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“Chicago.” “Kinsey.” “Gods and Monsters.” “Dreamgirls.”
One’s first thought after scanning that list is probably not, “Hey, that guy should direct the final chapters in the ‘Twilight’ series.”
But that’s exactly what Condon, 56, has done. The reportedly sexy and gory results of his efforts will be visible when “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1” – in which Bella (Kristen Stewart) and her vampire lover Edward (Robert Pattinson) get married, consummate their relationship and deal with a decidedly unique pregnancy – opens today.
Asked why he ditched the world of awards-ready musicals and serious dramas for the Team Edward vs. Team Jacob debate, Condon says the project let him return to his cinematic roots.
“I started out making horror movies, and although this isn’t literally a horror movie, it is a genre film, a combination of romantic melodrama and a certain amount of suspense, you know,” explains Condon, whose forays into shock fare include the 1995 sequel “Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh.”
“Also, to be truthful, it was on the heels of having spent huge chunks of time on two movies that weren’t coming together. And it was time to make a movie.”
And that movie – actually, two movies, since Condon also directed the finale “Breaking Dawn, Part 2,” set for release in November 2012 – is practically a guaranteed blockbuster. Each of the films in the “Twilight” series has made progressively more at the North American box office; last year’s “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” earned more than $698 million worldwide.
Condon, of course, is hardly the first filmmaker to pause from prestige pics to do something outside his usual cinematic box. This movie season alone, Academy Award-winning filmmaker (and frequent genre-hopper) Steven Soderbergh directed virus thriller “Contagion,” which he’ll follow with January’s action flick “Haywire.” And Martin Scorsese, master of the modern crime saga, will release “Hugo,” a 3D family adventure, next week.
Condon says there may be more connective tissue between a movie like “Breaking Dawn” and your typical Best Picture nominee than there initially seems.
“We have as many – more – visual effects across the two movies than ‘Avatar’ did,” he says. “So it was a huge opportunity for me to learn that world. And not only in kind of obvious ways, like (CGI) wolves and things like that, but in subtle, realistic ways, things I would carry into a small drama if you had the means to do that. So opening up to that world was really exciting.”
It also turns out that “Breaking Dawn” and Condon’s “Kinsey” – a look at sex researcher Alfred Kinsey – have something else in common: racy subject matter that caught the attention of the Motion Picture Association of America.
In “Breaking Dawn,” the honeymoon scene – when Bella and Edward act on the passion that simmered in the previous films – nearly pushed the rating from a “Twilight”-demographic-friendly PG-13 to an R.
“If you do certain things, that will get you an R,” Condon says. “One of those . . . is thrusting that suggests intercourse. And we had a hint of that . . . and that’s what we pulled back on.”
Did the MPAA express similar concerns about Bella’s (spoiler alert) bloody, disturbing birth scene?
“None,” the horror veteran says. “Didn’t change a frame of it.” He pauses. “Interesting, huh?”
Three years and three films into “The Twilight Saga,” Robert Pattinson can see the finish line for the role that made him famous.
With the release of “Breaking Dawn Part 1,” he knows that the whirlwind surrounding him and his cast mates is about to peak, then subside. He says he’s relishing the end (which will come November 2012, when Part II is released), and he’s taking it all in: the attention, the career boost and the way his peers have coped with the sudden fame of a film series whose fans are nothing if not fanatical.
“I am constantly amazed that no one has gone totally crazy,” he says, chuckling. “Everybody has their own way of coping. We’re all trying to be artists at the same time this whole thing is going on around us.”
The 25-year-old British actor has worked with Oscar winners Reese Witherspoon and Christoph Waltz (“Water for Elephants”) and former James Bond Pierce Brosnan (“Remember Me”). But he says his contemporaries — his “Twilight” cast mates — “have taught me the most. They’ve grown up in the eye of the storm. I learn from how they’ve dealt with fame. For me, that’s obviously the most overwhelming ... thing I’ve had to deal with. You learn a lot about the world and a lot about people when you and they go through something like this.”
That “something like this” has been in evidence since before the first film opened. Pattinson was an all-but-unknown 21-year-old, best known for a glorified supporting role as Cedric Diggory in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” when he landed the role that would change his life.
Tim Guinee, one of his co-stars in “Water for Elephants,” recalls the paparazzi in helicopters above that film’s set, the scores of fans “hoping to catch a glimpse of him. What an extraordinary amount of pressure this was for such a young guy to deal with and I was always amazed at the dignity and fortitude with which he dealt with all of it.”
Pattinson knows that he’s in select company, having come from almost nowhere to star in three spectacularly successful movies — “Twilight” (2008), “New Moon” (2009) and “Eclipse” (2010).
“It inevitably skews your idea of what this business should be,” he says. “But you have to fight against that. The whole fun, the whole point of being an actor is to keep re-inventing yourself.”
Pattinson has managed that, squeezing in a couple of non-vampire roles amid the run of the saga. He earned “acquits himself quite nicely” from film critic Leonard Maltin for last spring’s period piece “Water for Elephants.” He hopes his work will get a fair viewing once “Twilight” ends, that critics and fans won’t make as much of has been called his “brooding beauty” (Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News) as they do now.
“It gets scary. You worry that this is all they’ll let you do. But I could take chances (with other roles) because I always had another ‘Twilight’ movie coming out. At the same time, it’s kind of nice that they’re coming to an end, to know I don’t have that safety net and that I have to really strive to do new things and wholly commit to them.”
Pattinson’s take on Stephenie Meyer’s creation — the simmering, silent vampire dreamboat Edward Cullen, who wins the fair Bella (Kristen Stewart) with just a furtive glance: “Edward spends this whole series trying to catch up to being 17 in today’s society. Even though he’s 108, his values are more old-fashioned. He doesn’t know how to have a relationship with a young modern woman his age. He has to learn.”
The actor can joke about the new film’s overheated sex scene, which necessitated a re-edit to avoid an R rating, and not missing the “pale, pale makeup, which is covering more and more wrinkles. You start to look like a faded clown with fangs, eventually,” he says.
While Pattinson doesn’t know what he’ll do after “Twilight,” he isn’t any more worried than usual, he says with a laugh. “It helps to have tremendous self-doubt. That keeps you humble. It’s a very English mentality, that glass is always half empty.”
