Love,and fangs blood

Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, who was brought in to adapt Stephenie Meyer's novels, talks about working with Meyer, challenges and the strengths of The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Here follows excerpts from the interview.

Director Chris Weitz seems to run an incredibly relaxed set...

This is a happy set. I was with him after delivering the first draft, we had a couple of meetings on the second draft and he was the same guy then as he is here on set. He didn't suddenly turn into some maniac, stressed out and crazed. He's really impressive. He's just capturing every moment with the actors.

What changes did you make to that first draft of New Moon?

There was a lot of honing down, cutting down and eliminating certain scenes and pulling out certain elements of the story just to have it move faster.

How challenging was it to adapt this book with the character of Edward Cullen being absent for so much of the story?

Going in, that was going to be the issue. Not only Edward but the entire Cullen clan disappears, the vampires who you've come to know and love disappear throughout the middle of the book. In the book, Bella very much keeps them alive in her mind. He is a presence and because it's all inside her mind, the reader is with him.

The challenge here was, "How do I do that in a movie?" I think we have found a way to stay true to the tone of the book and true to the intention of the book but to have him remain a physical presence as well. And you're starting a whole new relationship with Jacob. Yes, there was a relationship with Jacob in Twilight,but this is when it happens.

What are some of the strengths of New Moon on the page?

What's so great about this story is Stephenie really explores complex emotions. You could boil it down to girl loses boy, finds boy, but she doesn't do the easy, black-and-white moves that a lot of young romances do. It's very complex — [what happens when] you develop feelings for a friend, romantic love versus platonic love. These are very sophisticated emotions that are very real but also very hard to translate into a film where everything is usually very... easy to follow. How do you keep that sophistication and complexity? Because that's the book, that's what makes it interesting.

So, how do you do that?

Examining each moment for the character and keeping alive different facets. Bella experiences 10 different things and does 10 different actions. OK, well, you're going to have to choose, in that moment, maybe a couple of those colours and a couple of those emotions.. You need to be able to track throughout the movie where she's going. It's hard to articulate because so much of it is just sort of instinctual — does that feel right? I'm very much a structuralist. I think story is structure is story. If you have the correct structure, the moments of the story happen at the right time and you build those characters to those moments.

Would you say that you have a close working relationship with Stephenie Meyer?

In the first book, with Twilight, I don't think I even met her until I was well into a draft and I was worried about meeting her... I was really protective of my process. I was afraid. By the time I finished Twilight, her reaction to it... was still one of the great moments of my career, having the author say such wonderful things about the script. From that moment she relaxed about "can I deliver?" and I relaxed about inviting her into my process.