For our latest Film Comment Free Talk, Claire Denis and Robert Pattinson joined FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold to discuss their singular new High Life. The film, in theaters now, features a cast including Pattinson and Juliette Binoche as a group of death row inmates set adrift in space as part of an intergalactic science experiment. 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 her lead actor discuss working together to bring High Life to the screen, Denis’s remarkable eye for physicality, encountering the taboo, considerations of genre, and much more.

For more on High Life and Denis, listen to our recent podcast on the filmmaker and her work, and check out a photo gallery of the conversation here.