When you started making this film, what was the learning curve?

The cast taught me so much. Kristen Stewart knows this character better than anybody in the world, and it’s so much made up of the Bella Swan of the book and Kristen Stewart and what she brings to it. That, for me, was just a lot of hanging out and talking before we started shooting. A lot of discussion, especially of the script. We took a few weeks where we just went through it page by page with all the actors. That completely helped me to get inside it.

What did you take from each of the past three films in studying them to figure out what you wanted your own voice to be?

The big thing I took was how different they are from each other. That was part of the appeal of getting involved because I feel that within the template of twilight, those are three very different directors who made three very different movies, each of which reflected their interests. That really appealed to me. I always saw Breaking Dawn – Part I as being kind of a bookend to the first movie. Everything that gets set up there gets resolved in the last. I think it has it’s own completely different style, but there are echoes of moments and musical references more to that movie than any of the others.

I think of the first one as having this youthfulness, the second as having this almost adult heartbreak, and the third as having this action and interest in vampire lore.

Absolutely.

Where do you fit in?

First of all, these two movies I made are each very different from the other, but I would sayBreaking Dawn I is a real immersion in romantic melodrama, but as a grown-up story. I feel like it’s Twilight Grows Up. The actor’s have adult concerns now. Take the vampires and the werewolves away and it’s about what the first year of marriage is like, or for Jacob, after you’ve lost, how do you grow out of this and become your own person. I have to say, the last act of this movie is a horror movie, too. It’s a flat-out horror movie. And that excited me because I have a background in that [with Candyman 2] and it’s something I wanted to explore again.

Clevver TV asks Bill Condon talk Breaking Dawn