Claire Denis and Robert Pattinson

For our latest Film Comment Free Talk, Claire Denis and Robert Pattinson joined FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold to discuss their singular new film High Life, which graces the cover of Film Comment’s March-April issue. In his feature on the film, Nick Pinkerton writes that, “While High Life is the biggest and most expensive movie that Denis has ever made, it gives little indication of its scale having been bartered for at the sacrifice of freedom—or with the stymieing of the go-with-the-gut intuition that has produced a sui generis body of work, created with enormous craft but a total disdain for the rules of the ‘well-made’ film, elliptical in approach and full of jarring tonal shifts.” In this conversation, the filmmaker and actor discuss working together to bring High Life to the screen, as well as Denis’s remarkable eye for physicality, encountering the taboo, considerations of genre, and much more.