New Moon Director Chris Weitz Blog: I Wanted the Fights Ugly and Unpleasant, Not Beautiful Karate
A big question for me as director of New Moon was how to appeal to both boys and girls by making the movie work not only as a romance but also as an action film. With a film like this one, you sort of know the girls are going to come, but you want to give the boys enough so that they’re not embarrassed to be seen standing on line for it. It was obvious from the script that if we wanted to appeal to boys (which is something we all wanted to do), there would have to be a bigger action component than the previous film had. I was expected to bring a certain execution to the action scenes and the CGI — which was hit or miss in the first film, Twilight — but the real issue was how to do this without overwhelming what appeals to the core demographic.
Since I’m not particularly an action-oriented director (even though I’ve done a film, The Golden Compass, in which there was a lot of action and a lot of CGI), it’s really about hiring the right people, and we ended up hiring Phil Neilson as second unit director, who was someone who also had a lot of stunt experience, and stunt coordinator J.J. Makaro, who had just come off of Wolverine. Plus, there are so many films shooting in Vancouver that you have access to a lot of genuinely good stunt and action talent.
Once we had the team, it’s not just about amping it up; it’s about capturing the flavor of action you want. There are two major action sequences in the film, the confrontation between Edward and the Voltari toward the end of the film and the action sequences with the wolves. I have a particular distaste right now for everyone suddenly learning kung fu in the movies. I’m sure you’ve seen this, where every time someone fights they suddenly know how to do sidekicks and know the correct grappling holds and all that kind of stuff. I wanted our fighting to be quite ugly and unpleasant, so that those moments, when you burst into action, feel more like a fight. The idea was for it to actually feel more like an unpleasant fight between two people that wanted to kill each other, rather than something that’s Matrix-like in its explosion into mixed martial arts. I used to box quite a lot, and I studied kung fu, and to me, when you’re talking about mixed martial arts you’re talking about the UFC and jiu jitsu and ground work. I don’t want to sound down on MMA, but that’s a lot of people shoving their heads into each other’s crotches, and that doesn’t look particularly appealing or cinematic since it’s really one guy managing to twist another guy’s elbow so much that it’s about to snap and he taps out. I was also really keen to avoid beautiful karate or kung-fu type moves. For the Volturi vs. Edward fight, we used what we have in our favor, that these vampires are supposed to move at terrific speed, so there was every reason to ramp in and out at very high speed. All of the fighting between vampires was shot at 96 frames per second, and then we could ramp speed using computers, whereas before — to geek out a little — we’d have to use something called a speed aperture control, which would adjust the iris and shutter speed and the shutter dimensions according to whatever speed at which you were shooting. This meant that all the different speeds would have to be predetermined, whereas shooting at 96 frames per second and then altering things later allows us to maintain a constant light, and to be able to manipulate the speed in whatever way we want to in postproduction. We also knew we could add in weird warping and facial distortion effects — which I think Doug Liman used in Jumper to pretty good effect. Then it was up to J.J. Makaro, with his guys, to come up with a bunch of moves and to coordinate with David Brisbin, our production designer, who is the gentlest person you could imagine and the guy who created the interior of the Volturi chamber, filling it with great stuff to break and smash into. He, David, and I took a look at stuff that we could smash up a bit, around the notion that this was going to be a fight to the death. We created some moves that build into one another — they are quick and unpleasant and painful looking. They don’t look at all like two guys doing katas with each other.
At the same time, it’s not just whether or not we can conduct the action but can we do it in such a way that it doesn’t violate the story. The story’s very much about feeling protective about your beloved, and it’s usually the case that Edward’s protecting Bella, and in this case, Edward’s getting his ass handed to him by this much, much bigger and faster guy. So this action piece is really not one that is full of back and forth and ups and downs; it’s really just Edward getting the shit kicked out of him — which, by the way, I think Rob rather enjoyed since he enjoys lending his character as much self-loathing as he can. It’s very hard to make Rob look bad, but within the constraints of what we were dealing with, he looks pretty bad at that point; he’s got dark shadows under his eyes because he’s been pining for Bella the whole time. The vampires’ skin in this story is described as having the consistency of stone — they’re cold, like marble. When we did the sound effects for the fight it all sounded like rocks smashing into one another and breaking one another. We had to be careful about the fact that we are dealing with flesh-and-blood actors, but never allowing them to show scrapes or bruises under the skin, because vampires have no blood, so when damage is done, it’s as though it’s done to stone.
You start to get into some very strange questions like, Would a vampire exhale when he gets hit, because they only pretend to breathe for humans, and so we had to come up with ways to convey the unpleasantness of this fight without using the sound effects that you would normally use in a fight like that. Scott Hecker, who did the sound effects for 300, who’s extraordinarily inventive and has great people working for him, we had him come up with an analogy for what would happen in a fight like that in terms of the sounds, and eventually it was so good that we dropped out the score music, which was very actiony score music, and let the sequence run through the effects themselves, which was very affecting, actually.
There was one particular moment where I had a back-and-forth dialectic with Stephenie Meyers, who wrote the original books, over one point where Rob’s head is smashed into the floor, and what I wanted was for the stone of the floor to break, because his head is so hard, but also for that break to ripple out into his face, which we did with CGI, of course. I worked around to a subtle version of that, and it’s a really nice moment of physical vulnerability where his face actually cracks, but he doesn’t bleed. So we came up with a different way of dealing with his vulnerability.
All through this sequence there’s always the issue of how Bella’s perceiving the fight, and that she’s always catching up to the action, because it’s so quick that she’s always a moment behind. She’s always turning to try to catch the action, and it’s very important to refer back to her reaction so we don’t become what I don’t like, which is: OK, now we stop for an action sequence. I think what can keep a girl in the audience from being turned off by it is that it really is about someone you care about being pummeled, but I think that if you could take a guy and just show him that sequence, I think he’d feel pretty good about going to the movie, too. Whether or not he’ll get scared away by the romance is another question, and who knows; we’ll see.
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xoxo
Carrie
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