Next Movie Any Twi-Hard knows that Bella Swan’s extravagant wedding to her handsome vampire suitor occurs in the beginning of series closer “Breaking Dawn” — chapter three, to be exact.
But according to David Slade, the director of the “Twilight Saga: Eclipse” adaptation, it might have come a little earlier on the big screen.
“We discussed a lot of the things at the script-writing stage — at one point, we were even going to shoot the wedding at the end of ["Eclipse"] but we knew there was another film coming,” Slade tells NextMovie exclusively.
“We knew that a lot of that could go into the next film. And we just made the most concise version of this story that we could.”
LA Times caught up with director David Slade, who steered the third installment of the franchise, as he reflected on his whirlwind year in the Twi-universe. After all, a year ago at this time, Slade was only a month into editing the flick.
"Finishing the film is a moment of great weight. It's not just getting it cut, it's when the final print is timed and there's nothing more to do," he said. "It was the night before we did our press junket we finished it."
Finished staring at the famous faces of Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner, that is. Slade, whose pedigree is in music videos and darker indies such as "Hard Candy," said he did his best with the "Eclipse" DVD to please the vampire saga's legions of fans.
"This is the only thing I've ever done that's had such a fan subculture, so with the deleted scenes I wanted to do a little justification for them," Slade said.
Chief among the scenes cut from the theatrical version of the film was an exchange between Stewart's Bella and her on-screen dad Charlie, played by Billy Burke.
[Spoiler alert!] The two have a bonding moment after her high school graduation, one of Bella's last mortal activities before Pattinson's Edward follows through on making her a vampire.
"It's all in Billy's face, when you watch the film 30-odd times or more, there's more in his face than in his words," Slade said. "I was so confident that was going to make it in, we did it in one shot. It was two people trying to be as close to each other as possible."
MTV David Slade talks about the DVD special six-part making-of documentary.
"I can't remember it," he admitted rather sheepishly. "I do remember having to watch it to approve it and stuff."
"All credit due to the people who made the behind-the-scenes. They were almost invisible when we were making the film. They really were exceptionally discreet. So I can't remember them ever being there," he said. "I noticed them with a camcorder every now and again. I remember grabbing a hold of it once or twice and gesturing into the camera, but other than that, I don't remember them being there. You could attribute this to old age."
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From Collider , here are some excerpts.
David on his fave scene to shoot...
"There are favorite scenes or moments, and there were things that were just predictably fun. The scene where Charlie (Billy Burke) and Bella (Kristen Stewart) have the discussion in the kitchen, which starts out as trying to explore whether she understands this need for marriage and turns into this admission of being a virgin, was genuinely fun because both actors have great comic timing. It wasn’t about going in to find the joke. The joke was there, and everything was actually a bonus. I remember that being tons of fun.
Do you feel it was a help or a hindrance with Eclipse that the cast had already been together for two previous films?
SLADE: It was a bit of both. Yes, there is something absolutely wonderful to build upon because they’ve done it before. But, the way it worked for me was that I met each actor individually and asked, quite honestly, what worked and what didn’t work, so we could excise what didn’t work and build upon what worked. And with so little time to shoot the film, and pressures of the schedule and weather, and all the rest of it, it certainly wouldn’t have been as successful, had they not been through this before.
Read the full transcript of the interview at Collider