Guillermo Navarro talks Breaking Dawn filmng

This is a really great in depth interview from Kodak with  Guillermo Navarro who worked closely with Bill Condon filming Breaking Dawn. A must read article !

Here’s an excerpt from Kodak :

Navarro was director Bill Condon’s choice for lensing Summit Entertainment’s The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 and Part 2, the final two films in the hugely-popular Twilight series. “Being approached by Bill immediately drew my interest,” Navarro says. “He’s a filmmaker I’ve always liked. It was a very, very strong collaboration, and I enjoyed every bit of it.”

The two films were cross-boarded and filmed simultaneously at locations varying from Vancouver  to Louisiana to Brazil. “One week, we were shooting one movie, and within the same week, a piece of the other. It was very complicated.”

Just as complex was the creation of the looks for Breaking Dawn. It was not simply a matter of watching the previous three films and attempting to recreate the work of the earlier cinematographers. “There is nothing which defined a single look for the three films,” he says. “The first movie is entirely different from the second and the third. It’s a completely different aesthetic.”

The concept of a movie being assigned “looks,” Navarro says, “is something I very much resent. That expression kind of implies responding to a scene and pulling out a gadget to see what existing recipe we should apply to the problem. If it’s dark, light it one way, or a fight, light it another way. That’s not at all how I work and come up with things.”

Upon reading the script, he says, “It was clear that the story was sufficiently different from the previous movies, and that things were extended in a way that I could approach them from a different perspective. I felt that doing a strong change in the film language would help the story. And that’s what we ended up doing.”

Navarro explains that he and Condon created a “dramatic visual landscape” for the whole movie. “We created visual highs and lows, chose where those fit in, and then found a very good visual narrative for certain sequences that really benefited from it. I’m very happy with how it came out.”

The films were shot on a challenging schedule. Navarro and Condon had to efficiently map out their various aesthetics before shooting began. “There was very limited time to execute and bear with all the difficulties and adversities of a movie like this,” he says. “We looked at how we were going to tell the story, combining all of those elements.”

Taking a fresh approach meant re-creating from scratch the parallel realities of the different characters’ worlds. “We did a lot of tests and work on how the look of those worlds was going to appear. We wanted to stay away from other things that worked for the other movies,” such as Edward’s (Robert Pattinson) heavy white make-up, a signature of his vampire look, in order to focus more on what was going on inside the characters.

Read the entire article HERE