MoviesOnline interview with Chris Weitz, Melissa Rosenberg, Wyck Godfrey
Posted on 09. Nov, 2009 by Amanda31 in News
MoviesOnline has an interivew with New Moon director Chris Weitz, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg and producer Wyck Godfrey to talk about their collaboration on the film. Here’s an excerpt:
Q: As I understand it in book 2, Edward disappears for most of the book and because of the popularity of his character, you needed him to be in the movie. Can you talk about how you decided to do what you did and whether you were worried your were being faithful to the book and unfaithful to it in this way was going to make people happy or not?
CW: Yeah. Well, it’s tricky. You don’t want too much Edward because then you lose the really important sense of missing him. On some level you don’t want too little because everyone loves Rob. The fortunate thing about it is reading a book which, I think, takes you about 13 to 17 hours and our film which lasts two hours, actually Rob’s not out of the movie for terribly long. I mean, I think the crucial difference between the book and the film is that when Bella hallucinates Edward’s voice she also sees him. It’s just a nice little flavoring, a little dose of Edward whenever we needed that. But I was very keen that when we presented it visually, it be as subtle as possible. And so it was kind of re-imagining the ghosting effect and trying to come up with something quite special for it. And what we did was, using green screen, we mapped Edward onto the dynamics of a candle flame, so that the way that he moves and flitters in and out is the way that a candle’s flame would behave. So it’s very subjective to Bella’s experience. And I think it’s fair to cheat in that because it’s one of the powers available to a moviemaker as opposed to a novelist. So it kind of suited the medium.
MR: It’s also true that in the book, he’s very present in her eyes, every page he’s really present, so it makes sense to have him actually appear. It was funny because as I was writing the script I kept on trying to explain what that was, and I’m not a director. I like to give the director something to leap off with, but I had no idea how to write this, other than that kind of Wayne’s World do-do-do kind of thing. So I was really grateful we had a visual stylist. I just kind of handed him the thing and said, “All right, it’s just she sees him. Go.”
WG: We also talked a lot about the overall design of the series, that we really needed Edward’s absence to allow Jacob to become a viable option for Bella. And we really had to fight that instinct to be like, “Oh my gosh, everyone loves Edward Cullen. You’ve got to figure out ways to put him in.” But the whole series doesn’t work unless he’s absent and Jacob enters into it. And I think Taylor really filled that hole amazingly well.
Check out the full interview here.
