Good Time Director Josh Safdie admits he nearly didn’t reply to Robert Pattinson’s email: ‘It was very mysterious and mystical’

Director Josh Safdie almost missed the opportunity to work with A-lister Robert Pattinson after he initially ignored his email saying he was desperate to work together.

The acclaimed indie filmmaker said that he was approached by the Twilight actor after he stumbled across his work, but wasn’t convinced that the star was “right” for the project he was working on at the time.

Luckily for them both, Safdie and his filmmaking partner Ben, decided to reply and created a role for Pattinson in another film, the now critically-acclaimed Good Time, which is already being tipped for an Oscar.

“Rob reached out to us. He said he saw a film still and said ‘Something in it makes me feel like I’m tied to your purpose and our purposes are now intertwined,’” Safdie told the Standard.

“It was very mysterious and mystical. He was very forthcoming and said that we should work together but was very polite too.

“I thought, well he’s not right for the movie I’m working on, I’m not going to answer this email.

"I didn’t at first and then the producer was like, ‘Write him back, this guy is doing really cool shit right now’. I respected him, so I wrote him back.”

The Safdie brothers worked with Pattinson to create the role of bank robber Connie Nikas, which was, in part, created out of the actor’s own personality traits.

They took “the mania inside of him that people don’t know about” and “the relentless ambition inside of him that also most people don’t know about” to add into the role.

“The weird man on the run vibe that he has, he’s always trying to be hidden and not seen like a guy on that run, and we wanted to bring that to Connie,” he said.

“I had to develop this character to kind of trick my mind into thinking it wasn’t Robert Pattinson.”

Safdie, whose feature films include Heaven Knows What and Daddy Longlegs, admitted that he hadn’t even seen Pattinson in the globally-successful Twilight franchise.

“I didn’t know him from that stuff so he wasn’t that person to me,” he said.

The crime drama follows a man who attempts to raise enough money to bail his younger brother out of prison in just one evening.

Having received a six-minute standing ovation when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, Pattinson’s performance has been dubbed career-defining.

“It’s a propulsive movie. We knew from the very beginning that we wanted this movie to be a bullet in that you don’t have any time to stop and think and understand morally what’s happening,” said Safdie.

Good Time is out in UK cinemas today.