Robert Pattinson clearly wants to break free of the Twilight vampire romance circuit, regardless of its popularity and so he'll shortly make his debut as a sex-mad billionaire in director David Cronenberg's new film Cosmopolis.

Twihards may be surprised to learn the new film will depict Pattinson nude on-screen during a prostate exam that becomes a sex scene.

Cosmopolis is based on Don DeLillo's novel set in a dystopian New York during the fall of capitalism. It's exactly the sort of intellectual exercise that will contrast with his Twilight turns, playing a romantic vampire stalker.

'There's nothing else like Cannes. I was kind of hoping I'd get a movie here maybe in 10 years' time,' Pattinson said in a joint interview with Cronenberg, according to the Huffington Post.

'It's amazing, it was literally one of the happiest phone calls of my life when my agent called up to say we got in. The script is obscure, it's quite an odd film. I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen with it.'

Pattinson, 26, appears in every scene in Cosmopolis, playing a Wall Street financial whizz  who must watch his empire crumble over the course of one day, whilst he has sexual encounters with three women, one of whom watches him get a prostate check-up.

'I did get a little bit worried about the prostate scene before, but mainly because you said I was going to be completely naked,' Pattinson said.

'Five minutes before I was like, 'I don't know if I can do that'. I think you said you were going to shoot it between my legs. That was the one time I was a little bit panicky.'

The film includes the famous DeLillo line about fame and fortune: 'A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable,' a fact that Pattinson says he acutely aware of.

'The last 10 years I can really see it just with the Internet. There's like this ravenous need for information but it gets stagnant so quickly, within seconds,' he said.

'And because it moves so quickly it doesn't really mean anything so there's no way to control it. A couple of years ago I was thinking if I kind of manipulate the wave of this, maybe I can control my image and the way people see me.

'It's absolutely impossible. People's attention span is so small. I think you almost have to be really old fashioned to have any hope of sustainability.'

The early reviews for Cosmopolis have not been stellar. With the Huffington Post critic writing: 'Characters soliloquize endlessly about the value of things, art, money, time, vanity, age, sex and greed. But where this adaptation suffers is in the theatrical manner in which it is presented.

'Characters exist merely as a means to convey ideas, taking, it feels, almost directly from the book. From Juliette Binoche's nymphomaniac art dealer to scene-stealer Paul Giamatti's obsessive stalker, they all serve as a conduit for concepts. Sarah Gadon (who also starred in his Brandon Cronenberg's Un Certain Regard film Antiviral) plays Parker's wife Elise with a similarly detached quality as Pattinson and is one of the few characters to have any kind of real arc.'

'Cosmopolis is a challenging film brimming with ideas so big that it can barely contain them all.'

Ouch!

Here's the trailer for "Cosmopolis":