Aug 24 2009 6:50 AM EDT

'New Moon' Director Finds The Cure For Robert Pattinson Withdrawal'We've got a nice dose of Taylor [Lautner] to sweeten any Rob deficiencies,' Chris Weitz tells MTV News.
By Larry Carroll

SAN DIEGO — It's hard to imagine a fall movie we're more excited to see than "New Moon," the feverishly anticipated sequel to last year's "Twilight" and, technically, the prequel to next year's "Eclipse." You know the players, you know the plot details, and you've watched the trailers a few hundred times.

Now, with a mere 13 weeks (!) until we can finally watch the Bella/Edward/Jacob love triangle get even pointier, director Chris Weitz sat down with MTV News for an exclusive chat about his "New Moon" rising.



MTV: You revealed two scenes that were a big hit at Comic-Con. How do they fit into the movie?

Chris Weitz: We showed two new scenes, and each one focused on abdominal muscles. That was the high point, I think, for the audience. [Laughs.] One scene was the one in which Jacob is teaching Bella how to ride a motorcycle. She falls, he comes to rescue her and dab her forehead — thereby revealing his bodacious abs and chest. And the other is Bella rushing to save Edward when he decides to commit suicide by revealing himself to the humans in Volterra, Italy.

MTV: You're in the unenviable position of needing to stay true to the source material but also needing to find more screen time for one of the world's biggest movie stars. How did you go about doing that?

Weitz: [We wanted to avoid] just randomly inserting Rob throughout the movie in a back-at-the-ranch sort of way, which would just be about box office and us being worried about whether people would deal with the darkness of the second book. People are actually very ready for [the dark] aspect of it. What we basically did was to take the aural hallucinations that Bella has of Edward and turn them into visual hallucinations. But I wanted to do them very subtly — so that it wasn't whacking you over the head with CGI — and to give you the sense that you have when you are broken up with and when you are really longing for someone. They are both not there at all and there all the time. And so, the notion that you have of someone's presence as absence is what we're portraying. You'll see quite a lot of Rob in the film, but it's seen subjectively, through Bella's eyes. It's also in dreams that she has of him as well. It strikes this very fine balance between too much Rob and too little Rob.

MTV: For a lot of fans, there's no such thing.

Weitz: Well, I know for a lot of people there's no such thing as too much Rob. But we've got a nice dose of Taylor to sweeten any Rob deficiencies. It is a disease that can only be treated with Vitamin T, for Taylor.





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MTV: Obviously, "New Moon" is written from the perspective of Bella. But Melissa Rosenberg recently told us about a scene with Victoria that gets away from Kristen's point of view. Are there other moments like that?

Weitz: It's from Bella's point of view ... but, for instance, when Alice has a vision of Edward about to commit suicide, we see her vision. To me, that's fair — because, in the book, Alice conveys that immediately to Bella, and you can see Bella imagining what Alice is saying. At points where a reader of the book might logically imagine a scenario, it was OK for the filmmakers — me — to imagine seeing something that would be outside of Bella's knowledge at that point. Or something that's within the scope of her imagination. She fears the worst, really, in terms of Edward.

MTV: Kristen has spoken to us in the past about the pivotal cliff-diving scene. How much CGI will there be, and how much will really be her?

Weitz: It's a hybrid — a reallocation of mapping the texture of real locations onto green screen and creating computer models of real locations. We needed to create just the right kind of stormy weather, so there's a lot of CG water and waves, which we combined with pool work that we did with Kristen. And so, eventually, it looks like a scene with a real location, but in order to get the kind of pinpoint control that you want to accurately represent what's in the book, you need to employ the very best that you can in terms of CGI. People should never notice when that's happening — except when I just gave it away. [Laughs.]