At the film's press day, director Chris Weitz, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg and producer Wyck Godfrey talked about developing this next chapter in the Twilight saga phenomenon.

Q: Chris, what was your thinking behind putting together the syllabus for the cast? Why did you feel that was something you needed to do for this film?

Chris: I knew that I needed to do quite a lot of thinking, coming into the movie, because I was the new kid. All of the actors knew their characters, but what often happens with actors is that they get dropped into a war zone, into a room that they're supposed to have known all their lives, or into a scene with someone their supposed to have known all their lives, and they're not quite aware of where they are, who they're meeting, or what movie they're in.

They know that they're in New Moon, but what I really didn't want was sequel-itis, or the idea that we were just cranking out a franchise. I wanted everyone to know what sort of movie we wanted to make and what had already been discussed with Javier [Aguirresarobe], our DP, with David Brisbin, our production designer, what had gone into the script from Melissa and what kind of thinking had gone into where we were, so that it was a holistic experience rather than the somewhat brutal process that making a film can sometimes be.

Q: Was there ever any thought of trying to get your mother to make a cameo in any of your films, like possibly the grandmother in the first scene of New Moon?

Chris: How fun. I think it would have been difficult for me to say, "Mom, we'd like you to play a woman who is so old she horrifies Bella when she recognizes herself in the mirror." But, I'm glad that people still remember my mom. For all who don't know who she is, she was nominated as Best Supporting Actress for Imitation of Life. I think she's put movies behind her for good, and now she just raises me and my brother.

Q: There are a lot of hunky guy moments in this movie that the girls are going to go crazy for. Even Laurent gets to show up bare-chested. Can you guys talk about constructing those moments and then delivering them?

Melissa: I wish I could take credit for the moments of Jacob pulling off his shirt and Edward pulling off his shirt. They are in the book and it seemed unwise to leave them out.

Chris: That would be a cut that you would regret. I like to say that it's all essentially economics. You see, the Quileutes don't have a very high average income and they can't afford the t-shirts they would need, given the amount of times they turn into wolves on short notice and their clothes burst. They'd really have to go to Wal-Mart, every 10 minutes. They just go around in shorts, for that reason.

Q: Was your intention to get teenagers' hearts going?

Chris: Well, yes. I will say that the last scene, especially, is constructed that way. Melissa and I talked about it, and it's constructed in such a way that it's meant to be one of the most scream-inducing moments in recent film history, and it doesn't even involve abdominal muscles.

I think that there's this wonderful audience that appreciates what we do, wants us to do well and really wants to engage in an emotional experience. And so, to me, it made sense to be unashamed of the emotionality of the piece. There's werewolves fighting each other, vampires fighting each other, vampires fighting werewolves, and all sorts of great stuff for boys as well. But, the girls needed to be given their due, and I think we deliver.

Q: Did your work with the young cast in the American Pie days help you adapt to this film, with it also having such a young cast, in any way?

Chris: Strangely not. Not in the way that you'd expect. Even though the cast in the film is quite young, they've all been in quite a lot of stuff before, especially Kristen, whereas with American Pie, most of them were first-timers, so I didn't feel as though I had to do any hand-holding with our young actors. But, there was the fun I'd had on American Pie of casting some unknowns in the parts of the young guys who play the Quileutes, and that's lovely.

It's really great to work on a movie where you've got Michael Sheen in a scene, who is an extraordinary professional, then you've got a guy who was walking around and saw a line of people waiting for an audition and was like, "What's this?" And, they said, "It's for some movie," and he decided to stand at the end of the line. A few days later, I saw the video and said, "That guy's really funny. Let's put him in." That's terribly enjoyable as well.

Q: Melissa, how do you adapt from a book rather than your own personal experiences?

Melissa: Very carefully because it is a very beloved book. But, the objective is that you have to take the audience on the same emotional journey they had in the book. And, in order to take them on that journey, there's certain plot points you have to hit. You obviously have to have Edward breaking up with Bella. You have to have Bella discover the wolves. You have to have Edward attempting to kill himself. All those things are crucial in the book. So, you start with those scenes and then you condense and expand on some things.

Q: In the book for New Moon, Edward disappears for most of the book and, because of the popularity of his character, you needed him to be in the movie. Can you talk about how you decided to do what you did and whether you were worried about not being faithful to the book?

Chris: It's tricky. You don't want too much Edward because then you lose the really important sense of missing him. On some level, you don't want too little because everyone loves Rob. Rob's actually not out of the movie for terribly long. I think the crucial difference between the book and the film is that when Bella hallucinates Edward's voice, she also sees him. It's just a nice little flavoring.

It's a little dose of Edward, whenever we needed that. But, I was very keen that, when we presented it visually, it be as subtle as possible. And so, it was re-imagining the ghosting effect and trying to come up with something quite special for it. What we did was, using green screen, we mapped Edward onto the dynamics of a candle flame, so that the way that he moves and flitters in and out, is the way that a candle's flame would behave. It's very subjective to Bella's experience. I think it's fair to cheat in that because it's one of the powers available to a moviemaker, as opposed to a novelist. It suited the medium.

Melissa: It's also true that, in the book, he's very present in her eyes. On every page, he's really present, so it makes sense to have him actually appear. It was funny because, as I was writing the script, I kept on trying to explain what that was, and I'm not a director. I like to give the director something to leap off with, but I had no idea how to write that. So, I was really grateful we had a visual stylist. I just handed him the thing and said, "All right, she just sees him. Go."

Wyck: We also talked a lot about the overall design of the series, and that we really needed Edward's absence to allow Jacob to become a viable option for Bella. We really had to fight that instinct to be like, "Oh, my gosh, everyone loves Edward Cullen. You've got to figure out ways to put him in." But, the whole series doesn't work unless Edward is absent and Jacob enters into it. And, I think Taylor really filled that hole amazingly well.

Q: Was there really a possibility that the role of Jacob would be recast, before this movie started?

Chris: I'd say there was a big possibility that could happen, but I was always convinced that Taylor was going to be able to do it. The doubts came up because he had very few scenes in the first movie. Also, because he's described as being 6'5" in the second book, there were some reasonable facts that we had to come to grip with. But, I like the sweetness of his character, in the first movie, and I knew that it was easier to take an actor in the direction of anger and rage than it was to find someone who is a 6'5" hunk or Native American, and somehow turn him into that very sweet-natured persona that Taylor brings out so well.

Wyck: It also became less of an idea, once audiences identified with Taylor when they saw Twilight. He's in their minds. He is Jacob. So, it became less of an idea to recast, once people really identified with him. Once the movie opened, people were like, "Taylor is Jacob." It certainly helped that he had spent the last eight months really working very hard to physically adapt himself to the role.

Q: How did you approach compiling the soundtrack and bringing in more indie artists?

Chris: I owe a great deal to two things. One is the success of the first film and Catherine Hardwicke's version, which made for a soundtrack that was so successful that suddenly anyone was conceivably within our reach. And, the other person to thank is Alexandra Patsavas, our amazing music supervisor, who knows everything that's out there. She was able to bring me a basket of music that I could choose from with her.

My musical education is formed by my daily drive listening to KCRW's "The Morning Becomes Eclectic," so I am an indie guy, if anything. Mostly, I'm a square. But, suddenly there were these incredible pickings on offer, like Thom Yorke and The Killers. I genuinely think it's one of the best soundtrack albums that's ever been done. The reason I will make this outrageous claim is that it's not music that was already completed.

You're always dealing with a known quantity when you're doing needle drops. It's easy to do that. But, to be able to risk asking somebody to do a track, and four weeks later or so a song comes back, to have it work as many times as it did was really extraordinary. I think that, if any one of those artists had done a track for our soundtrack, I would have been really proud, but to have all of them is absolutely extraordinary.

Q: How did you strategize the way the wolves would transform? Were there movies you turned to for inspiration for that?

Chris: Stephenie was very explicit in not wanting it to be a Lon Chaney-esque, Howling-esque, American Werewolf in London-esque transformation, which takes a long time. That was good. Her instincts were completely correct, in terms of the movie, because what we had noticed, in making The Golden Compass, that a lot of the things that you really worry about, like how is one thing going to transform into another, are really solved by doing it very quickly.

There was some worry about how you turn a 180-pound guy into a 600-pound wolf. We had to do some early tests on how you might do that, and it became much more doable than we thought. We had Phil Tippett, who is legendary and a genius in the effects world, and I was fortunate to have both my former visual effects supervisor, Mike Fink, who won the Oscar for The Golden Compass, heading Prime Focus, one of our effects houses, and Susan MacLeod, who was our visual effects producer on The Golden Compass, working as our producer. So, I was working with people I was very, very familiar with, which sped up the R&D process measurably.

You're dealing with an industrial process which takes its own time with visual effects. It's not just about having an inspiration. You have to have the inspiration, but then you have to have the resources to actually execute the special effects. Fortunately, we were able to do all of our aesthetic development and get all of the shots out in time, but it's always down to the wire.

Q: What made you decide to use the slow-motion effect in the film?

Chris: I hate slow-mo, normally. I think Chariots of Fire is a good use of slow-mo. We have this issue of vampire speed and how quickly they move, and it was my contention borne out by some early tests that to speed up the footage actually made things look herky-jerky and a bit comical. But, to slow down footage and to be able to manipulate the speeds, which is what we can do now, was what was going to be our happy place, in terms of the vampires' speed.

You used to have to use something called a Speed Aperture Control, which would manually control the speed and shutter setting and iris of the camera. But now, you can shoot at higher frames per second and alter the ramping effect, which is the speed changes shot with computers. And so, we were constantly addressing each shot individually, in terms of what we wanted it to achieve, and then having special effects do warping time dilution and space distortion effects, on top of that.

Q: Was there ever a concern about making Jacob too appealing?

Chris: It's a balance, in terms of how he's written and how Edward's written, and how they're shot. I think that, for the die-hard Twilight fans, nothing will ever beat Edward, so you've got this very strong, simple fact that they know that he is the one, which allows you to push as hard as you possibly can to make Jacob as winning as Taylor has been able to be. That gave me a lot of latitude. We didn't have to suddenly have a scene in which Jacob acted like a creep, so that we're reminded that we needed to love Edward. It's just a love fest.

Q: Wyck, can you address the recasting of Victoria? Did Rachelle really break contract?

Wyck: 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 selling New Moon. But, the truth of the matter is that we couldn't move our schedule around to get her in the movie, and she wasn't able to back out of her other film.

Q: Chris, your grandmother was in the original Spanish language version of Dracula that was in 1932. Did you feel it was destiny to do a vampire movie?

Chris: To be honest, about a week before this was offered to me, I was saying to a friend, "Why are they making so many vampire movies? I just don't get it." I don't feel fated at all to have done this. The vampire thing isn't really what appeals to me about this series of books. It's the characters, and it's Bella, especially. It was the chance to work with these young actors, especially Kristen. She's extraordinary. So, I have actors in my lineage and I respect what they do, but the fact that they've played vampires is simply a strange coincidence.

Q: Do you get the vampire craze now?

Chris: I still don't understand why. It's a very adaptable metaphor. In the ‘80's, it could have been about AIDS. In the ‘90's, it could have been about greed. Now, it's really about the sense that the person that you fall in love with, for the first time, is something higher, unattainable and transcendent.

And, it's possibly also about sexuality, which is okay to use because the message of these films is that it's a very important thing. When Edward is thinking about whether to turn Bella into a vampire or not, he's taking the issue very seriously, the way that you might take sex seriously, or you might ask teenagers to take it seriously.

Melissa: I completely agree with that and would also add that I think it mainly comes down to writers. Not me, 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 those I mentioned, come in and reinvent and reinvigorate it, then you have a new, young audience being introduced to it. I think that's true of any genre, whether it be Western or romance.

Initially, it is a really creative writer who reinvents the mythology, and then it becomes commerce because that's successful. People start jumping on the bandwagon and it's overkill when it dies off again, until another creative person comes along and reinvents the mythology.

Q: Wyck, what are the pitfalls that you have to avoid, to continue to make this franchise successful, and how do you plan to avoid those pitfalls?

Wyck: I think the pitfalls are when 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 and the same locations, but with a different eye. I think that's very important. We got a different director for the third film. That'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 regenerate their interest by working with new people.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON opens on November 20th

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