Pattinson is an in-vogue vampire in ‘Twilight’

Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen in Twilight

It’s been two hours since Robert Pattinson landed in San Francisco. Dressed in a no-fuss pair of jeans and an opened button down short-sleeve shirt layered on top of a plain T-shirt, he’s waiting in a huge conference room at the Ritz Carlton. As he sips on some soda, two huge Twilight movie posters stand at attention in separate corners of the room. I introduce myself. He smiles a crooked smile and I smile my russet-colored crooked smile as I lay my digital recorder down on the table to document this monumental occasion.

“Is this your first time in San Francisco?” I ask.

“Yes,” he replies as he takes another sip from his soda.

“How do you like it?”

“Ummm…it’s a really nice hotel room,” he chuckles.

Pattinson is an integral cog in this reemerging vampire trend. Every couple of years, vampires are a hot commodity – not necessarily fashion, but more in pop culture. Take a look at the immortal track record: there was the Lost Boys,  Interview with a Vampire, Blade and now there’s HBO’s True Blood and, of course, the four-book Twilight series (five if you count the unpublished and unfinished Midnight Sun).

In a word, vampires are in vogue.

Even though I am Twilight fan, I am not as rabid as those deranged fans that broke noses and fainted at Stonestown Mall earlier that morning to get a wristband just to see him later that evening, but I am curious to see if he resembles the image I painted of the lovelorn vampire, Edward Cullen in my head. More than that, I am curious on whether or not he’s going to follow in the footsteps of Euro “it” boys of years past: Jude Law, Orlando Bloom and more recently, James McAvoy.

The movie hasn’t even come out yet and only the fanatical tweens of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” book series know who he is. Other non Twilight-ers may know him as “that guy who played Cedric Diggory in that one Harry Potter movie.”

But this new role for him may launch him into the star-studded stratosphere. Playing a vampire who crushes on Bella Swan (played by Kristen Stewart from “Into the Wild”), a mortal girl ridden by teenage angst, Pattinson jumped on the “Twilight” bandwagon of four books, but he didn’t finish the ride – yet.

Pattinson (left) and Stewart do some immortal flirting.

“I haven’t read the fourth one,” he says with his bloke-of-a-gentleman English accent. “I like the tension of the first three. If we shoot the second two and I know how it ends, then it would be such a different interpretation.”

Even though this is the first book in a series that caters to teenage girls, Pattinson didn’t take his role as a vampire destined for love lightly. He dove deep into the character because he thought he was an enigma in the first book, keeping a lot of secrets from Bella. That’s why he took a lot of inspiration from the character in “New Moon,” the second in the series.

“He becomes more real – especially in the second (book),” says Pattinson. “He shows how venerable he is as well. I had a lot of ideas for the character in the second book rather than the first book.”

As he runs his hands through his perfectly tousled hair, I reference the interview he did with “Entertainment Weekly” where he said he says he played Edward as a manic depressive.

“He’s not really a manic depressive – he just – he has no hope at all,” he lets out a light hearted giggle. “It makes the story great. It’s someone who has no reason to live. All he wants to do is die. He can’t kill himself because he’s too scared because he thinks he has no soul. He’s kind of trapped in this tiny little world which is pointless to live in anyway and then this girl comes and breaks everything.  He kind of feels less than zero. I don’t think I have met many people who cannot find hope in anything at all and that’s how I wanted to play him.”

He shifts around in his huge leather conference room chair and sits Indian style and ponders more about his character. As he speaks, you can definitely tell he put a lot of thought into his portrayal of Edward and of his analysis of the “Twilight” phenomenon. He admirably speaks of it as if it were a piece of poignant theater.

“With the initial teenage audience – ‘Twilight’ takes a lot of teenage life and emotion extremely seriously and in a non-ironic way,” he says. “Like with all that stuff about choosing where to sit in the lunchroom. It’s not looked at in a nostalgic way. It’s very real and very troublesome – and that’s how it is when you’re in that moment. You can’t look at that stuff cynically when you’re that age. If you ever read a 17-year-old girl’s diary – it’s the same thing. She writes pages and pages and pages of the same thing. I can relate to that. It took me a while to accept it while I was reading it, but it definitely tapped into some sort of mystery in teenage girls.”

Speaking of a 17-year-old girl’s diary, the book doesn’t exactly read like a Bronte novel. The dialogue and writing is very light and teenage girl-appropriate. I referenced the same “Entertainment Weekly” article where Kristen Stewart said she had trouble saying some of the corny lines and asked if he felt the same way.

“They are very melodramatic lines, but I always thought that they were going to end up operatic,” he admits. “If you literally translate the lyrics of opera, they are completely ridiculous. If you set it up right and think of the right way to perform it, it can have a lot of power – especially saying these blanket statements. If you analyze it right, you can make any line good – I think.”

I am ready to go on to my next question, but he keeps on with his discourse.

“The good thing about the film is that it takes away the blunt, ‘he is the most beautiful thing in the world’ descriptions. It doesn’t really have too much of that. And it’s extreme in the book. It’s almost on every page, which is kind of tough for me before my audition. I was literally wading through it.”

The interview moderator comes in and I only have about one minute left in the interview and I haven’t even gotten to my “What’s your favorite thing about being a vampire” question or his take on vampire fashion. I scan through my questions and ask him the first one that would give me a hearty answer.

“We already know girls have an attachment to this film and the books,” I ask. “But why should boys go out and see the movie?”

He pauses. He starts and stops, taking endearing moments to organize his thoughts. Then he finally says:

"If you find something you love, you start to see so many flaws in yourself and you try to push it away.  A lot of the story is about that. I think guys, when they are being honest with themselves, can relate to that. It’s one of the most romantic things about the male mentality.”

Times up. I didn’t get to ask all of my questions but I’ll survive. I shake his hand and go chat with people in the hallway about my interview.

Then, as I stood there, checking the messages on my phone, he came out of the conference room.

“Nice meeting you,” he said in his velvet voice as he floated down the hallway with his hands in his pockets; his shy, golden eyes directed at me.

“Nice meeting you too,” I said as my inner tween screamed, “OMG! I JUST MET EDWARD CULLEN!”

Published on Examiner.com Nov. 18, 2008.