At this year's Comic-Con, The Twilight Saga: New Moon director Chris Weitz was a man of many words - words which laid out what would be small, trivial details for most but which for Twilight fans are of urgent and paramount importance.
LG: It's an uncanny sound. I think only teenage girls can make that sound.
That high, keening noise.
It's like Beatlemania.
That's the only thing I can think of, the Beatles. You see old footage of that type of thing. It happened in Montepulciano, when we were shooting there. It was like The Birds, but with young girls. You'd turn a corner and there would be one or two or three. And the next time you looked there would be 10, 20, 50, 100.
Then before you know it gas stations are exploding.
Exactly. I think basically the panel today would have worked perfectly for the fans if it had just been us sitting there, and they could just look at Rob and Taylor. Maybe Rob and Taylor would move a little.
Taylor seems the most comfortable with this level of scrutiny. He doesn't squirm as much.
It's funny. In a way he's the least prepared for the intense scrutiny, but he's very balanced about it. Whereas I think Rob and Kristen are very sheepish about it. Not that they don't appreciate it. But they're thrown a bit by it.
I think there's a balance possible. I do want to make it my own, and I'm not really interesting in tweaking the world in the digital intermediate so that it gets this kind of blue gloss which the first movie had. I'm much more interested in having a fuller palate, and a richer palate. And we're able to shoot some scenes in sunlight, eventually, which is really kind of nice. And to shoot interior scenes that have a kind of rounded glow to them, like the Volturi ... bad-guy headquarters, for want of a better term.
Is it weird to be a guy directing Twilight? Since it's a franchise that's considered more for … the ladies?
I think at first it was odd for the fans when I came on board. There was a question of whether I was going to kind of try to bring some amped up macho mentality … I wouldn't even know how to do that. I think I'm pretty fem. I have a lot of estrogen.
At first Stephenie was a bit surprised that I had been brought out as a first choice. But we met and chatted and it all worked really well.
Is she going to have a cameo in this movie?
She's not. But now I feel bad about it -- as though I intended not to. But I had kind of forgotten that she had a cameo in the first one, and she never asked, she's very quiet and gracious about it. I don't know if she wanted to or not. I probably should have.
Taylor's very much like the character, tremendously sunny and upbeat. And Kristen is very protective of Taylor, actually. He's 17 now, and Kristen's been working since Panic Room if not before that. She wanted to make sure Taylor was protected from the world, and that works perfectly with the dynamic of the book.
read the full interview here
