5 Questions with David Slade

Entertainment Weekly has a new interview with the director of Eclipse in which they ask him 5 burning questions about the Eclipse DVD.


1. Why doesn’t he do a commentary track?
Slade is obviously well-represented in the feature-length making-of documentary and introduces and provides context for deleted and extended scenes, but he’s not on either of the two commentary tracks over the movie — he leaves those to Stephenie Meyer and producer Wyck Godfrey, and Stewart and Robert Pattinson (she’s in Montreal, jealous that he’s in L.A. eating In-N-Out). “It’s a choice I made after doing my first ever and last ever commentary on my first film Hard Candy,” he says. “I did a commentary for that and found it such an unsatisfactory experience, personally, that I vowed never to do it again, because I’m not very good at it. You work for a year-and-a-half, two years, however long it is on a film, and it’s a very personal experience as well as a very public experience. There’s so much catharsis that goes into it, and then you end up sitting in a little room and you reduce what was an intense amount of work down to a crappy, silly little anecdote usually. ‘It was raining that day.’ [Laughs] I just found it to be really disheartening, and, like I say, I’m not really good at it. I didn’t do one for my second film [30 Days of Night] either.”


3. Why don’t we see all the deleted scenes described in the commentaries on the DVD?

Stewart describes the first thing she shot on the movie — a “fairly ridiculous” sequence in which she imagined herself in the fireside flashback as the Quileute elder chief’s third wife, who stabbed and sacrificed herself to distract the vengeful female vampire attacking the village. Meyer and Godfrey describe people laughing when they saw it. Understandable that they would choose not to include it. Ditto the scene Bella imagined after her kiss with Jacob on the mountain. She saw them having grown old together. “There were a lot of issues with prosthetic makeup,” Slade says with a groan, then a laugh. “It gives me a bit of a shiver, as a filmmaker. As an idea, it was wonderful. What happens with a film is it becomes organic and it grows, and it tells you what it wants, and it was screaming loudly, ‘I don’t want that!’ to me.” Another scene described in the commentaries never actually got shot. “Stephenie really wanted to see Edward as a young man again, and we had this vision scripted for a while where Bella and he are together in Victorian times, as a kind of reverie,” Slade says.


5. Why don’t we get a blooper reel on the DVD?

Kristen and Rob talk about how people fell a lot on the fake snow. That, for instance, we would have liked to have seen. “We had a blooper reel, but I think people were pretty potty-mouthed,” Slade says. “I think you can put that down to bad language.”

Read it all at EW

Mandy's Mind - I want certain deleted scenes and if they aren't on there I will riot!