BoxOffice® Pro - November 2011

BIG PICTURE > THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN—PART I
WEDDING OF THE CENTURY
VAMPIRES MAGGIE GRACE, ELIZABETH REASER, MYANNA BURING, CASEY LABOW HAVE LIVED LONG ENOUGH TO KNOW A GOOD BASH WHEN
THEY SEE ONE
and putting on helmets where she’d do the
face when we had smaller bodies. It was
complicated for me because I’d never done
it before, and she just took to it all naturally.
Very complicated technical stuff. In some
early scenes, you’d have a 4-year-old girl—
that’s how big Renesmee was meant to be at
that point—walking through the scene and
doing the action. And then she would put
on this helmet and have to move in a similar
way. And she could do it effortlessly—she’s
really rather remarkable.
I heard that when you shot scenes on
the streets of Brazil, you needed a wall
of men with guns just to protect the set.
What was it like to work under so much
secrecy?
You know what? I liked it because I always
find one of the more distracting things about
making movies is that so many people show
up to visit. Imagine people showing up at
your office at work and standing there with
their arms folded watching you. It just gets
to be distracting. But we didn’t have any of
that. It was too hard for people to make even
casual visits. It helped you to focus on just
getting the job done.
Is there a scene in the film that just had
that magical click where everything was
working right and you thought, “This is
why I took this job.”
I felt that the wedding was really magic. Once
we made that decision that it was going to be
told from inside Bella’s head, walking down
the aisle and her just being so nervous until
she sees Edward—he’s just the point of light
that she’s going to go toward—telling it that
way and revealing the dress slowly. We were
at a beautiful location. It was cold and wet
and all that, but it didn’t matter. There was
something very magical about it and the sun
came out at the right moment. It felt like the
real thing.
These are two young kids—well, at least
in Bella’s case since she’s not undead—
who as I was talking about with Kristen
have been thought of as these naive
Romeo and Juliet types who are now
making this big commitment.
It’s true, only they don’t die. Well, they do die
for a little bit. I felt the Romeo and Juliet vibe
in the first film, but now there are different
forces at work that bring people against
them. It’s not so much do with their love
anymore. There’s a real sense of resolution in
the beginning of the movie that the love has
finally forced its way past all those hurdles.
You feel the difficulty of getting down an
aisle, how much it took and how much
willpower from Bella got her there, and I
think that gets supported a lot through the
movie. She’s a great character and, my god,
there are so many unbelievable touchstone
experiences that this character goes through
in this movie. Marriage and honeymoon
and pregnancy and childbirth and death. It’s
amazing.
I heard that there was some talking of
making Breaking Dawn Part II in 3D?
We considered it early on. The only reason
I was thinking about it for a while was the
Bella point of view thing. We are now seeing
the world through the eyes of a vampire.
That was a creative reason that it might have
made sense, but because we shot the movies
at the same time and in the morning, she’d
be pregnant, and in the afternoon, she’d be a
vampire, it just became too unwieldy of an
idea.
Where do you go from here now that
you’ve directed the last two installments
of one of the biggest teen franchises ever?
I can safely say someplace smaller.
60 BOXOFFICE PRO NOVEMBER 2011