Bill Condon Talks Breaking Dawn Secrecy and Honeymoon: What Will He Keep From Fans?

Are you using actual visual cues to represent the invisible forces between vampires in the stand-off scene?

On the field? Yeah, definitely. That's still a work in progress, but yeah.

In the Breaking Dawn press conference, you mentioned that you thought Stephenie Meyer might want to spin-off other Twilight characters into more stories. Can you elaborate on that?

Right. No, because that's just speculation. But when I've asked her, "Is it over?" she's been very definitive that it's the Bella-Edward thing. She's sure of that -- telling the Bella-Edward story is over for her. So that leaves you with the question... God knows, in Breaking Dawn alone, the numbers of characters she introduced. She could go in a lot of different directions.

What is your strategy in regards to what to show and what not to show to fans?

I know! Well, it was hard this time, because I think there are just basic things. You don't want to show Bella in the wedding dress...

Why?

Because we want to, as long as we can and I hope we can keep it until opening day! We want to keep it a surprise.

You went pretty long without even announcing the dress designer. So, until opening day, will you not reveal Bella's dress?

If we have our way, which you know will never happen. [Laughs] But I'm hoping! Certainly today in July, we're not going to show anything in the wedding dress, and I'm not going to show anything of her pregnant because that's a whole transformation that she goes through. So you take that out of the equation and for Bella and Edward there's really only the honeymoon, and for Jacob, it's really not that many scenes. So it wasn't really hard to figure out once you got to that point.

The Jacob scenes shown at Comic-Con were interesting because, as you mentioned on your panel, we'll see things that don't really happen in the book. How did you decide what to tweak?

I think it's just that, in a movie, you want to really concentrate things. It's all suggested in the book that once he breaks with Sam and the pack they have this threat now, but in the movie it becomes a clear idea that they [the Cullens] are under siege, and that Sam and the rest of the wolves are circling them, just waiting -- and that the Cullens haven't fed so they're hungry, they're weak. The wolves are either going to attack as soon as one of them leaves to feed, or they'll wait for them to get too weak. It's a real tension that builds up, it's a very strong suspense idea.

I like that Jacob's scene in the woods is evocative of a double agent reveal in a spy movie.

Exactly! And when you see it in the movie, you don't know -- Jacob might be telling the truth at that point.

There are so many iconic scenes in the book; how do you walk the line of romanticizing the feathers-at-the-honeymoon scene, or deciding how gory to go with the birth scene, in a PG-13 movie?

You know it's not going to be an R-rated movie, so it's a great challenge. How do you have the experience without having to be too explicit about it. I think that's not a hard thing to do. No one wants to see -- no one needs to see a full-on sex scene to have the incredibly intense experience that they're making love, you know? And it's more romantic. The same with the birth; I think it's very visceral, but it doesn't necessarily need close-ups of certain things.

Did you track the fan reaction when the honeymoon footage leaked?

Oh, yeah. That was upsetting.

I can imagine -- so much got out. But fans seemed to love what you did in that sex scene. Especially, if I may point out, the bed breaking glimpsed in the trailer. It's sexy.

[Laughs] I think it's good. I hope people feel that way.

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