This is the skin of a filmmaker, Bella: Bill Condon looked back on the hate against the Twilight franchise during its heyday, speaking endearingly about the Breaking Dawn installments that he directed.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about his forthcoming musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, the versatile director and screenwriter stood by his work and said he believed he brought a level of camp to the films, which were the final two entries in the saga.
“It became such a target for people, and people felt superior to it, and I thought, ‘God, you were really missing the point,'” Condon said of the blockbuster franchise, adapted from Stephenie Meyer‘s young adult novels of the same name.
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Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in ‘The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2’
“Because this is a big franchise that is in on the joke,” the Oscar winner added. “For me, personally, as a gay director, I thought I brought a bit of camp to it that was permissible. Michael Sheen, that laugh.” The films diverged from his usual filmography, and Condon reveled in that.
“It’s been a wonderful opportunity to mix it up and to have something where there is such a dedicated audience waiting for it, and you’re in dialogue with that audience knowing that we were going to do this incredibly cruel thing of killing off all of their beloved characters,” he said.
“That, to me, was like, ‘Oh, I have to,’ because I just want to be there the first time we show it,” Condon continued. “I’ve never, ever heard a scream as loud and last as long as when we cut off Carlisle’s head.”
Kristen Stewart became a household name for her portrayal of Bella Swan, a high school student who falls in love with mysterious classmate Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), who is revealed to be a vampire, in the first 2008 installment of the five-film franchise. The films were massive box office hits, grossing more than $3.3 billion collectively.
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Bill Condon at the Los Angeles premiere of ‘The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1’
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There “were a lot of things about” the franchise that sucked Condon in, none more so than leading lady Stewart. “I’d just been fascinated with her right out of the box,” Condon said, also comparing the films to “a classic Minnelli Hollywood melodrama.”
“It’s a family story. I aspire to be in the tradition of George Cukor and Vincente Minnelli,” Condon said. “But I do think one of the things that’s remarkable about that is that Twilight is a franchise that is really women’s pictures, they call them.”
He elaborated, “It is told from a female perspective. I can’t tell you how many times you talk about that movie and someone would say in the first one, ‘Well, nothing happens,’ but she gets married, she gives birth, she becomes a vampire.”
Ashley Greene, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Peter Facinelli, and Elizabeth Reaser played members of the Cullen family, while Billy Burke portrayed Bella’s father. Taylor Lautner also starred as a competing love interest who just so happens to be a werewolf. The franchise is set to return to theaters later this month for the Halloween season.
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