It was inevitable that Chris Weitz should be picked to direct the second installment of the "Twilight" saga, “New Moon” -- his grandmother starred with Bela Lugosi in the 1931 vampire classic, “Dracula.”
“American Pie” marked an auspicious directorial debut for Weitz back in 1999, followed by “About a Boy” and the ill-fated “The Golden Compass." The latter, a poorly received adaptation of the beloved book by Philip Pullman, failed at the box office. The debacle is widely considered responsible, in part, for Warner Brothers’ acquisition of New Line in 2008 and which Weitz says the studio basically took out of his hands.
Now Weitz is back with what is sure to be one of the hottest movies of the season, “New Moon.” Here, he talks about losing control of “The Golden Compass” and taking the "Twilight" reins from Catherine Hardwicke.
Coming off “The Golden Compass,” how did you find yourself in such an enviable position with ‘New Moon’?
My friend Eric Feig works at Summit, and when things didn’t work out with Catherine Hardwicke, I think I was the first person that he came to me not because of my background in vampires but because of my background in CGI, in directing young actors and also in adapting novels.
Did you have to audition?
There’s always the "Are they crazy?" meeting. You’ve essentially agreed to do something, and then they meet with you just to see if you’re going to start barking while sitting at the table. So I passed that test. Crucially, Stephenie Meyer had approval over the director of the film. So I spoke to her about the book and about scripts and she asked a bunch of questions about why I was doing it and if I felt that I could tell this story in spite of the fact that I was a man.
What about the issue with Taylor Lautner? He was in, he was out ...
He was never out, but there was some doubt because in the second book, Jake is supposed to be 6-foot-5 -- and Taylor isn’t. In the first movie, we only saw the sweet-natured side of him, but I thought, "I can take this guy and go to the angrier places that he needs to go to."
Where were the doubts coming from, Meyer? The producers? The entire team?
I don’t want to point fingers, but I think that Stephenie, the studio, the producers, didn’t know if the guy who they’d seen in “Twilight” was the guy who was going to be Jacob in the second movie simply because it wasn’t there for them on screen. But the fans, too, actually wanted him. I think that they would have been very upset if we changed Jacob. And he was willing to show, not only the determination to kind of rebuild his entire body, but to go to those emotional places that he had to.
How much did “The Golden Compass” prepare you for this?
It gave me a grounding in the process of CGI -- which is a very specific one -- and doing that on a large scale.
