A Twilight Kiss

Photo from Twifans.com

Hitfix interviewed New Moon director Chris Weitz and his vision for the Volturi

Q: There is a lot of fan speculation about what the Volturi will actually look like and from what I’ve read or seen from photoshop manipulations people have done, they are really off the mark. Curious, will we see the Volturi in any of the upcoming trailer or publicity stills or is that secret until the movie comes out?

I think there will be some publicity stills about them coming out eventually and I’m not sure whether they will be in the trailers or not. I think essentially our aim was to make them look like what they look like in the book and not to be too fancy. They are not levitating off the ground, they are not surrounded by mystical auroras, they are creatures that actually exist and they are very specific. They are very stylish, they are very elegant, they are very dangerous, but essentially it’s very faithful to the book.

Q: Can you tell us about your vision for the Volturi?

No matter how strange one of the characters is in a work of fantasy, I think you have to approach them as people and then so you start to think, ‘Oh they’ve been around for 2,000 years. How would they interact with one another?’ The conclusion was that after 2,000 years you’d probably be more than mildly insane. No matter how cultured or gracious you appear on the surface.

And I think that’s what Michael Sheen managed to portray in portraying Aro, the head of the Volturi, in that on the surface he’s terribly gracious, warm, a wonderful host and at the same time he’s absolutely lethal and frightening.

It’s also what Dakota [Fanning] conveys as Jane. She’s sort of this in appearance innocent looking, harmless looking almost teenager, but she’s absolutely deadly.

The first thing I wanted to do was put them in a setting that wasn’t Dracula’s castle. I feel like that’s been done. There have been so many vampire movies and werewolf movies and horror movies where everything has been dark and dreary and everything is blue or green or something like that. Instead, their headquarters is surprisingly light and crisp. And the characters that they play have a kind of a tactile reality to them in spite of how bizarre their situation is really.

The whole point is not to leave kind of Forks, Washington where everything has really been quite realistic and then suddenly go to a location that completely throws you out of the movie. So, that’s the 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 kind of situations of shooting everything in green screen and adding everything later. 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 had a real sense of existing in a real space.

Thanks to robert-pattinson.co.uk for the Hitfix interview heads up and link.

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