Exclusive Twilight Interview: New Moon Scribe on an Epic Vampire-Werewolf Battle and Writing for Rob Pattinson and Kristen Stewart

Share on Facebook posted 11-11-09 by Julina Tatlock

Team Edward and Team Jacob are squaring off this week in the run-up to the Nov. 20 release of New Moon, the second installment of the epically popular Twilight Saga. (You really have to love a franchise that takes itself so seriously it calls itself a Saga without the slightest bit of irony.) The haters joke about Twilight’s brooding, emo teenagers, but action lovers might be pleasantly surprised by the latest installment. Not only is the team behind New Moon marketing the movie with a fair amount of action this time around, but it looks like they might actually be delivering. The film goes far beyond the uninspiring vampire fight at the end of the last movie, employing instead some excellent visual effects while staging a number of tooth-and-claw battles between werewolves and vampires. Hell, there’s even some fangs-out vampire-on-vampire action.

If you doubt that the filmmakers have the sensibility to strike a balance between angsty teen romance and good old-fashioned bloodletting, consider that the writer of all three Twilight films is Melissa Rosenberg, who has served as co-executive producer on both the nighttime teen soap The O.C. and the serial-killer romp Dexter. For this reason alone, action fans have reason to hope that New Moon will be more to their liking: more clawing and less cloying. In Part 1 of our exclusive interview, Melissa tells 30 Ninjas Editor-in-Chief Julina Tatlock how and why she gave New Moon‘s action scenes more bite.

The Claws Come Out

30 NINJAS: The action in New Moon seems to have been kicked up a notch from Twilight, and New Moon seems to be being marketed as both an action film and a love-triangle romance. What discussions did you have with Summit Entertainment, [Twilight series author] Stephenie Meyer, and director Chris Weitz about taking New Moon further into the action genre?

MELISSA ROSENBERG: I don’t know if I discussed it a great deal with anyone — Chris wasn’t on board yet when I wrote New Moon. In the story breaking process it tends to just be talking to the studio, and then after I finish the outline, Stephenie [Meyer] gets involved. But for me it seemed like an obvious turn of events, as the book suggests a great deal of conflict, and in a book you can let a lot of that conflict play out off-screen, internally or in an intense conversation. But in a visual medium like film you’ve got to play it.

So, for instance, in the end of the book for the final confrontation, with Edward, Bella, and Alice going to Volterra to confront the Volturi, in the book it is fraught with tension and the danger that they may not walk out of there. What I wanted to do was to externalize that, so I turned it into an action sequence, and there’s a really great battle between Edward and a very big Volturi, Felix, played by Daniel Cudmore. Chris [Weitz] did such a good job with that, and actually, I originally wrote it as a full-out battle. It was huge — I had all the vampires involved, and I think the way that I wrote it, that sequence alone would have cost the whole entire budget of the movie. At that point Stephenie said, “I think this is a little much,” and I absolutely agreed, so it was dialed down to its core, to the core of the conflict.

30 NINJAS: Given that it was hard for the vampires to get injured, was it difficult to write the physical conflict, to give them a real sense of jeopardy?

MR: No, they certainly can get injured, certainly by other vampires, and they do have some weaknesses. If you have someone the size of Felix beating on you, I don’t care how strong a vampire you are, that’s a pretty nasty thing. And then, of course, you get these old vampires who are the oldest Volturi, and they are thousands of years old and hence considerably stronger, which is why Edward turns to them, because he wants them to kill him, initially believing Bella is dead.

Kristen and Rob: Looks That Kill

30 NINJAS: Can you think of a specific moment where, in working with or watching Rob Pattinson during the first Twilight movie, that you saw something about his performance that informed your dialogue or writing choices for his character in New Moon?

MR: Sure. When I first wrote Twilight, we didn’t even have a cast yet, so you’re kinda working in a vacuum a little bit, and I tend to write with a little more humor and a little comedy, especially dark comedy (like Dexter). But when we got Kristen and Rob in there, it was very clear that [the humor] was inappropriate; a lot of those laughs were like another movie, and not the tone of the book either. So we dialed back on some of that. Then I found, going into New Moon, that I know who Rob and Kristen are (and [Twilight director Catherine [Hardwick] has established the tone of the movies as well), so with Rob — well, with both of them actually — the fewer words they say can actually be more powerful. They don’t need long speeches; they can do so much with their faces and with looks, so that became something that for New Moon, and even more so for Eclipse [the third Twilight film, which is currently in production], that I would go through and just pull words out. I think that’s the strength of a good screenplay, not necessarily my own, but how much you can convey with the fewest words.

30 NINJAS: There are very few films that appeal to audiences as both a great action flick and a romance — Titanic is one of them. And it’s known that women are more likely to go see this kind of cross-genre movie for the love story while their men are thinking they’re there to see a special-effects-driven action film. It’s almost like they’re watching separate films.

MR: Right.

30 NINJAS: Did you have this in mind for the Twilight Saga, as it has become more and more action-oriented?

MR: No, I don’t tend to think in terms of, “What audiences am I trying to attract?” I really tend to think of what’s the best story to tell, what’s the most compelling story to tell, what aspects of the book are the most important to convey in order to take the character through the same emotional journey as in the book. If you take the audience through the same emotional journey as the book then the audience will feel that they’ve had the same ride as the book, and then specific scenes and conversations are not missed as much — I hope so, anyway. So in writing it and coming up with action sequences, it wasn’t about, “Oh, boys or guys are going to like this” or “This is going to expand our audience.” You really can’t write a book or write a movie like that, [because] then you’re pandering. You really have to write the best story and the most cinematic story.

For a specific case in one of the books, Bella hears off-screen that Harry Clearwater’s had a heart attack, and it was a very important plot of the storytelling because that’s how Edward believes that Bella’s dead because he calls and hears that Charlie’s at a funeral. So it was very important that that [beat] be in there, and it was one line in the book. So I thought, Well no one said how or why Harry had a heart attack, and Charlie’s supposed to be out there hunting wolves, and we haven’t actually seen him, and Victoria’s out there, and all this sort of confluence of a bunch of different elements came together and suggested an action sequence that I just love — Chris did such an amazing job with it.