Twilight Fansites Breaking Daw:n Part 2 Interview with Bill Condon (Part 1)

Bill Condon Edit Bay Q&A—Part 1

Back in June, many Twilight fansites had the opportunity to visit the Breaking Dawn edit bay. While they were there, they got to see the editing process for Breaking Dawn—Part 2 and interview director Bill Condon. This is part 1 of the interview ...part two will be coming at 12:00 PM EST tomorrow (Wednesday).

After seeing the same footage that fans saw roughly three weeks later at Comic Con, Bill Condon addressed a room filled with Twilight site operators.

Laura (Lexicon): I don’t know, I guess I’ll dive in. The teaser (the first one) came out today and I think we all probably played that like 3 million times, not that there is anything wrong with that. And one of the things I really liked is you saw glimpses of alternative points of view…

Bill: Right

Laura (Lexicon): Can you talk a little bit about how did you those; maybe that’s a collaboration between you, Melissa Rosenberg, and Stephenie Meyer, to decide which are the alternative points of view, and how much fun was that to film something that is not in the book, other than saying we traveled some place and came back. Like how much fun was that, to go to that space?

Bill: Ya, I know, exactly like, for example; The Denali’s right? In the book they come, and it just felt like,  to get our lead characters on the road together, in 3 different areas, was like an important thing just for the scope of the movie. I think you’ll see. You get a glimpse of it from the size of the main title. With this movie, it’s all about scope in a weird way, and it’s all about like, canvasing the world for all these vampires. So, that actually was, in very early days we made that decision to do that, It’s a challenge because, we introduce, I think it’s 23 new vampires, right? And, we do it in the second act, and by the 3^rd act they’re on the battlefield and you have to get to know them very quickly. Actually it was great fun for the actors. Cause they all realized that they only had a moment or two, where they had to land what it was that they did. So it was part of what drew me to it. That it is a completely new part of Twilight that is getting introduced in this movie.

Laura (Lexicon): Any one of those alternate point of view your favorite or is that like picking between your kids?

Bill: Yeah, it is. Definitely.

(Everyone Laughs)

Kallie: Well, I’ll go next. You mention the 23 new characters. I mean, that is profound to me. We were talking about it at breakfast, that that’s just a huge number of people to be working with on one set. We saw a glimpse of it in the trailer. Of all of them lined up together.

Bill: Yeah, Yeah

Kallie: How was that as a director? I mean it’s kind of a feat to tackle that many characters.

Bill: It was like, putting on a play. You know, we did something that you never do in movies. As you know from the book its 100 pages of the book. Its 25 pages in the script. Taking precious time with the crew standing around. We took a day and I staged it like a play, and we did the entire 25 pages. And we just like, beat by beat by beat we had the actors. So that it was just  like staging a musical number almost. You know, cause you’ll see it. In order to make that feel like it has life. It doesn’t get monotonous to be there.  I don’t think it does you know, it’s part of like really making sure that you are doing very different things through all that, section of the movie. But it was good.

Andrew: And do they equal amount of screen time? Like how was that balanced out?

Bill: No. Um, you know some of them have more. The Denali’s are more prominent, I would say. Garrett is more prominent. The Irish people are more, you know, jolly Irish people.

(Everyone Laughs)

Bill: Some of them, you know, I think that you couldn’t do that honestly. Some of them were there to kind of fill out the sense of being across the world. But I have to say each of the actors again, even they, had their moments. They had little things that made them kind of pop.

Kaleb: How close is what we just saw here to the finished version without adding CGI and things like that?

Bill: Right, it’s the cut. So, the cut is done. [Note: the footage in the first clip was identical to what was shown at Comic Con]But the big thing is, it’s all Bella, you know, whatever little Spider Monkey thing is there, won’t be there yet. All those things, when she gets on the rock for example, she, the whole point of it is that she just finds a…she creates her own hold by basically, pushing through the rock[referencing the scene where Kristen Stewart scales the rock to get at the climber and was reacting to non-existent falling debris]. So that’s going have a lot of debris, a lot of stuff as she’s going, going down. She’s creating all this stuff so that all these elements aren’t in there yet. But the cut is the cut.

Jack M: Laura was nervous over dinner last night that it was going to be like last year’s edit bay visit where you got the opening Volturi scene, and …

Bill: Oh, and then it goes away

Greg: You guys were responsible for that (jokes)

Bill: That’s right.........

Read the full interview at BellaandEdward.com