21 Qs With 'New Moon' Director Chris Weitz
Chris Weitz is the, um, male director with the epic task of bringing the achingly romantic New Moon to the big screen. He explains how — plus, his thoughts on taking on the fourth installment, Breaking Dawn.
What was your interest in coming on board a franchise like this, that has predominantly been more popular with women than with men?
Chris Weitz: Actually, in that regard, my brother and I often end up doing movies whose predominant audience is either women or whose kind of tipping point of success relies on a female audience. Even American Pie.
In as much as the Twilight series has a global appeal to women, I think it reflects that it really concentrates on the emotions of the central character and romance. And I think that’s something unfortunately that the studio system has not been very good at getting boys to be interested in. They think, maybe correctly, that all the male gender is interested in is things blowing up, and robots and that sort of stuff. I don’t really think that’s true. I certainly didn’t make this movie with an eye towards only girls or women being interested in seeing it. There’s a lot for diverse audiences, including older audiences.
But really, frankly, I was drawn to the cast and I thought that the central cast was great, and I wanted to work with them. And it also sort of employed some skills I had picked up along the way, including working with special effects, working with younger actors and working on kind of emotionally-centered stories.
Twilight, as you said, is very emotional, and of course, it’s got a lot of CG elements and action elements. Would you say that you’re in a comfort zone? Is this familiar ground for you? Obviously your early work was very character-driven.
CW: I’m never really in a comfort zone making a movie. I’m in a discomfort zone, because you’re always kind of working under pressurized circumstances because you don’t have an unlimited amount of time or money to do these things, but there were a number of things I was quite familiar with, and familiar enough so that I could do what I think is really important, which is not to foreground the special effects or the action elements, but to make those settle into the story. You never really want someone to watch a movie and say, "Wow, those were great special effects." You hope that they don’t notice the majority of what you’re actually doing.
Obviously, people are going to notice horse-sized wolves and realize on some level that they’re special effects, but they’re photo-realistic and they should be as expressive as a good actor if possible. So in terms of kind of wrangling that sort of process, yeah, it is something that I’m used to.
When we were on set and talked to the producer, he was like, "Yeah, we’re still working on some of the designs for the Wolf Pack," then I think it was two weeks or three weeks later we saw the first trailer and that great shot [of the wolf] at the end. Is this the quickest you’ve ever worked?
CW: It is. I myself was surprised that Phil Tippett’s company was able to turn out that wolf shot. And I think they kind of did that as a matter of institutional pride that they could. Even that shot that was in the trailer has gone through 20, 30 iterations since then, but they have done a really extraordinary job. Phil Tippett is a complete genius. He was responsible for the walkers in Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, and he’s kind of one of the legends of the visual effects community. And it has been really amazing what they’ve been able to do on very short notice.
We’re working on kind of breakneck speed, at the same time as really trying to achieve something quite elegant as well. And it’s not just Tippett, it’s also Frantic Studios as well, which is headed up by Mike Fink, who is my old friend who was the visual effects supervisor on Golden Compass, which won the Oscar the year that it came out. So, yeah, we’re working very fast, but we’re also trying to work as beautifully as possible to make the effects kind of settle into the really amazing cinematography that Javier Aguirresarobe brought us. We’re kind of moving at light speed, but still trying to deliver something that’s very elegant and beautiful.
KEEP READING: Making Face Punch, and settling (on) the score!