (once again) for the thrilling and breathtakingly rewarding bank-robber crime drama Good Time. It's easily one of Pattinson's best performances, and one of the best films I have been lucky enough to see this year. But when Pattinson brought the film to the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, he told CinemaBlend about a massive and expensive scene that was cut... and it sounds insane. Pattinson tells us:
[The Safdie brothers] would cut out crazy sequences. They cut out the most expensive scene in the entire movie. I don't know if you saw the Iggy Pop video, which was... it was this whole thing. I don't know if anyone even really knows what the actual point of the movie is, but the whole point of the movie is that we are robbing the bank to buy this land in Virginia. It's like a farm. [Laughs] Which everyone misses! No one gets this. And we shot, there was a scene where I'm talking with Crystal, the young girl. I'm in the shower describing that I had this dream about being on this farm in Virginia. As I'm telling this story, there's this whole sequence that shows the dream of the farm. And it's actually this hellish, disgusting shack in the middle of nowhere. There is this demon living on it. And I slay this demon... [Laughs] Yeah, it's crazy.
If you saw Good Time, you know that a dream sequence showing Robert Pattinson's character, Connie, slaying a dragon on a dilapidated Virginia farm would fit as well as high heels would fit on a pig. Co-directors Benny and Josh Safdie craft Good Time into a gritty, grounded and real-world robbery-gone-wrong drama, where two brothers make horrible decisions after a heist they plan goes wrong. The action is limited to the dingy boroughs around New York City, and a "dream sequence" pit stop to a Virginia farm would have been surreal.
The more that we talked, though, the more Robert Pattinson explained that a detour through Connie's damaged dreamscape might have fit, if the Safdies chose to keep it. He tells us:
So much of the movie is basically just Connie's imprisonment. He has basically lost his mind. He is kind of crazy to begin with, and he's having visions. That's why, when the bank robbery is happening, no one is particularly scared or anything. It's ordained. Everything for Connie is ordained. Me and Josh would joke in the beginning that Connie is sort of a superhero. But his superpower is that he can see about 40 seconds into the future, and that's it. [Laughs] So you are constantly being able to predict things that only are a millisecond in advance.
Good Time is an exhilarating experience, but it's one that is so tightly wound, I think that a dream sequence would have deflated some of the necessary tension that came with Robert Pattinson being on the run for the duration of the film's run time. If anything, we hope that the demon-slaying scene makes its way onto the film's DVD as a deleted scene.
