Chris Weitz gives an indepth interview to The Hollywood Reporter (illustration Chris Morris), not shying away from any questions or answers:

“THR: How much did you interact with Stephenie Meyer?

Weitz: A lot; we’ve had a real good collaboration. Crucially, she approved me as director, and she didn’t have to. We had some discussions that were very important — my convincing her that I didn’t want to take her baby and run away with it, or tell a story that was counter to the spirit of what she was trying to tell. I see myself, in the last few movies I’ve done, as adapting literary properties into film, so that’s how I treated this one. We got along like a house on fire.

THR: What kind of suggestions did she give you?

Weitz: It would normally be me e-mailing her and running things by her when I felt I was on the edge of getting a detail wrong, everything from the powers of a given vampire to the look of a particular scene or what she imaged a location looked like. And sometimes, when I felt that I was creating something new within the framework she had set up, making sure she was aware of it and that it didn’t make her sick.

THR: For example?

Weitz: A good example is the headquarters of the Volturi. The oldest vampire family lives in Italy, and it was important to me there be nothing in their surroundings that reeked of any other vampire movie. So the interiors are done in a very classic Renaissance style and are very crisp and very bright, which you would not normally expect from a vampire movie”

See the rest on THR