Chris Weitz Interview: His Vision for the Volturi, Proposal & More

[Stephanie, Loves Vamps and Werewolves but Zombies scare me!!]

Talking about the proposal scene at the end of the book. Fans are worried that that might have been altered or cut out for the film. Can you address those concerns?

CW: It hasn’t been cut out, I can tell you that much. It’s not going to hit them in exactly the way they think it’s going to, but I will say that, I gotta put it: It’s gonna be quite special. I kind of saved all of my gusto for that moment. I don’t think it’ll disappoint.

The Volturi. Can you talk about your vision for this new group of characters?

CW: No matter how strange one of the characters is in a work of fantasy, I think you kind of have to approach them as people, and so you start to think, well, they’ve been around for 2,000 years. How would they live? How would they interact with one another? The conclusion really was that after 2,000 years, you would probably be more than mildly insane, no matter how cultured or gracious you appear on the surface.
I think that’s what Michael Sheen really managed to convey in portraying Aro, the head of the Volturi, which is that on the surface, he’s terribly gracious, warm, a wonderful host, and yet at the same time he’s absolutely lethal and frightening, and it’s also kind of what Dakota Fanning kind of conveys as Jane. She’s this, in appearance, very innocent-looking, harmless-looking almost kind of a teenager, but she’s absolutely deadly.

The first thing I wanted to do was to put them in a setting that wasn’t sort of Dracula’s castle. Because I feel that’s been done, there have been so many vampire movies and werewolf movies and horror movies where everything is dreary and dark and everything is blue or green, and instead for their headquarters to be surprisingly light and crisp, and then the characters that they play have kind of a tactile reality to them, in spite of how kind of bizarre their situation is. And the whole point is not to leave kind of Forks, Wash. where everything has been very realistic, and then suddenly go to a location that completely throws you out of the movie.

So that’s kind of a difficult balance to achieve. And the set, although it’s huge and grand and magnificent, actually kind of feels like a real place. One always has the option in these kinds of situations of shooting everything in green screen and adding the set later, and I’ve done that before, but in this case, it felt really important to actually build something that surrounded the characters, that they could interact with and that had a real sense of existing in in actual space.

There’s a lot of fan speculation about what the Volturi will actually look like, and from what we’ve read and seen, they’re really off the mark. Will we see the Volturi in any of the upcoming trailers or publicity stills, or will that be top secret until the movie is released?

CW: I think they’ll be some publicity stills coming out about them eventually. I’m not sure whether they’ll be in the trailers or not. I think, essentially, our aim was to make them look like what it says they look like in the book and not to be too fancy about it. It was very important to [Stephenie:] that the werewolves transform very quickly and that they look like wolves, that we not have this kind of magical Lon Cheney-esque long transformation, and I think the reason behind that is to make sense of their reality. And I think that that was important to the Volturi as well. That they’re not levitating above the ground. They’re not surrounded by mystical auras, they are creatures who actually exist, and they’re very specific, they’re very stylish, they’re very elegant, they’re very dangerous. But essentially, it’s fairly faithful to the book.

[Stephanie, Loves Vamps and Werewolves but Zombies scare me!!]

Here's a link to the whole article...it's really good!!

http://www.hollywood.com/content/feat...

[[deleted user]]

I love Chris's idea that they're slightly "insane" under their facadé, because they lived for so long, and that's genius! I was always interested in Marcus's character, him being bored and all and how that made sense, the insanity brings to light other things.

I'm also really glad they're not using so much green screen, no matter how technology goes, there is no substitute for the real thing. And the light crisp colors makes sense, and is faithful to the book...Although I was kind of hoping their quarters would be a little traditional, I see the Volturi as ancients in power, so it would have been nice to see them living like ancients.