What was your favorite scene to film?
CW: There were a lot of fun scenes to film, frankly. I really did enjoy the scenes in the Volturi headquarters, although it’s a tremendous logistical headache. In a way, it’s the scenes that you dread the most, because they are so time-consuming and you have to get it just right, which is like the stuff in the Volturi headquarters, or the stuff that was shot in Montepulciano. I suppose that has to be my favorite scene, because it’s kind of the highpoint of the movie, when Bella goes to try to stop Edward from killing himself.
We had 1,000 extras in this medieval town square in a hill town in Tuscany in the most beautiful country on Earth. It’s just such an extraordinary opportunity to get to work there, and it was also kind of surreal because every Twilight fan who could make it from all over continental Europe and further had gotten by hook or by crook to Montepulciano and booked a hotel room, sometimes at the very hotel at which the cast and crew were staying. And so there was this kind of weird Beatle-mania sort of thing going on in this small, beautiful hill town, and so for five days it was kind of this bizarre festival atmosphere. And it really wasn’t bothersome at all. It was incredibly gratifying that all these people would applaud after every single take. Whether or not we had screwed it up. They had no idea because they weren’t close enough to hear, but if you look down any alley down which the camera wasn’t pointing, you’d see hundreds of these young girls who’d come to kind of just touch a piece of what they really loved.
Talking about the proposal scene at the end of the book. Fans are worried that that might have been altered or cut out for the film. Can you address those concerns?
CW: It hasn’t been cut out, I can tell you that much. It’s not going to hit them in exactly the way they think it’s going to, but I will say that, I gotta put it: It’s gonna be quite special. I kind of saved all of my gusto for that moment. I don’t think it’ll disappoint.
The Volturi. Can you talk about your vision for this new group of characters?
CW: No matter how strange one of the characters is in a work of fantasy, I think you kind of have to approach them as people, and so you start to think, well, they’ve been around for 2,000 years. How would they live? How would they interact with one another? The conclusion really was that after 2,000 years, you would probably be more than mildly insane, no matter how cultured or gracious you appear on the surface.
I think that’s what Michael Sheen really managed to convey in portraying Aro, the head of the Volturi, which is that on the surface, he’s terribly gracious, warm, a wonderful host, and yet at the same time he’s absolutely lethal and frightening, and it’s also kind of what Dakota Fanning kind of conveys as Jane. She’s this, in appearance, very innocent-looking, harmless-looking almost kind of a teenager, but she’s absolutely deadly.
The first thing I wanted to do was to put them in a setting that wasn’t sort of Dracula’s castle. Because I feel that’s been done, there have been so many vampire movies and werewolf movies and horror movies where everything is dreary and dark and everything is blue or green, and instead for their headquarters to be surprisingly light and crisp, and then the characters that they play have kind of a tactile reality to them, in spite of how kind of bizarre their situation is. And the whole point is not to leave kind of Forks, Wash. where everything has been very realistic, and then suddenly go to a location that completely throws you out of the movie.
So that’s kind of a difficult balance to achieve. And the set, although it’s huge and grand and magnificent, actually kind of feels like a real place. One always has the option in these kinds of situations of shooting everything in green screen and adding the set later, and I’ve done that before, but in this case, it felt really important to actually build something that surrounded the characters, that they could interact with and that had a real sense of existing in in actual space.
