‘Grandest climax I've ever directed'

'Breaking Dawn' director Bill Condon talks about the film and how the climax of the film is better than all the other films of the franchise

After months of anticipation, the first look of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn-Part 2 is finally out. The first look poster for film features the lead characters - Edward (Robert Pattison), Bella(Kristen Stewart) and Jacob (Taylor Lautner). Based on the best selling novel by Stephanie Meyers, this is the grand finale of the saga. The movie centers on Bella and her new transformation as a vampire, along with her and Edward's  half-vampire, half-human child, Renesmee (played by Mackenzie Foy). After the birth of Renesmee, the Cullens gather other vampire clans in order to protect the child from a false allegation that puts the family in front of the ruling class known as the Volturi. Director Bill Condon tells us why he reduced the run-time for this film by an hour.

Excerpts from the interview:

After the success of the previous three parts of the Twilight series, is there too much pressure to live up to the audience’s expectation?
I am positive that it will be huge success and will fair equal if not more compared to the previous three parts. In fact the whole crew is excited to see the response we get from the audience and more so from the people who have read the book and come to watch the movie. We just can’t wait for the movie to release.

There has been a lot of speculation about the continuity of the series since the story was divided into two parts. Will it affect the film?
There is a quandary faced by the studio executives over the years about the continuity of the series. It is one of the most successful movie franchises that have run out of books to adapt, however this may not be an obstacle for the Twilight films. The movie is expected to gross $700m-plus worldwide in revenues. It’s hard to imagine a movie that does $700m-plus doesn’t have ongoing value. We are contemplating about continuing the series even though there are no books to adapt to.

 What stage of the post-production process are you in?
We're at the stage of mixing and doing color timing and adding that last big bunch of visual effects shots, and that's where it gets complicated because the [most challenging] ones always come in last, so it's just making sure that they look as good as they can, that's the big thing right now.

What difficult was it to shoot the battle scenes?
It was fun, just because of the surprise they pulled off, we went to the top, top, top as far as you can get in this arena to get the widest shot of the (battle) field with the Volturi on one side and the Cullen group on the other and on the last take suddenly you hear the Eurythmics and they all start to do this intimately choreographed dance that they'd worked out. It was a huge day and the biggest party ever.

 How easy was it to direct Mackenzie Foy who plays Renesmee?
She's adorable. There are some visual power scenes but a lot of that is done through Carter Burwell's score, but then just recently in the mixing Dane Davis, who is a brilliant sound designer( he did ‘The Matrix’ and many other movies) had her just speak and read poetry and things like that, and he's turned it into hundreds of tracks. You don't actually hear words but it becomes the chattering of her [voice], it's a very abstract effect that I've never heard before. It's really cool.

In the last stages of mixing and production, is there something that during filming you liked but have come to love in seeing onscreen?
There's a lot of that. I would say the whole climax, I feel like it's the biggest musical number I've ever directed. It does feel, when you finally get the rhythm of that right, it makes it, I hope, very satisfying.

 How about the running time? Is that official yet?
Yeah. The first cut of Breaking Dawn – Part 2 was 2 hours 14 minutes and now it’s about one hour and 56 minutes, one minute shorter than the first one and as such, I think the shortest of all of them.

 Is there any scene which was one of the most emotional?
There are a lot of those, I would say. I don’t want to talk about one scene because that’s a surprise but you know what, the scene when Charlie meets vampire Bella for the first time and then meets Renesmee. This is a movie that really only has one fully human person, if you treat Taylor [Lautner] as a magical creature, so Charlie is our way into this whole thing. If Charlie can believe it and understand, I think the rest of the audience can too. Of course, Billy Burke is such an incredible actor who can really humanize any moment, so watching him and Kristen together in that scene; I remember everything was a total pleasure in that.