"Twilight" Clip & Star Profiles
Nov. 18th, 2008 09:49 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
petzipellepingo.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
fandomaniaClip of the Day: WATCH EDWARD SAVE BELLA IN A CLIP FROM 'TWILIGHT'
Movie Profile: ROBERT PATTISON GETS ACCEPTED INTO THE 'TWILIGHT' - PART ONE
The actor chats about not being accepted initally into the TWILIGHT universe and how Stephanie Meyer helped him out...
By EMERSON PARKER, Contributing Writer
For Robert Pattison, getting the role of Edward in TWILIGHT is probably the best thing career-wise that could have happened to him. Well … maybe. It depends on how successful the film franchise will be. We know that the book series from author Stephanie Meyer is insanely popular with fans everywhere grabbing at whatever they possibly can in terms of news about the film (which comes to theaters Nov. 21).
But this could have a very HARRY POTTER effect in terms of getting a number of movies under Pattison’s belt – a relatively unknown before TWILIGHT – if the film does as well as the books. Books in which, much like his co-star Kristin Stewart, he had no idea about.
“I didn’t know how big [the Stephanie Meyer following] was when we were shooting,” Pattison says. “When we first started shooting, it kind of, it got bigger and bigger and bigger—like, when we first started, no one showed up at the set, and then, on the last day, there were about 100 people outside the set screaming. Everyone knew everything. But at the beginning, no one I talked to had heard of it, and now everyone’s heard of it.”
And those fans. Oh boy those fans were something Pattison wasn’t expecting. “It’s scary because teenage girls especially are notoriously flippant in their affections for celebrities, so it’s kind of scary,” Pattison says. “The fans of the book are very, very loyal to the book and to Stephanie Meyer. And I got a 100 percent negative reaction when I got cast, I mean, literally 100.”
That just meant that Pattison had to make the proper adjustments to his character, working on Edward, finding out what drives him and moves him and that he’s an enigma but one that’s more of a perfect creature in the wilderness, Pattison explains. So it was only fitting that his choice for the role didn’t fit with everyone’s expected image of Edward.
“Everyone has projected their own image onto him,” Pattison says. “The amount of different people who the fans wanted was so varied. People were saying like Leonardo DiCaprio and stuff. And the guy’s supposed to be 17. It’s completely crazy. But then I met Stephanie Meyer and she kind of gave me the okay. And literally overnight, all the fans – like virtually all of them – completely changed their minds. So now, if anyone says anything negative, people will attack them, and say ‘No, Stephanie says he’s right!’”
http://ifmagazine.com/feature.asp?article=3096
PATTINSON SINKS HIS TEETH INTO TWILIGHT - PART TWO
The actor details his first, interesting, screen test, the scene it turned into and his opinion of the books
By EMERSON PARKER, Contributing Writer
Vampires are hot right now. Well, actually, vampires have been hot for a long, long time but now seems to be the time where they are buzz worthy and not just something found in books or an occasional film here or there.
Maybe it started with BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and ANGEL. But since then rabid following of fans have attached themselves to MOONLIGHT – the failed vampire series on CBS – TRUE BLOOD, the brutal HBO romance series and big time have fans gone batty over the upcoming vampire film TWILIGHT based on the books of Stephenie Meyer.
But for star Robert Pattinson, vampires … eh no big deal.
“There’s such an obsessive following for vampires,” Pattinson says. “It’s really strange. I don’t know why.” And for Pattinson he’s never read any books about vampires other than Dracula, which he read after he got the part in TWILIGHT. It is something that has never interested him.
Luckily or unluckily for Pattinson, his very first screen test didn’t give him a lot of time to prepare or ease into the part of a vampire – he did it on the director’s, Catherine Hardwicke, bed.
“As as soon as I met Kristen, we were doing a scene where—it’s a big scene in the book—where I try and kiss her for the first time and then kind of lose control of myself, and I almost kill her,” Pattinson says. “And that was the first thing we had to do, on the director’s bed. It was pretty intense.
Related Articles
Movie Profile: ROBERT PATTISON GETS ACCEPTED INTO THE 'TWILIGHT' - PART ONE
11/12/2008
Movie Profile: KRISTEN STEWART STEPS INTO 'TWILIGHT' - PART 2
11/6/2008
Movie Profile: KRISTEN STEWART SINKS HER TEETH INTO 'TWILIGHT' - PART 1
10/31/2008
That same scene was re-shot later in production where it turned out to be extremely easier as, well, it wasn’t on the director’s bed for one but it involved more pieces rather than just one long extended scene.
“There was something about that specific scene which could show so much about the story, and so we just kind of spent three days doing it instead of one day, and just got loads more coverage and stuff,” Pattinson says. “And I think it ended up being a lot better. I mean, it’s just so difficult to shoot, like, the actual transition between, when does a kiss suddenly start turning into, you know, murder? It was just like very subtle little things, which involved lots of little shots.”
No so subtle is Pattinson’s opinion about Meyer’s series of books, just ask him. “It was hard for me to get through the first time,” Pattinson says. “Especially when you’re trying to picture yourself in the role. I like the second book a lot more than the first one as I thought the second book was pretty moving.”
But it at least gave him an understanding of what his and the other characters were like and what he need to do in order to make a great film. “I really wanted to make the movie not seem like a kind of cash-in, you know, sort of flash-in-the-pan movie,” Pattinson says. “The core story is very strange. It’s like a really, really bizarre story, and it hasn’t really been done before to such a detailed extent. So, I was trying to play that.”
http://www.ifmagazine.com/feature.asp?article=3103
Movie Profile: KRISTEN STEWART SINKS HER TEETH INTO 'TWILIGHT' - PART 1
Or what it's like to be in a vampire movie when you're not a vampire
By CARLOS DELGADO, Contributing Writer
In case you haven’t heard, TWILIGHT is set to be released Nov. 21, 2008, oh but the buzz has been around for a while already. Tons of fansites have been created. The movie trailer was one of the most viewed in iFmagazine’s history. Fans are waiting in eager anticipation for the big screen rendition of Stephenie Meyer’s vampire saga. But at the swirling center of all the media madness and hype is little Kristen Stewart, the young actress chosen to portray Bella Swan. Remember her alongside Jodi Foster in PANIC ROOM? Well she’s grown up now and ready to tackle the juicy role of trying to avoid being vampire bait. She’s also ready to tackle some serious teen issues like divorced parents, isolation, and love.
TWILIGHT tells the story of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), two teens that fall in love. Bella is the new girl in town and attracts lots of attention from all the boys. As fate would have it, she meets and falls in love with Edward. But like star-crossed lovers of yore, they have plenty of obstacles to overcome, the most obvious being that Edward is a vampire. He must resist his temptation to kill Bella while defending her from other vampires who seemingly have no qualms about making her their dinner.
Leave no doubt, TWILIGHT is a love story. Stephenie Meyer has written several books chronicling the struggles that Bella and Edward have been through as they fight for their love. It is a familiar story, forbidden love, but in this particular case, it’s not one that Stewart was familiar with.
“No, I don’t know what rock I was living under,” admits Stewart. “I hadn’t heard about it. I think it reaches—I don’t know, I think it’s sort of a random—some people are saying, ‘How could you not have known about it? I mean, it’s like shoved in my face every day,’ and then other people are like, ‘Twilight?’
Stewart’s lack of familiarity with the story, however, did not dissuade her from taking the part of Bella. It seems the script by itself was enough to convince Stewart to jump on board.
“I read the script before I got the part and agreed to do it, but I soon delved into the book,” says Stewart. “But the script was solid and there and something worth doing.”
That’s a good sign, I would imagine, because as we all know, oftentimes the movie adaptation of a popular novel can go terribly, terribly wrong. To feel the script was strong enough to take the role without even reading the novels—which, by the way, has a rabid fan base—says plenty about Stewart’s moxie and the quality of the TWILIGHT screenplay.
But like every good movie, characters are what pave the way. They’re what get us, the viewers, to relate and emphasize with the characters onscreen. So what does Stewart think about Bella?
“I think the cool thing about her is that she is this seemingly, like she’s supposed to be the victim in the story, she’s supposed to be the girl, the damsel in distress sort of a deal, and she’s not,” explains Sewart. “The power balance is so different from that. She’s very sure-footed and, in an odd way, caught up in something that is crazy and intimidating and, frankly, bigger than her, yet she is there for a reason and willing to fight for that.”
An interesting characterization, for sure. It’s not often that the mortal character in vampire movies is the strong character. Like Stewart states, they are often seen as victims in need of rescuing. Yet Stewart approaches Bella from a unique direction, from a position of power almost, despite being fragile, at least in the mortal sense.
“I feel like she’s a strong character—I don’t know, maybe that’s just me,” says Stewart. “But hopefully both come across in the movie—I can’t tell you that, because I’d be a very biased opinion. But she’s not the typical—she doesn’t think necessarily, if you were to ask Bella, ‘So do you feel like you’re a strong character?’ ‘No.’ But she is. That’s the point. She’s like any girl, not sure of herself, but her actions say otherwise.”
Surprisingly, Stewart has a pretty strong opinion about her character and who she is, but unlike many of the other characters of the movie, she’s not exactly sure who Bella was. The other vampires are hundreds of years old with countless stories stored in their undead heads. Bella, in contrast, is just a seventeen-year-old girl who hasn’t really lived yet. But maybe that’s not really important.
“My character was the one person without a back story, really,” begins Stewart. “I mean, she sort of—it’s very much—we’re trying to figure out how long she’s actually been away from her dad. That was sort of a consideration, like how long she’s—like, the homecoming, how long it’s been since she’s been there. But she was very—the story for Bella starts at the beginning. I mean, she’s sort of just cruising along life, and then the story really starts at the beginning of our story. All the rest of the characters have immense back stories that absolutely affect the way they act, but mine didn’t.”
So no real back-story, got it. Stewart believes that who Bella is once her romance with Edward begins is what this story is really about anyway. Such a lack of character history, however, leaves plenty of room for interpretation. It allows Stewart to create a character that she likes, the details of which she is not shy sharing. When asked what about Bella she enjoys the most, Stewart quickly responds:
“That she doesn’t fit into the role that everyone thinks that you would—you know? She’s very simple, you know? It’s like, she’s just a girl who’s going to high school in a new town, and finding that sort of difficult to deal with. And we’ve always sort of joked around that Bella would be like the ultimate queen vampire because she’s so, like, unassumingly strong. You know, everybody’s sort of interested in her, and she can’t tell why. And there’s sort of an innate power that she has, just like the vampire’s powers are sort of just physiological. It’s nothing about her personally; it’s just sort of like she has this power over these sort of mystical creatures.”
I suppose we’ll have to wait until TWILIGHT is released to see if Stewart is right about Bella. Until then, we’ll have to be satisfied with movie trailers and fan blogs. Oh, yeah, and if you have time, you could even read the books.
http://ifmagazine.com/feature.asp?article=3085
Movie Profile: KRISTEN STEWART STEPS INTO 'TWILIGHT' - PART 2
The actress talks about bringing the pages of the famous novel to the big screen
By CARLOS DELGADO, Contributing Writer
Want to try something difficult? Try taking a successful series of books and making a big screen adaptation that is worthy of the pages it’s drawn from. Need more of a challenge? Have the story be about vampires. You know, those immortal bloodsuckers that move at blinding speeds and have superhuman powers. Still not hard enough? Make sure the book your film is based on has a devoted—did I say devoted? I mean devoted with a capital D—fan base that will scrutinize every line, scene, and fiber down to the minutest of minute detail. How’s that for a challenge? That, my friends, is exactly what TWILIGHT faces when it is released Nov. 21.
Kristen Stewart had quite a task ahead of her when she was cast to play Bella Swan, the love interest of vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). Let’s hope she can deliver the goods and give a performance that is both entertaining to those not familiar with the books and satisfies TWILIGHT’s diehard fans. How does Stewart feel of the daunting task of living up to their expectations?
“I think that you can’t hold that too high; I think you have to be the creative person that you are in the first place and consider that second,” Stewart reveals. “While in this case you are shooting a book—I mean, we tried to stay true to the book without fixating on details that the fans were obsessed with. They should be happy with the general integrity of the story. I mean, we haven’t changed a thing, and we did the best we could. But yeah, I think that’s maybe not a good idea to—because they’re so fanatical, I mean, fanatical. And their opinions differ.”
Sounds like Stewart is handling the pressure just fine. One of the keys to making a successful screen adaptation is realizing that you’re not going to please everyone. Some fan somewhere is going to notice a missed detail, criticize an “inaccurate portrayal” of a character, or complain about an omitted scene. Stewart realizes what she’s up against, and yet she seems unfazed. She knows the best thing to do is to just do the best job you can and remember why you became an actor in the first place.
“I feel like it’s something that I’ve really just stepped into,” says Stewart. “And, I don’t know, if you sit back and consider why I’m doing this, it’s more about stories. I read stories, and if there’s a character in it that needs to be—I have to be really compelled to do something, or it just will be terrible. I don’t know, it’s just something that feels good; it’s just something that is—it’s actually quite hard to describe. I don’t know, I just have to do it. It’s fun.”
Another key to a successful adaptation is to remember who your audience is. I think it’s a safe bet to say that TWILIGHT targets teenage girls more than middle-aged men. I don’t know, call it intuition, but that’s the vibe I get from the trailers and such. Don’t agree with me? Here’s what Kristen said when asked if she thinks TWILIGHT is a story aimed more towards girls:
“I think that girls are definitely—I mean, obviously—more enthralled with, like, the lovely ideas, like, especially when they’re younger,” explains Stewart. “But it’s a very high-stakes—I mean, it’s a fight for the love. It’s not—the love is like the ultimate, sort of ideal, far-out goal. But to get there is hard. I mean, it’s a fight; it’s definitely a struggle, so maybe they’ll be interested in that, you know?”
Okay, so maybe TWILIGHT is poised to reach a larger audience. We are dealing with vampires after all. But beyond the occult, TWILIGHT deals with plenty of teen issues. So many, in fact, that the very filming TWILIGHT took its toll on Stewart.
“It was a very—it was a heavy movie to live through, you know, to, like, go through such things as were going on in the movie,” says Stewart. “It’s like the most intense version of a teenager’s life that you can—it’s like taking everything and just putting it up here.”
Sounds draining. People often don’t realize the difficulty of being an actor and living someone else’s life for months at a time. Being the living embodiment of a character that has to go through as much as Bella does can be both emotionally and physically exhausting. The emotional tax is obvious. And after watching the previews, the physical tax is pretty obvious as well.
Remember, we’re dealing with vampires here: beings that are blessed with incredible speed and strength. Stewart talks a little about the action scenes of TWILIGHT.
“There’s a couple sequences (when) we’re on wires a little bit of the time,” begins Stewart. “He’s super fast—the vampire—super strong and super fast. So there’s wire work and a big fight scene.”
“I always have fun doing that kind of stuff,” she continues. “It’s a challenge. It’s a different kind of workday ahead. It’s physically and emotionally strenuous.”
So now that TWILIGHT is being released, what of the rest of the books in the series? Is there a follow-up in the works? Would Stewart game to take part in a sequel?
“Yeah, I would love—I mean, you know. I think they’re planning on combining two of them, which I’m not sure which ones they’re gonna be. But yeah, I would love—it’s a good—it’s a very complete story. I would be very happy to do that.”
http://ifmagazine.com/feature.asp?article=3092
Movie Profile: ROBERT PATTISON GETS ACCEPTED INTO THE 'TWILIGHT' - PART ONE
The actor chats about not being accepted initally into the TWILIGHT universe and how Stephanie Meyer helped him out...
By EMERSON PARKER, Contributing Writer
For Robert Pattison, getting the role of Edward in TWILIGHT is probably the best thing career-wise that could have happened to him. Well … maybe. It depends on how successful the film franchise will be. We know that the book series from author Stephanie Meyer is insanely popular with fans everywhere grabbing at whatever they possibly can in terms of news about the film (which comes to theaters Nov. 21).
But this could have a very HARRY POTTER effect in terms of getting a number of movies under Pattison’s belt – a relatively unknown before TWILIGHT – if the film does as well as the books. Books in which, much like his co-star Kristin Stewart, he had no idea about.
“I didn’t know how big [the Stephanie Meyer following] was when we were shooting,” Pattison says. “When we first started shooting, it kind of, it got bigger and bigger and bigger—like, when we first started, no one showed up at the set, and then, on the last day, there were about 100 people outside the set screaming. Everyone knew everything. But at the beginning, no one I talked to had heard of it, and now everyone’s heard of it.”
And those fans. Oh boy those fans were something Pattison wasn’t expecting. “It’s scary because teenage girls especially are notoriously flippant in their affections for celebrities, so it’s kind of scary,” Pattison says. “The fans of the book are very, very loyal to the book and to Stephanie Meyer. And I got a 100 percent negative reaction when I got cast, I mean, literally 100.”
That just meant that Pattison had to make the proper adjustments to his character, working on Edward, finding out what drives him and moves him and that he’s an enigma but one that’s more of a perfect creature in the wilderness, Pattison explains. So it was only fitting that his choice for the role didn’t fit with everyone’s expected image of Edward.
“Everyone has projected their own image onto him,” Pattison says. “The amount of different people who the fans wanted was so varied. People were saying like Leonardo DiCaprio and stuff. And the guy’s supposed to be 17. It’s completely crazy. But then I met Stephanie Meyer and she kind of gave me the okay. And literally overnight, all the fans – like virtually all of them – completely changed their minds. So now, if anyone says anything negative, people will attack them, and say ‘No, Stephanie says he’s right!’”
http://ifmagazine.com/feature.asp?article=3096
PATTINSON SINKS HIS TEETH INTO TWILIGHT - PART TWO
The actor details his first, interesting, screen test, the scene it turned into and his opinion of the books
By EMERSON PARKER, Contributing Writer
Vampires are hot right now. Well, actually, vampires have been hot for a long, long time but now seems to be the time where they are buzz worthy and not just something found in books or an occasional film here or there.
Maybe it started with BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and ANGEL. But since then rabid following of fans have attached themselves to MOONLIGHT – the failed vampire series on CBS – TRUE BLOOD, the brutal HBO romance series and big time have fans gone batty over the upcoming vampire film TWILIGHT based on the books of Stephenie Meyer.
But for star Robert Pattinson, vampires … eh no big deal.
“There’s such an obsessive following for vampires,” Pattinson says. “It’s really strange. I don’t know why.” And for Pattinson he’s never read any books about vampires other than Dracula, which he read after he got the part in TWILIGHT. It is something that has never interested him.
Luckily or unluckily for Pattinson, his very first screen test didn’t give him a lot of time to prepare or ease into the part of a vampire – he did it on the director’s, Catherine Hardwicke, bed.
“As as soon as I met Kristen, we were doing a scene where—it’s a big scene in the book—where I try and kiss her for the first time and then kind of lose control of myself, and I almost kill her,” Pattinson says. “And that was the first thing we had to do, on the director’s bed. It was pretty intense.
Related Articles
Movie Profile: ROBERT PATTISON GETS ACCEPTED INTO THE 'TWILIGHT' - PART ONE
11/12/2008
Movie Profile: KRISTEN STEWART STEPS INTO 'TWILIGHT' - PART 2
11/6/2008
Movie Profile: KRISTEN STEWART SINKS HER TEETH INTO 'TWILIGHT' - PART 1
10/31/2008
That same scene was re-shot later in production where it turned out to be extremely easier as, well, it wasn’t on the director’s bed for one but it involved more pieces rather than just one long extended scene.
“There was something about that specific scene which could show so much about the story, and so we just kind of spent three days doing it instead of one day, and just got loads more coverage and stuff,” Pattinson says. “And I think it ended up being a lot better. I mean, it’s just so difficult to shoot, like, the actual transition between, when does a kiss suddenly start turning into, you know, murder? It was just like very subtle little things, which involved lots of little shots.”
No so subtle is Pattinson’s opinion about Meyer’s series of books, just ask him. “It was hard for me to get through the first time,” Pattinson says. “Especially when you’re trying to picture yourself in the role. I like the second book a lot more than the first one as I thought the second book was pretty moving.”
But it at least gave him an understanding of what his and the other characters were like and what he need to do in order to make a great film. “I really wanted to make the movie not seem like a kind of cash-in, you know, sort of flash-in-the-pan movie,” Pattinson says. “The core story is very strange. It’s like a really, really bizarre story, and it hasn’t really been done before to such a detailed extent. So, I was trying to play that.”
http://www.ifmagazine.com/feature.asp?article=3103
Movie Profile: KRISTEN STEWART SINKS HER TEETH INTO 'TWILIGHT' - PART 1
Or what it's like to be in a vampire movie when you're not a vampire
By CARLOS DELGADO, Contributing Writer
In case you haven’t heard, TWILIGHT is set to be released Nov. 21, 2008, oh but the buzz has been around for a while already. Tons of fansites have been created. The movie trailer was one of the most viewed in iFmagazine’s history. Fans are waiting in eager anticipation for the big screen rendition of Stephenie Meyer’s vampire saga. But at the swirling center of all the media madness and hype is little Kristen Stewart, the young actress chosen to portray Bella Swan. Remember her alongside Jodi Foster in PANIC ROOM? Well she’s grown up now and ready to tackle the juicy role of trying to avoid being vampire bait. She’s also ready to tackle some serious teen issues like divorced parents, isolation, and love.
TWILIGHT tells the story of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), two teens that fall in love. Bella is the new girl in town and attracts lots of attention from all the boys. As fate would have it, she meets and falls in love with Edward. But like star-crossed lovers of yore, they have plenty of obstacles to overcome, the most obvious being that Edward is a vampire. He must resist his temptation to kill Bella while defending her from other vampires who seemingly have no qualms about making her their dinner.
Leave no doubt, TWILIGHT is a love story. Stephenie Meyer has written several books chronicling the struggles that Bella and Edward have been through as they fight for their love. It is a familiar story, forbidden love, but in this particular case, it’s not one that Stewart was familiar with.
“No, I don’t know what rock I was living under,” admits Stewart. “I hadn’t heard about it. I think it reaches—I don’t know, I think it’s sort of a random—some people are saying, ‘How could you not have known about it? I mean, it’s like shoved in my face every day,’ and then other people are like, ‘Twilight?’
Stewart’s lack of familiarity with the story, however, did not dissuade her from taking the part of Bella. It seems the script by itself was enough to convince Stewart to jump on board.
“I read the script before I got the part and agreed to do it, but I soon delved into the book,” says Stewart. “But the script was solid and there and something worth doing.”
That’s a good sign, I would imagine, because as we all know, oftentimes the movie adaptation of a popular novel can go terribly, terribly wrong. To feel the script was strong enough to take the role without even reading the novels—which, by the way, has a rabid fan base—says plenty about Stewart’s moxie and the quality of the TWILIGHT screenplay.
But like every good movie, characters are what pave the way. They’re what get us, the viewers, to relate and emphasize with the characters onscreen. So what does Stewart think about Bella?
“I think the cool thing about her is that she is this seemingly, like she’s supposed to be the victim in the story, she’s supposed to be the girl, the damsel in distress sort of a deal, and she’s not,” explains Sewart. “The power balance is so different from that. She’s very sure-footed and, in an odd way, caught up in something that is crazy and intimidating and, frankly, bigger than her, yet she is there for a reason and willing to fight for that.”
An interesting characterization, for sure. It’s not often that the mortal character in vampire movies is the strong character. Like Stewart states, they are often seen as victims in need of rescuing. Yet Stewart approaches Bella from a unique direction, from a position of power almost, despite being fragile, at least in the mortal sense.
“I feel like she’s a strong character—I don’t know, maybe that’s just me,” says Stewart. “But hopefully both come across in the movie—I can’t tell you that, because I’d be a very biased opinion. But she’s not the typical—she doesn’t think necessarily, if you were to ask Bella, ‘So do you feel like you’re a strong character?’ ‘No.’ But she is. That’s the point. She’s like any girl, not sure of herself, but her actions say otherwise.”
Surprisingly, Stewart has a pretty strong opinion about her character and who she is, but unlike many of the other characters of the movie, she’s not exactly sure who Bella was. The other vampires are hundreds of years old with countless stories stored in their undead heads. Bella, in contrast, is just a seventeen-year-old girl who hasn’t really lived yet. But maybe that’s not really important.
“My character was the one person without a back story, really,” begins Stewart. “I mean, she sort of—it’s very much—we’re trying to figure out how long she’s actually been away from her dad. That was sort of a consideration, like how long she’s—like, the homecoming, how long it’s been since she’s been there. But she was very—the story for Bella starts at the beginning. I mean, she’s sort of just cruising along life, and then the story really starts at the beginning of our story. All the rest of the characters have immense back stories that absolutely affect the way they act, but mine didn’t.”
So no real back-story, got it. Stewart believes that who Bella is once her romance with Edward begins is what this story is really about anyway. Such a lack of character history, however, leaves plenty of room for interpretation. It allows Stewart to create a character that she likes, the details of which she is not shy sharing. When asked what about Bella she enjoys the most, Stewart quickly responds:
“That she doesn’t fit into the role that everyone thinks that you would—you know? She’s very simple, you know? It’s like, she’s just a girl who’s going to high school in a new town, and finding that sort of difficult to deal with. And we’ve always sort of joked around that Bella would be like the ultimate queen vampire because she’s so, like, unassumingly strong. You know, everybody’s sort of interested in her, and she can’t tell why. And there’s sort of an innate power that she has, just like the vampire’s powers are sort of just physiological. It’s nothing about her personally; it’s just sort of like she has this power over these sort of mystical creatures.”
I suppose we’ll have to wait until TWILIGHT is released to see if Stewart is right about Bella. Until then, we’ll have to be satisfied with movie trailers and fan blogs. Oh, yeah, and if you have time, you could even read the books.
http://ifmagazine.com/feature.asp?article=3085
Movie Profile: KRISTEN STEWART STEPS INTO 'TWILIGHT' - PART 2
The actress talks about bringing the pages of the famous novel to the big screen
By CARLOS DELGADO, Contributing Writer
Want to try something difficult? Try taking a successful series of books and making a big screen adaptation that is worthy of the pages it’s drawn from. Need more of a challenge? Have the story be about vampires. You know, those immortal bloodsuckers that move at blinding speeds and have superhuman powers. Still not hard enough? Make sure the book your film is based on has a devoted—did I say devoted? I mean devoted with a capital D—fan base that will scrutinize every line, scene, and fiber down to the minutest of minute detail. How’s that for a challenge? That, my friends, is exactly what TWILIGHT faces when it is released Nov. 21.
Kristen Stewart had quite a task ahead of her when she was cast to play Bella Swan, the love interest of vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). Let’s hope she can deliver the goods and give a performance that is both entertaining to those not familiar with the books and satisfies TWILIGHT’s diehard fans. How does Stewart feel of the daunting task of living up to their expectations?
“I think that you can’t hold that too high; I think you have to be the creative person that you are in the first place and consider that second,” Stewart reveals. “While in this case you are shooting a book—I mean, we tried to stay true to the book without fixating on details that the fans were obsessed with. They should be happy with the general integrity of the story. I mean, we haven’t changed a thing, and we did the best we could. But yeah, I think that’s maybe not a good idea to—because they’re so fanatical, I mean, fanatical. And their opinions differ.”
Sounds like Stewart is handling the pressure just fine. One of the keys to making a successful screen adaptation is realizing that you’re not going to please everyone. Some fan somewhere is going to notice a missed detail, criticize an “inaccurate portrayal” of a character, or complain about an omitted scene. Stewart realizes what she’s up against, and yet she seems unfazed. She knows the best thing to do is to just do the best job you can and remember why you became an actor in the first place.
“I feel like it’s something that I’ve really just stepped into,” says Stewart. “And, I don’t know, if you sit back and consider why I’m doing this, it’s more about stories. I read stories, and if there’s a character in it that needs to be—I have to be really compelled to do something, or it just will be terrible. I don’t know, it’s just something that feels good; it’s just something that is—it’s actually quite hard to describe. I don’t know, I just have to do it. It’s fun.”
Another key to a successful adaptation is to remember who your audience is. I think it’s a safe bet to say that TWILIGHT targets teenage girls more than middle-aged men. I don’t know, call it intuition, but that’s the vibe I get from the trailers and such. Don’t agree with me? Here’s what Kristen said when asked if she thinks TWILIGHT is a story aimed more towards girls:
“I think that girls are definitely—I mean, obviously—more enthralled with, like, the lovely ideas, like, especially when they’re younger,” explains Stewart. “But it’s a very high-stakes—I mean, it’s a fight for the love. It’s not—the love is like the ultimate, sort of ideal, far-out goal. But to get there is hard. I mean, it’s a fight; it’s definitely a struggle, so maybe they’ll be interested in that, you know?”
Okay, so maybe TWILIGHT is poised to reach a larger audience. We are dealing with vampires after all. But beyond the occult, TWILIGHT deals with plenty of teen issues. So many, in fact, that the very filming TWILIGHT took its toll on Stewart.
“It was a very—it was a heavy movie to live through, you know, to, like, go through such things as were going on in the movie,” says Stewart. “It’s like the most intense version of a teenager’s life that you can—it’s like taking everything and just putting it up here.”
Sounds draining. People often don’t realize the difficulty of being an actor and living someone else’s life for months at a time. Being the living embodiment of a character that has to go through as much as Bella does can be both emotionally and physically exhausting. The emotional tax is obvious. And after watching the previews, the physical tax is pretty obvious as well.
Remember, we’re dealing with vampires here: beings that are blessed with incredible speed and strength. Stewart talks a little about the action scenes of TWILIGHT.
“There’s a couple sequences (when) we’re on wires a little bit of the time,” begins Stewart. “He’s super fast—the vampire—super strong and super fast. So there’s wire work and a big fight scene.”
“I always have fun doing that kind of stuff,” she continues. “It’s a challenge. It’s a different kind of workday ahead. It’s physically and emotionally strenuous.”
So now that TWILIGHT is being released, what of the rest of the books in the series? Is there a follow-up in the works? Would Stewart game to take part in a sequel?
“Yeah, I would love—I mean, you know. I think they’re planning on combining two of them, which I’m not sure which ones they’re gonna be. But yeah, I would love—it’s a good—it’s a very complete story. I would be very happy to do that.”
http://ifmagazine.com/feature.asp?article=3092
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}