CHRIS WEITZ FINDS THE CURE FOR ROBERT PATTINSON WITHDRAWAL
Last month at Comic Con, MTV got the opportunity to sit down with New Moon director Chris Weitz to ask some great new questions. In this new interview, Chris explains how the scenes from Comic Con fit into the film, how he balanced the need to stay true to the book and the need to focus on the stars we love, how much CGI we can expect in the film, and more:
MTV: You revealed two scenes that were a big hit at Comic-Con. How do they fit into the movie?Chris Weitz: We showed two new scenes, and each one focused on abdominal muscles. That was the high point, I think, for the audience. [Laughs.] One scene was the one in which Jacob is teaching Bella how to ride a motorcycle. She falls, he comes to rescue her and dab her forehead — thereby revealing his bodacious abs and chest. And the other is Bella rushing to save Edward when he decides to commit suicide by revealing himself to the humans in Volterra, Italy.
MTV: You’re in the unenviable position of needing to stay true to the source material but also needing to find more screen time for one of the world’s biggest movie stars. How did you go about doing that?
Weitz: [We wanted to avoid] just randomly inserting Rob throughout the movie in a back-at-the-ranch sort of way, which would just be about box office and us being worried about whether people would deal with the darkness of the second book. People are actually very ready for [the dark] aspect of it. What we basically did was to take the aural hallucinations that Bella has of Edward and turn them into visual hallucinations. But I wanted to do them very subtly — so that it wasn’t whacking you over the head with CGI — and to give you the sense that you have when you are broken up with and when you are really longing for someone. They are both not there at all and there all the time. And so, the notion that you have of someone’s presence as absence is what we’re portraying. You’ll see quite a lot of Rob in the film, but it’s seen subjectively, through Bella’s eyes. It’s also in dreams that she has of him as well. It strikes this very fine balance between too much Rob and too little Rob.
MTV: For a lot of fans, there’s no such thing.
Weitz: Well, I know for a lot of people there’s no such thing as too much Rob. But we’ve got a nice dose of Taylor to sweeten any Rob deficiencies. It is a disease that can only be treated with Vitamin T, for Taylor.
Read the full transcribed interview here.
