Hollywood.com asked ‘New Moon’ Director Chris Weitz 21 questions about taking on the ‘Twilight’ sequel ‘The Twilight Saga:New Moon’

What was your interest in coming on board a franchise like this, that has predominantly been more popular with women than with men?
Chris Weitz: Actually, in that regard, my brother and I often end up doing movies whose predominant audience is either women or whose kind of tipping point of success relies on a female audience. Even American Pie.

In as much as the Twilight series has a global appeal to women, I think it reflects that it really concentrates on the emotions of the central character and romance. And I think that’s something unfortunately that the studio system has not been very good at getting boys to be interested in. They think, maybe correctly, that all the male gender is interested in is things blowing up, and robots and that sort of stuff. I don’t really think that’s true. I certainly didn’t make this movie with an eye towards only girls or women being interested in seeing it. There’s a lot for diverse audiences, including older audiences.

But really, frankly, I was drawn to the cast and I thought that the central cast was great, and I wanted to work with them. And it also sort of employed some skills I had picked up along the way, including working with special effects, working with younger actors and working on kind of emotionally-centered stories.

Twilight, as you said, is very emotional, and of course, it’s got a lot of CG elements and action elements. Would you say that you’re in a comfort zone? Is this familiar ground for you? Obviously your early work was very character-driven.
CW: I’m never really in a comfort zone making a movie. I’m in a discomfort zone, because you’re always kind of working under pressurized circumstances because you don’t have an unlimited amount of time or money to do these things, but there were a number of things I was quite familiar with, and familiar enough so that I could do what I think is really important, which is not to foreground the special effects or the action elements, but to make those settle into the story. You never really want someone to watch a movie and say, “Wow, those were great special effects.” You hope that they don’t notice the majority of what you’re actually doing.

Obviously, people are going to notice horse-sized wolves and realize on some level that they’re special effects, but they’re photo-realistic and they should be as expressive as a good actor if possible. So in terms of kind of wrangling that sort of process, yeah, it is something that I’m used to.

Check out the article for all his answers plus his take on David Slade picking up ‘Eclipse’

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