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…]