Hit Fix Interviews David Slade For the Eclispe DVD Release

Slade: I think the mountain top battle between Victoria, Edward, Riley, Sethwolf valor battle was probably the biggest most complex set piece. [I had to] make room in our schedule for me to go back and direct the key elements of that fight scene because the fight scene was like a three-act structure story. It’s not just, you know, a fight. It has a beginning, it has a middle, it has an end. It has various character traits that make things happen if they’re good. So, that fight sequence was one where the tree going over was a big part of the plot but was also part of the story because the story enveloped the character. The character of Victoria was that she was an escape artist. She always ran. And she was going to jump. She was going to get somewhere safe. She was always safe. So, a character is feeding into your fight. There’s no description in the book that she jumps into a tree. It was just like, “Well let’s make her jump into a tree because…” and you work that way. You work out the ideas through — she’s going to run away and she’s just to live another day but he’s going to have to find a way to bring her back with words. Still the character — even though it’s a fight, you know? – And then at a certain point he’s got to use words to goad her into the proximity it’s going to take to fight, you know? It’s a very, very structured thing. We didn’t shoot it for days on end but it was certainly one of the most complex things to engineer.  The actors went into training for it all and it was one of those things where I was solely kind of every day hammering away at until we shot it. And I think because there is a point where all of these things I’m talking about just randomly appear. They happen.

Slade: You know, in the end it was great in the first screening to hear everyone scream and cheer when Victoria dies. That worked.”