Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book in author Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series of vampire novels, was far and away the most controversial. Bella, played by Kristen Stewart in the films, is no longer the shy teen with a vampire crush but a young woman dealing with some serious adult issues. [SPOILER ALERT!]
Bella marries her vampire love Edward (Robert Pattinson) in a lavish ceremony—shattering the love triangle between them and werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), and the two embark on their honeymoon in Brazil where they—gasp!—finally have sex. In the book, however, the sex scene simply fades to black, and Bella wakes up to find bruises on her body, ripped pillowcases, and a broken headboard. Bella then discovers she’s pregnant with a vampire baby, and spends a long time struggling through a torturous pregnancy. She’s determined, however, to deliver the baby at any cost—even her own life. In the book, the birth scene is particularly gruesome, as Edward rips open Bella’s stomach with his teeth. And then, when Renesmee—yes, that’s the baby’s name—is delivered, Jacob “imprints” on her, falling in love with her at first sight. In a review of the book, The Washington Post wrote, “Breaking Dawn has a childbirth sequence that may promote lifelong abstinence in sensitive types. And it becomes downright surreal when the lovelorn lycanthrope Jacob gets romantically imprinted on Bella’s newborn daughter, Renesmee...Reader, I hurled.”
In its opening weekend, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1, grossed a whopping $139.5 million in North America—one of the biggest opening weekends of all time. The director of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1, Bill Condon (Dreamgirls), and the screenwriter of all the Twilight films, Melissa Rosenberg (Showtime’s Dexter), explain how they created the film’s key moments—the wedding, the sex scene, the bloody birth scene, “imprinting” on a baby, and why they don’t believe the film has the “pro-life” message many critics say it does.
SPOILER ALERT: If you don’t want to learn crucial plot points about Breaking Dawn, Part 1, stop reading now or forever hold your peace.
Condon: Because it’s filled with touchstones in this woman’s life—a wedding, a honeymoon night, a pregnancy, a birth scene, and then a death and transformation scene, those are all huge markers in this story, so it felt like a heightened approach seemed right. It needed to have a sweep and not be too ultra-realistic in the approach.
Rosenberg: Stephenie took a very dramatic turn with her storytelling in this book, which was controversial in some ways. This is a very grown-up, adult story. It’s about a marriage and having children. It’s a far cry from the teenage new girl’s first day in school. Then, with Bill Condon coming onboard, I worked very closely with him, and what attracted him to the fourth one was that it’s very much a character drama about examining the complexities of marriage and having a child. He was very interested in the internal workings and peeling back the layers.
Condon: But you’ve got to have humor in these movies just because that’s the thing that makes you feel you can connect to it. Whether it’s the first time you have sex or cringe-worthy wedding toasts, those make you relate to it. With the self-referential thing [like in Eclipse], I thought it was cool in that movie but I think if you push that too far, it can become not corrupted, but not innocent anymore.
Filming a Real-Life Couple (Pattinson and Stewart)
Condon: It was entirely a relief. I can’t imagine doing those scenes with two people who don’t like each other. But did I have to adjust the way they make love to each other? No, it was really good.
Rosenberg: I created the sex scene and then Bill let the actors go, and I don’t think Rob and Kris needed any help with how to perform. [Laughs.]
The Wedding Scene
Rosenberg: For me, what was great about the wedding was that in the book, it’s so dreamy for Bella and she doesn’t actually go into specifics about what actually goes on in this wedding, so I got to fill that out a little bit by adding the wedding toasts, which was fun.
--thedailybeast.com
~Robstenfan
0 comments:
Post a Comment