David Slade wrote the following letter to Eclipse fans on the official Twilight Saga movie facebook which just reached the 8 million fan mark over the weekend making it one of the largest Facebook online communities.

“When you put your heart and soul into something as intense as the duration of a film production, you become completely lost in it. You focus on doing your very best to get it right each day and you work on this for so long that you assume an ownership of it.

When shooting The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, I always felt an awareness of how many people this film would reach and as a result, knew that this film did not just belong to myself, the producers and the studio, but more so, to all of you, the fans of The Twilight Saga.

At the end of the day, after all the hard work is done, all that’s left is the film itself, and your overwhelmingly positive and supportive responses have made me feel like we must have done something right. As a filmmaker, this is a rare and strange feeling of connection with an audience of which I will never forget and I thank you all for it.

DAVID SLADE
JULY 2010

James Kleinmann talks with fellow Brit, David Slade, about Eclipse

The Vampires and Slayers blog has an audio interview with David Slade on his approach to action.

Well, regardless of David knowing why he was chosen or not. The end result seems to be being given a thumbs up by fans far more so than the previous two films.

“How do you approach something like the proposal scene, which could so easily be the cheesiest thing ever? Do you try to underplay it?
I really tried to keep the actors in the moment and not be premeditated about things. We had a policy of not changing lines unless specific issues came up, in which case we’d discuss it well in advance. I also had a one-on-one actor rehearsal policy, where I would meet every actor individually to discuss scenes and talk about their characters so that by the time we got to the full rehearsal with all the actors, we had just the content of the scene [to concentrate on]. We’d answered all the questions, so we could deal with the meat and potatoes of getting the scene right. I think the actors appreciated that time we spent with them. When it came down to it, one of my goals was to make things realistic and believable without leaning on the fantastical elements at all, but trying actually to be antithetical to that. I wanted the fantastic elements to be as believable as possible.

I know Kristen Stewart knocks herself out to be believable in her performances.
One of the things she said to me early on was, “If I don’t believe in it, I can’t do it. I’m a terrible liar, and if I don’t believe the words I say, then I can’t go through with saying them.” Sometimes it was tricky, massaging some of the line readings, but it was always in the process of getting it down. Kristen can be an exceptionally naturalistic actress in that way, but that’s really what I was looking for. We knew that this was the most mature of the books in how the story was told. It’s the conclusion of the love triangle, and a lot of the the themes in the first two books conclude in this book. We knew it would be a more adult and cinematic film, and we wanted to treat the drama as drama. There’s comedy, but the comedy is intentional.”

See more on Movieline.

Wonder what else will be on the DVD.

Collider is back with another great interview. Here are the highlights:

David Slade

• I ask about the unique shots and the close-ups.  Did he design the look before he got on set or did he do more of it while there.  Talks about how the film needed to have a cinematic vocabulary
• 2:50 – Twitter questions – I ask him about the meadow scene.  When he was filming the scene, was he aware it meant so much to so many fans.  Talks about how Stephenie Meyer’s was there a lot on set a lot.
• 5:00 – Home video question.  What deleted scenes will be on the DVD/Blu-ray.  Talks about the one of the scenes that was cut.  He says the scene was 2 or 3 minutes alone and he think it may be as many as 5 minutes of deleted scenes coming
• 6:30 – Commentaries on the DVD?  He says he won’t be doing one and explains why.
• Talks about how he literally just finished the film the night before this interview
• 7:48 – What is he doing next.  Says he is definitely not doing The Shadow

Director David Slade Video Interview THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE – Amazing videos are here

What’s very clear here when you compare David Slade’s take on the reshoots, Stephenie Meyer’s take on the reshoots (see MTV interview), and the fact that the film was shown to the Oprah audience 5 days later without those reshoots having been incorporated in was that the film was not in chaos as several gossip sites tried to insinuate(our favorite is still the site that tried to say that Catherine Hardwicke and Chris Weitz were being called in to “save the film”). It was in viewable form with minor tweaks being done. It was a specific plan on specific dates working around Rob’s Bel Ami schedule.