Chris Weitz talked to Variety about working with younger and less experienced actors. This certainly came into play on his most recent film A Better Life and on New Moon.

Casting a young actor amounts to more than just selecting one person to fill one role, according to director Chris Weitz.

“It’s important to me that I meet the family before we hit the set, so that they know enough about me to trust me,” he says. “What they’re really doing is giving over a chunk of their kid’s life.”

With credits that include “About a Boy” in 2002, Weitz has found success casting newcomers. The most recent addition was Julian as the teenage son of a Mexican gardener in the U.S. illegally in “A Better Life.”

While he considers casting a first-timer as “taking a leap into the unknown,” the risk, he says, is worth it.

“You know you’re going to get a certain fresh and unstudied quality rather than someone who has been influenced by the world of TV, which is really where a lot of kid actors get their first break,” Weitz says.

See more on Variety

Taylor Lautner supported Chris Weitz at his opening for A Better Life, now if looks like Chris has returned the favor.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI) will honor CHCI alumnus Orson Aguilar, executive director at the Greenlining Institute, and Hollywood writer/director Chris Weitz at its Closing Luncheon on education during the 2011 CHCI Public Policy Conference on September 13 at the Washington Convention Center.

Aguilar will be presented with the 2011 Distinguished Alumnus Medallion of Excellence Award, and Weitz will be honored with CHCI’s 2011 Excellence in Service Award.

Orson Aguilar is part of the new wave of civil rights and community leaders focused on ensuring that the American dream remains accessible to all Americans. In his role as executive director of The Greenlining Institute, Aguilar advocates for communities of color on issues such as the environment, community reinvestment, philanthropy and leadership development. Aguilar works to make positive social change and continues to be a role model for future CHCI Alumni.

In honor of his excellence in filmmaking, his work to give voice to the Latino American dream and his efforts to create positive change through the arts, writer/director Chris Weitz will receive CHCI’s Excellence in Service Award. Chris Weitz most recently directed “A Better Life,” a multi-generational immigrant story about a father’s love and everything a parent will sacrifice to build a better life for his child, which Summit Entertainment released on June 24, 2011.

“We look forward to honoring two extremely deserving individuals in Orson Aguilar and Chris Weitz on September 13,” said Esther Aguilera, CHCI President & CEO. “Orson represents the next generation of American leadership and we are proud of what he has accomplished since his CHCI Fellowship in 1996-1997. Chris Weitz’s distinguished career in Hollywood is bested only by his commitment to shedding light on the immigrant story and creating awareness of the American dream story so many in our community live every day.”

After the closing luncheon, attendees are invited to take part in a special screening of “A Better Life” and take part in a question and answer discussion with Chris Weitz.

After the awards presentations, Reps. Raul Grijalva and Nydia M. Velazquez will host a high-level discussion on education. This session will engage experts in a dialogue on how to increase Latino education attainment, which is imperative to reach the national goal of 60 percent higher education attainment by 2025. The session will also feature Allan Golston, president of U.S. Programs at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

To read the honorees’ full bios or to register for the Public Policy Conference, please visit www.chci.org.

Chris has recommended NYC places before which were all great choices. Now he’s talking LA food with THR:

“Director Chris Weitz shot his new drama, A Better Life, released June 24, on location primarily in and around East Los Angeles. The film tells the story of a gardener and illegal immigrant (Demian Bichir) who is striving to keep his teenage son (Jose Julian) away from gangs. The movie follows the two as the father purchases a pickup truck to get ahead in business only to see it stolen.

“It’s an adventure about the father and son learning to speak to each other and getting to know each other as they go in search of this truck,” says Weitz.

During the course of the 38-day shoot, Weitz, the director of The Twilight Saga: New Moon and About A Boy (with his brother Paul Weitz), also discovered some of the area’s best places to eat, from authentic Mexican joints to one of the city’s most inventive Nuevo Latin restaurants. Here are his top five spots to hit when exploring the Mexican cuisine of L.A”

See more on THR

Link to videos here

Chris Weitz continues to talk about his connection to the Twilight franchise in a positive way as he does A Better Life press:

“Many directors might see a Twilight gig as a stepping stone to getting bigger and bigger films, but you sort of did the opposite following New Moon, which was interesting, and it’s your second film in a row at Summit. What’s the secret of the relationship you have here?

I didn’t have the Inception kind of thing in my mind, that Dark Knight was going to allow me to do. I had A Better Life, that New Moon was going to allow me to do — not so much because it was a quid pro quo, because Summit didn’t see the script for The Gardener until we were halfway through New Moon. They just liked it. I said, “You do understand that I’m not going to do anymore vampire movies?” And they said, “Yeah, we get it, it’s OK — we love this script, let’s do it!” I think there was just this degree of trust established between me and Summit, whom I’ve known for a long time. I’ve known the people there for a long time, Patrick Wachsberger and Rob Friedman and Eric Feig, and they trust that I can deliver what I say I’m going to when I show them a script that they like, and I trust them in terms of keeping their promises and what they want, and also how avidly they’re going to try to market something.”

See more on Movieline

When I attended the MTV Movie Awards back in June, I had the amazing opportunity to see a preview of Chris Weitz’s new movie A Better Life that is currently opening in limited release in select cities (see details here). What really struck me as I watched the story was that it didn’t have a specific political agenda and avoided stereotypes. It was a very human story of what a father would do to put himself last in order  to give his only son A Better Life.

Just yesterday I was again fortunate and was able to be part of a last minute fansite phone interview with Chris where he talked candidly about his film and what’s in it for Twilight fans. Shout out to my fellow site ops from: Twilight Examiner, Twilighters Anonymous, Team Twilight, Twilightish, Twilight Series Theories, and Twilight Moms.

Q: How were you able to get such amazing emotions out of the actors, especially [Jose Julian] – I just read on his page that he’s never done anything like this before. The movie’s so powerful; how did you get the actors to portray that on-screen?

Chris Weitz: Well, I mean Demian Bichir is a big actor in Mexico. He’s been in many movies; he’s incredibly technically accomplished and a brilliant actor so that was never in doubt for me. Of course, when you’re starting with a newcomer, you don’t really know what you’re going to get, but I think the thing that we managed to do was to schedule it so that the scenes which he was being a difficult teen and kind of a pain in the butt were early on, which is kind of easier for a sixteen-year-old actor to go to, and then the more emotional scenes, by the time we got around to shooting that, he had lived in our little circus for you know a couple of months. He had learned from Demian; he had learned how to focus; he had been through all this thinking about things, and so that helped him. And of course acting with Demian when he’s delivering that sort of final speech in the detention center, I would find it hard not to convey a hell of a lot of emotion myself.

Q: Twilight fans obviously, certainly we love our good-looking men and the abs, but we do like more than that, and one of the big themes in the Twilight series is family and relying upon your family. Can you speak to those similar themes in A Better Life? [Read more...]