The final film in The Twilight Saga has a crazy ending that will shock readers. . Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg tells the backstory.
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The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 is on a course to make more than $140 million this weekend in the United States alone. Twilight has been a fantastically successful franchise of books and movies. And yet even as the first three movies made hundreds of millions of dollars, I puzzled over how Stephenie Meyer’s fourth book, Breaking Dawn, could ever be translated into a movie. Forget Renesmee, the quickly aging half-vampire baby of Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Kristen Stewart), who is a central character, charming everyone she meets. And put aside that Jacob (Taylor Lautner) essentially falls in love with Renesmee by “imprinting” on her when she is a newborn – which was just too awful to contemplate seeing with my eyes.
What I thought would be the biggest challenge was the book’s utter anticlimax of an ending, when the good vampires and their wolf friends line up to confront and possibly war with the mean vampires, the Volturi. As my friend Denise Martin once described it in “10 Reasons Breaking Dawn Should Not Be Made Into a Movie,” “Did I say war? I meant peaceful gathering in the forest.”
Yes, nothing happens in the climactic scene of the books. The characters all talk, and then everyone goes home, and that’s the end. Bye, Volturi, nice to see you! Moviegoers would riot. As a reader, I nearly rioted on my couch.
So how would Melissa Rosenberg, the screenwriter who has written all five movies, and director Bill Condon deal with this particular and disastrous problem? And would Meyer, who retains control over Twilight and has to approve any deviations, allow them to fix it? Here is where the spoilers begin. Stop reading if you care!
Here’s how the scene unfolds. As in the book, Alice Cullen (Ashley Greene), who is psychic, approaches Aro (Michael Sheen), who can read minds. But instead of Alice's effort being the path to peace, as it is in the book, a huge battle ensues, with many of the main characters dying (Carlisle, Jasper, Leah, Seth, and all of the evil Volturi). Set on fire, beheaded, and worse! It is a fantastic, violent, visually stunning, fun sequence – and truly shocking to anyone who has read the book.
That it then suddenly ends and we see that none of those deaths actually happened, and Alice was merely showing Aro what would occur if he messes with them, elicited loud laughter – some positive, some negative, I imagine – in the screening I saw. Personally, I loved it.
I spoke with Rosenberg on Friday about how she approached Breaking Dawn.
KA: Breaking Dawn was published in August 2008. You had already written the first Twilight movie, which came out a few months later. When you read it, you thought… what?
MR: I thought many things. I was compelled. I could see that there was definitely one, if not two movies in it. I could see that the second half was actually going to be the easier of the two because there’s a very strong action engine pushing all the way through. I was worried about the first half. I really didn’t know how I was going to approach that. I actually didn’t jump on board immediately because I wasn’t sure I could do it.
KA: Creatively?
MR: Creatively, politically.
KA: Oh yeah! Oh yeah. Let’s talk about that for one second – that was nearly a deal-breaker for you, the anti-abortion theme in the book?
MR: Absolutely. It absolutely would have been a deal-breaker if I couldn’t figure out how to do it in a way that didn’t violate my belief’s and Stephenie’s. That was a dilemma. The story of the first part of the book – it was the pregnancy. I was, like, how am I going to do this? If I’m going to adapt the book, I have to tell that story. I wanted to do it, I wanted to stay with the franchise. I spoke to my sister-in-law, a former ACLU feminist lawyer: she also found these books. She gave me the way in. In my life, I’ve made the choice not to have children, but she has two. She said that what often gets lost in the abortion debate is that having a child is a choice. And I was, like, wow, oh, hold on a second: it became that Bella is choosing to have this child. When I could see it from that point of view, I realized I could do this.
KA: The whole Bella character is very different in the books. I could talk to you at length about that, but I will summarize by saying I hate her in the books and like her in your movies.
MR: That’s a very conscious choice on our part.
