Nearly ten years after Robert Pattinson became a household name thanks to a little film called Twilight, the actor has become a bit of an anomaly in Hollywood.

He’s carved out his own niche, realising that just because five films that he led became global blockbusters, that didn’t mean he couldn’t step away from the world of franchises and pick his own path to career happiness.

Now, working with the likes of auteurs David Cronenberg and Wernor Herzog, and up and coming directors such as Brady Corbet, Pattinson has seemingly become a man at ease with the fame, although would clearly still be happier if he could just keep on working with interesting filmmakers and not have his life and every word analysed.

When we meet him in a London hotel to discuss his new film Good Time, he’s got a freshly shaved head, which many will connect to the breaking of Twilight fans hearts – not realising they love him no matter what hair he does or doesn’t have – and is trying to sneak in a quick puff on his e-cigarette.

Caught in the act he giggles and apologises.

In Good Time, Pattinson plays Connie, a down-on-his-luck New Yorker who, after a botched bank robbery, lands his younger brother Nick, played by Ben Safdie, in prison.

What follows takes the audience on a journey through the underbelly of Queens as Connie desperately tries to break his younger brother out of jail through a series of wretched and often violent encounters with drug dealers, teenage girls, and the police.

It’s clearly a film that both the Safdie brothers and Pattinson are proud of, but five years after the end of his obligations to the Twilight franchise, and with several critically acclaimed movies on his CV, have his experiences working on set changed, and more importantly, has he stopped arguing with directors – especially those whom he has sought out?

‘You feel… it’s quite difficult to know… look, when someone is telling you what to to do and you don’t really know how to get to what you want to do then it becomes confrontation,’ he says.

‘But I think when you have more autonomy in what jobs you’re choosing… so generally I choose a director because I want to be part of their world, rather than wanting to impose my ideas on it.

‘Obviously you try and help facilitate what they want to do, but I think when I was in my early 20s, you just think it’s more about you, so you kind of… you’re trying to direct almost through your performance so then genuinely you ruffle some feathers.’

Still, don’t go thinking he’s changed completely.

‘I still definitely get in arguments with people but now I’ll back down instead of not backing down!’ he laughs.

Sat with him is Josh Safdie. It’s impossible for anyone not to know Pattinson’s name, even if it is in relation to the Twilight franchise, but was Safdie ready for the level of scrutiny that comes with hiring someone called Robert Pattinson?

‘He said this is going to be a thing, “I know you want to shoot on the street”, and I said, “don’t worry we have our ways”, and then I remember getting his hair permed and someone in the salon called the paps and then we were tracked,’ he says.

‘So I was intrigued by it, I thought that the fame was very helpful to the character because Connie is a sudden star he is the star of his own world and that’s why he’s lovable and also despicable, and that part was assuring but the pragmatic part of working with someone who people stop and stare at was worrisome.’

The cast and crew of Good Time were asked to sign NDAs and were given scripts to recall when they were asked on the street what they were filming.

But did Pattinson’s fame worry Safdie, an unknown filmmaker whose world was about to change completely?

‘I was a little worried as it was frustrating, this is what we have to deal but it just made us have to double time and work,’ he says.

He adds: ‘When you see someone who has the independence to make those decisions and actually acting on that independence, it was reassuring and exciting.

‘A lot of people don’t do that, they see the success and follow that same line and we saw in Rob a desire to go deeper, the struggle wasn’t commercial, it was artistic.’

Safdie had seen Pattinson, 32, in The Rover and Cosmopolis and says that ‘people who make and watch movies’ was noticing that Pattinson was ‘on this path and working with these legendary auteurs’.

‘There was a strict pattern’, adds Safdie of Pattinson’s career trajectory, before admitting that the idea that Pattinson then wanted to work with them was ‘a weird humbling and kind of bizarre notion’.

‘Like, “oh my God he wants to work with us, this is strange!”,’ he adds.

I’ve always wondered about an idea Pattinson has previously admitted to, that he believes he has what he calls ‘a credibility deficit’.

Now though, with Good Time leading him to potential becoming Oscar contention, does he still feel like he is lacking in validity?

‘Yes,’ he says as he giggles loudly (he giggles a lot), ‘100% but just as a human.’

Good Time is out in the UK on November 17.

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