Buzz on Eclipse

Can't wait for the DVD, due out on Saturday (I never heard why they didn't release it on a Tuesday, as is typical for DVDs), so I can watch the deleted scenes and the Making Of video.

Apparently David Slade (the director) is making the media rounds right now for the DVD release. I haven't seen any of the interviews, but excerpts are posted on the TwilightMoms website. Here's some of the most interesting tidbits (IMO):

1. "We had a very tight schedule so there wasn’t much time to be too sympathetic, to be honest,” Slade said. “We had to go. We had to shoot. We had shoot after shoot after shoot. We had a 50-day schedule which isn’t normally what you have for a film of this scale."

“So we just had to crack on,” he continued. “If anything, there wasn’t time to go, ‘How are you feeling today? Are you all right? What’s going on?”

They were so busy that Slade says he never even had the chance to get to know Pattinson, Stewart and the rest of the cast too well. “All the time we spent together was working,” he said. “We never hung out and had a beer. We were rehearsing. If we weren’t rehearsing, we were shooting. If we weren’t rehearsing or shooting, we were sleeping.”

[I wonder why the schedule was so tight. It can't have been because of money concerns. Maybe it had something do with the availability of all the actors.]

2. "Stephenie [Meyer] was there all the time, so even if it wasn’t clear in the novel, she would always have such a clear picture of this world and this universe, and she can answer any question. You could ask her a year apart and it will be the same answer she gives you, every time."

3.  Slade was pleased his cast was taking the whole project seriously and sincerely.  Everyone was committed, he says.“Kristen, in particular, was very tough on herself.”  Slade says because Stewart didn’t pull from her own life and her own person to play Bella Swan, she found it personally demanding to find Bella’s truth.  “She would say, ‘I don’t know who Bella is to me.’ In a lot of ways, I think she felt Bella was the antithesis to her, which presented a lot of challenges for Kristen. . . . She would beat herself up about it, because she wants to be there. She never wants to leave a scene undone. “There were tears,” says Slade. “But you move on and you keep going. . . . Even in rehearsals with Rob (Pattinson), there was a similar spiralling that would happen.”

[I shouldn't be surprised that KS is so neurotic, but I think some people would be amused that it's the 3rd movie and she's having a breakdown about how to portray this character . . .]
4. Q: Why don’t we see all the deleted scenes described in the commentaries on the DVD? Stewart describes the first thing she shot on the movie — a “fairly ridiculous” sequence in which she imagined herself in the fireside flashback as the Quileute elder chief’s third wife, who stabbed and sacrificed herself to distract the vengeful female vampire attacking the village. Meyer and Godfrey describe people laughing when they saw it. Understandable that they would choose not to include it. Ditto the scene Bella imagined after her kiss with Jacob on the mountain. She saw them having grown old together. “There were a lot of issues with prosthetic makeup,” Slade says with a groan, then a laugh. “It gives me a bit of a shiver, as a filmmaker. As an idea, it was wonderful. What happens with a film is it becomes organic and it grows, and it tells you what it wants, and it was screaming loudly, ‘I don’t want that!’ to me.” Another scene described in the commentaries never actually got shot. “Stephenie really wanted to see Edward as a young man again, and we had this vision scripted for awhile where Bella and he are together in Victorian times, as a kind of reverie,” Slade says.

[I just wanted to see the two little dark-haired children that Bella imagines in the book. That wouldn't have required any cheesy makeup. . . This is part of an interview in EW - I haven't seen it yet, so maybe the next issue.]

5. “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. 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.”

[Personally, I would have liked to see less of the Seattle vampires and more of these kind of scenes!]