Will The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, a mammoth 750-page book, be released as one film or two? With stars Robert Pattinson, Kirsten Stewart and Taylor Lautner already inked to Breaking Dawn deals, that is the biggest question surrounding the final installment in the Twilight film series and widely considered to be the last hurdle before filming begins.
According to Twilight producer Wyck Godfrey in an interview with the LA Times’ 24 Frames blog, work on Breaking Dawn is already underway and the decision between one film or two will not slow down production.
“It’s a work in process,” Godfrey said in reference to scribe Melissa Rosenberg’s progress on adapting the final book for the big screen. “The issue [of whether there will be one or two movies] is not going to be resolved until we get the full treatment and see whether it’s organic. If it’s not organic, I don’t think it will be done, and if it is, it will be. It really has to do with how much level of detail from the books there is, with all of these new vampires that appear in ‘Breaking Dawn,’ the whole section about Jacob… It’s a very long single movie if it does become a single movie.”
Godfrey suggests he and the other principles involved with the production have every intention of kicking off production on Breaking Dawn, as one film or two, this fall in Vancouver. That would put the earliest release date in the Summer 2011 time frame and a possible battle of the sexes clash with Michael Bay’s Transformers 3.
Twilight fandom loved the job The Twilight Saga: New Moon director Chris Weitz did on that film and are clamoring for him to return to shoot Breaking Dawn. Godfrey shoots an arrow into the heart of that wish.
“I think everyone would be happy and excited if he came back, but I don’t think it’s going to happen,” added Godfrey in regards to Weitz and Breaking Dawn. “We’re just focused on the treatment and getting that right. At that point, we’re going to see who’s available and who’s appropriate. It’s such a complicated book because you have the emotions and the intensity of the love story — so you need somebody who’s just a wonderful director of actors — and yet it’s really complicated from an action and visual effects standpoint. They’ve got to have both tools in their kit.”
Due to the handling of a new character in Breaking Dawn whom ages rapidly, Godfrey is looking for a director who will come in with a plan to handle the probable partial-to-full CGI creation. “I keep having visions of ‘[The Curious Case of] Benjamin Button’ in my head,” Godfrey proclaimed, and he’d be the luckiest producer on earth to land David Fincher.
