Wyck Godfrey: "I think the pitfalls are that if people feel like the characters and story aren't progressing and aren't surprising them along the way. Catherine set an amazing foundation and a very distinct style to Twilight that brought people to the movie. One of the choices that Summit and we made was to bring in a director with a different visual style who could approach the same characters, the same locations, but with a different eye. I think that's very important. We, you know, got a different director for the third film. So it's been one of the ways we've tackled that. I also think bringing in new, creative people on every film allows the actors and the writer to kind of regenerate their interest by working with new people."
Could you address the recasting of Victoria? There was some back and forth when that was announced. Rachel Lefevre said her peace online. Did she really break contract with you guys?
Wyck Godfrey: "It was simply because she wasn't available at the time we were set to make the movie. We found out a little bit too late, in terms of her schedule difficulty, that we couldn't change our schedule. We had a release date for this movie and we had to complete photography by the time we needed to get sort of selling New Moon. So ultimately that's not ultimately what we're here to talk about is New Moon, but the truth of the matter is we couldn't move our schedule around to get her in the movie."
Why are they making so many vampire movies? Do you get it now?
Chris Weitz: "I still don't understand why. I mean I think I usually end up mumbling something about it being a very adaptable metaphor. In the '80s, it could be about AIDS. In the '90s, it could be about greed. I think now really about the sense that the person that you fall in love with for the first time is something other than you, something higher, something unattainable, transcendent. And also possibly about – I'm going to use this word – sexuality, which is okay to use because really the message of these films is that it's a very important thing. And these are actually quite sort of traditional in their values. And so when Edward is thinking about whether to turn Bella into a vampire or not, he's taking this issue very seriously, the way that you might take sex seriously – or you might ask teenagers to take it seriously."
Melissa Rosenberg: "I completely agree with everything you said and would add also I think really it mainly comes down to writers. Not this writer, but Stephenie. And before her you had television with Joss Whedon. Before Joss it was Anne Rice. When you have this familiar genre but you have a writer like these ladies, and Joss, come in and reinvent it and reinvigorate it, then you have a new young audience being introduced to it. And I think that's true of any genre, whether it be Western or romance. And so initially it is a really creative writer who reinvents the mythology and then it becomes commerce because that's successful. And then people start jumping on the bandwagon and it's sort of overkill when it dies off again, until another creative person comes along and reinvents the mythology. This is why we had so many Westerns at one point."
