THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON - Visual Hollywood

The Twilight Saga: New MoonProduction Noteswere supposed to film it. I have to say, I almost nicked a couple buildings!”The Twilight Saga: New Moon marks the first appearance of the Volturi, the closest the vampire worldhas to royalty and a major force in the future of the saga. Centuries old and unimaginably powerful, theyserve as lawmakers and enforcers for the community. The leader of the group is Aro, played by MichaelSheen. Sheen is no stranger to this world, having played a werewolf enslaved by the vampires in theUnderworld series. But Sheen says there was another on the set who embodied both vampire andwerewolf.“Chris Weitz looks like a cross between a vampire and a werewolf to me,” says the actor. ‘He’s got thechiseled look of a vampire, and yet he is buff like a werewolf, so he was like a great mythologicalcreature going around the set. “Sheen developed a distinct vocalization for Aro, higher pitched and more precise than his normalspeaking voice. Weitz notes that his intonation perhaps arose from their early talks about the character.“Essentially, the character is 2,000 years old,” says Weitz. “English is not his first language, so he mightspeak it in a calculated way. He is incredibly gracious and endearing, but also extraordinarily dangerous.”In fact, Sheen says, he unconsciously channeled the scary, psychedelic, music-hating, color-sapping BlueMeanies of Yellow Submarine fame when voicing Aro. “There was a moment where I suddenly thought,‘Oh, I sound a little bit like the Blue Meanies,’” he says. “I found them really disturbing when I was a kid,so I thought that was a good thing.”While all the Volturi are formidable, perhaps the most fearsome is Jane, a sweet-faced, innocent-lookingvampire who can—and does—inflict pain merely by willing it. She is played by Dakota Fanning.“I’ve never really gotten to play a bad guy before, but in this one, I play a bad girl —or vampire—and itwas really fun,” Fanning says. “Plus, I was a really big fan of the books, I read all four of them in about aweek, so it was thrilling to be asked to be a part of the film.”Part of that fun came from the physical transformation. “I got to wear red contact lenses, which werecool and changed the whole look of everything, literally,” she says. “And the white make-up—I thought Iwas pale before, but now I realize, by comparison to a vampire, I’m actually quite tan.”Kristen Stewart, who had met Fanning before her involvement with the film, says, “Dakota is straight-upscary and mean as Jane. She’s one of the most impressive people and actors I’ve ever met. She’s reallygot a presence that you just don’t mess with. And you wouldn’t expect that, because she’s a little girl.She’s one of the best young actresses around, and I’m excited that I got to work with her.”The Wolf PackThe Cullens are a family; the Volturi are a completely different kind of family—and then there are thewerewolves, who Chris Weitz describes as more of a fraternity. “Not in the sense of like Alpha OmegaChi,” says the director. “They are a band of brothers whose job it is to protect their land and their tribeand even the people around them who don’t necessarily understand what they’re doing.”8