Taylor Lautner went to the Teen Vogue Party in LA on Sunday night. Seems to be chilling with his black suit and relaxed white shirt. You can see more photos of Taylor at JustJaredJr.
Kellan Lutz gave his time to blackbookmag for a recent interview about himself, New Moon, and Robert Pattinson. Seems like a nice guy.
Does going to auditions make you nervous?
No, I love them. I always fight for them and hate when some agents make us put ourselves on tape and send it to the casting director. I like winning the room, if that makes sense; hanging out with the casting directors and talking with them. An audition is 50% knowing your lines and the other 50% is being personable.
So what’s it like being a young actor in Los Angeles?
It’s been an eye-opener, for sure. I really don’t like LA. I don’t go to the beach, I don’t use the amenities that are in LA , I don’t really go out to the clubs.
Why don’t you like going to the beach?
I live in the Valley, so it’s kind of a trek to go there. And for me, whenever I go traveling I just throw everything in a suitcase. I don’t really plan outfits or anything like that so I’ll throw a bunch of stuff in, and when I go to the beach I’m like, “Okay, I need a bunch of balls, towels, sandals, I need to bring my lacrosse stick in case I want to play, and a volleyball.” You know, it takes an hour finding everything and then you have to drive there. It’s just exhausting. And no one really goes in the water in LA, unless you surf. There’s only a month to two months where you can actually go in the water without a wetsuit.
So do you avoid the flashiness of LA’s nightlife?
There’s some things you should go to. Last night I went to the InStyle party and it was very beneficial for myself to meet the editors and hang out with them. It’s all about making relationships—real relationships, you don’t need to be fake. You just talk and build that bond for future endeavors. It’s really weird seeing other actors who go to every single thing, every party out there. It doesn’t appeal to me.
Is it a game you feel you have to play?
No, not really. Again, being in L.A. is kind of like school. You go to math, then you go to geometry and then algebra. It’s changed so much from when I first moved out here. Now it’s a depressing city.
So I hear you’re pretty cool with the Twilight fans, who I hear can be a little much.
I am extremely blessed to be a part of this franchise. I didn’t know this series and I didn’t know it had such a following. I love going to conventions. That’s why I love Will Smith. He goes to every premiere in every country. I really admire that because his fans are the ones going to his movies, and it doesn’t take much to show your appreciation. The Twilight moms made dog tags and engraved really cool things on them.
What’s a Twilight mom? I’m assuming it’s parents that take their kids to these things?
Well actually most of the time it’s the opposite. It’s funny because the mom’s are like, “Oh, we need a picture for my daughter, can you get a picture for my daughter.” And I’m like, where is she? And she’s like, “Oh, uh, she’s grounded this week.” There’s groups of Twilight moms that go to every convention. That’s the amazing thing about Twilight. It’s for everyone.
But what happens when the fans get to a Robert Pattinson-level where it’s just insane?
Well, it’s crazy because with all this attention, all of us are handling it extremely well. We still have our head on our shoulders and our feet on the ground. Rob’s handling it so well. I can’t fathom being in his shoes. I believe I could handle it, but being cooped up in Vancouver and not being able to leave the hotel room or the apartment without having a driver and having to hide out—especially when he was shooting Remember Me, I talked to him a lot in New York and those fans were just crazy. I can’t imagine trying to act when you have all these people yelling your name and you’re doing an emotional scene.
You have some fight scenes in New Moon. Did you have to put on weight?
That’s the thing that’s really hard for me. I did a couple movies after New Moon and before Eclipse where I had to play a high school kid, like Warrior and Nightmare on Elm Street, and it’s one of those things where I love my size—I love being a big kid and having my muscles. So having someone tell you, “Hey, can you not work out until we shoot so you don’t tower over the other actors?” I’m really happy to take the time out and just work out. That’s what my character is, he’s a big guy and it makes me happy being able to eat and just put that weight back on.
So you’ve actually been forced not to work out?
Yeah, I mean they didn’t really say it that blatantly.
Do you like doing your own stunts?
I love doing my own stunts. I try and fight the producers to allow me to do stuff and of course there’s insurance reasons why we can’t, but again, I want that to be my face on screen. I don’t want them to have to blur it out if there’s a cool fighting scene. And a lot of times I can do the stunt better than the stuntman. I once had to fall ten feet from a tree and I go the wind knocked out of me. The stuntmen were like, Let all the air out before you hit the ground. It’s a learning process but I just love doing all my own stunts and I’m an action junkie. I love anything action and being on rigs and falling from buildings. I kind of want to be a stunt man too.
So I imagine you’d love to top line a big action film.
Yeah, I mean, my team and I really are focusing on that genre. I feel like there aren’t that many American action heroes. You got Daniel Craig who’s overseas and Matt Damon’s awesome. I love his career choices. He does comedies, to dramas to big action movies, like the Bourne franchise.
So what was it like filming the Nightmare on Elm Street remake?
Freddie scared me growing up. I watched a lot of horror movies with my dad and my brother. There’s something about Freddie Kruger attacking you in your sleep that terrified me. I mean, that’s probably why I only get four hours of sleep a night, I hardly dream. And having the chance to be a part of this movie, and it’s a psychological thriller versus some bloodbath, I’m blessed. I’m the guy that you want to root for in this because he’s a good guy having these problems because he can’t sleep, and he sees Freddie when he sleeps, so he just stays up.
Do you hang out with your cast mates from Twilight when you’re not filming?
Me and Ashley Greene are kind of not—the kids of the group, but we like playing games. I went to Toys R Us and bought Wii Fitness and tons of other games to play in the hotel, because we are always in the hotel and it’s tough to leave and not be followed by paparazzi or fans.
So people stalk you at the hotel?
Well the thing is, we can’t rent out the whole hotel, so fans will come up that know we are shooting there to have a chance to see all of us in one place. They’ll get rooms and every time one of us leaves, they’re there. It’s great to talk to them but you really can’t sneak away.
What is their reaction when they see you?
They’re very nervous and shy. They’re shaking, they shake and shoot the camera, and it’s all fuzzy so they have to do it again. Then there’s paparazzi who have flown from LA to Vancouver just to shoot a bunch of us. So it’s not just the Vancouver paparazzi, it’s LA as well. So it’s great just to feel like you’re at home and to play games. I bought the Twilight game which we never played until we were up there. It’s a fun game!
You started your career as a model, but when exactly were you bit by the acting bug?
I fell into the modeling world by luck, but I did it because I found photography to be a passion of mine, and being in front of the camera was really cool. So doing different stuff and learning who I want to shoot with as far as photographers was great I got a scholarship to go to Chapman University for chemical engineering in Orange County, and my father’s always lived in LA, so I just wanted to pack up and go there, but my mother didn’t want me, so I did it anyway. It was just something I had to do. When I was in LA, it was extremely lucrative with the modeling—the money, the opportunities—it’s LA so it was fast-paced and I was making more money and traveling all over the world. I just kind of fell into acting as a way to show off my personality.
What’s your favorite restaurant or place to eat in LA?
Katsuya is a great place, one of my favorite sushi places.
Wow! I just stumbled on a stockpile of some awesome New Moon Movie set photos! The photos were taken at Capilano Park Forest, which is about 15-20 minutes outside of Vancouver. Apparenty the crew were up till 4am filming! If you want to see them all, head over to Latimes.com
Some very nice stills there! Kristen dress looks very nice, props to the constume designer for that one 
. Enjoy!
Good news everyone! We finally have a track listing for the official New Moon Movie Soundtrack. I can recognize a few of of the artists listed, though there a some there I haven’t heard of before. If you want, you can pre-order your copy for $9.99
Sponsored by no other than my deep pockets, I’m proud to announce New-Moon-Movie.Net’s First Competition! Up for grabs is your very own copy of the new New Moon Movie Soundtrack! All the details on how to enter can be found at the New Moon Movie Forum! Don’t miss out .
Master mind Chris Weitz, director of New Moon Movie, was kind enough to give his time for an interview hosted by Boxoffice.com. Seems like a pretty smart and relaxed guy and has a lot to tell about the new movie.
How do you direct a film when everyone knows the story and ending?
In a way, that’s an advantage. That people know and love the book means that people know and want to see the movie, which is what you hope for when you’re making a film. It’s a fine balance between being as faithful as possible to the spirit of the book, and bringing changes. I regard myself as fan as much as any other, and the way that I see the book in my head is just like any other fan’s ability, except that I happen to have tens of millions of dollars at my disposal to realize that vision. One hopes that it’s a strong enough envisioning of the book that people will be amused and entertained and excited even though they know how things are going to end.
One of my favorite New Moon conspiracy theories is that the producers are ordering Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson to keep their love hidden because it will affect the way people will perceive the story, even though the story is already known even until the next two books.
The fans know what the Volturi look like or what Taylor Lautner as Jacob’s amazing bod is going to look like—the producers know these things are big points of curiosity about whether we’ve been able to be faithful to people’s notions. And they want to parse these things out over time. [Laughs] It is a conspiracy, but the conspiracy is called marketing.
There are so many films about vampires, vampire romances, teenage romances—what is it about Twilight‘s love triangle that’s catalyzed this phenomenon?
To me, it has a lot less to do with vampires and werewolves than with readily identifiable emotional situations. Bella has a choice between the loving friend who’s nearby and the distant, unattainable object of her affections. That’s a pretty common scenario, and unfortunately also, so is being dumped. I know I’ve experienced it—pretty much anybody except the incredibly lucky has experienced it—and the supernatural element of things just allows for a degree of wish fulfillment. We can play out these scenarios on a grand scale. When you get broken up with, you’d like to think that if you just did something brave enough, something amazing enough, you could rescue the relationship that’s been broken. And you would like to think that the person who’s left you has left you for your own good against their heart. That’s usually not the case, but in New Moon it happens to be, so that’s a lovely way to fulfill one’s wishes. A great thing that Summit as a studio understands is that there are dark places that the movie has to go in order for it all to work. They’re not afraid of the angst and the sorrow that’s in the book. In a way, the film can be kind of a throwback to weepies as well as very cutting edge in terms of visual effects.
It’s got this operatic tone that’s like soma for anyone with a broken heart.
We’re probably going to put out one of the greatest breakup mix albums of all time on the soundtrack. Alexandre Desplat doing the music means there’s this sense of French Romanticism that goes back to Alexandre’s mentor Maurice Jarre and everything he did for David Lean’s movies—going back to Debussy and Ravel and that kind of stuff. There is a lot of luxuriating in the emotionalism of the piece. I think I’m probably now supposed to add at this point that there’s great stuff for guys as well. But leave that aside for the moment.
You talked a minute ago about Pattinson being an ‘unattainable male.’ We always see stories about men pursuing a woman. It’s rare to see stories where a woman really pursues a man, and when you do, it’s usually handled like All About Steve, where it teeters into comic stalking.
Farce.
Exactly. You always hear about the male gaze in films, but this seems to have such a strong female gaze. One of the prerequisites is how many times Pattinson and Lautner take off their shirts.
It’s there in the script, and that’s one for the ladies, really. Women have been objectified plenty in Hollywood films. And there’s still sort of a chasteness to the objectification in Twilight and New Moon. One approaches it hopefully with a bit of tact—not just an exercise in beefcake peddling. You hope when you’re shooting any kind of above-the-waist nudity that it suits the demand of the moment, it isn’t just in there for the hell of it. That being said, I think we did come to Comic-Con with a lot of muscles and it was really fun to see the reaction to it. I’ve tried to make films that take into account the female members of the audience. Even American Pie, which comes from a genre that is notoriously misogynist.
I would agree with that. In American Pie, you make a point to show the girl’s side of why she would or wouldn’t do it on Prom Night—it was fair.
We were trying to say, too, that they were really in control of the scenario, and the guys were more or less hopeless schlubs just trying to navigate these waters. The girls were in control of what happened when.
American Pie—like Twilight—was one of those films that made stars of everyone in the cast. This time around, do you find yourself wanting to give this new generation career or life advice?
I don’t particularly feel qualified because I’m not in their situation. I don’t have to deal with that fame; I’m able to turn it on or off—or rather, the publicity department is able to turn it on and off. I don’t walk around and get recognized. I’m recognized in inverse proportion to my nearness to Rob. There’s some kind of equation I could work out. Basically if I’m within 50 yards of Rob, I matter. If not, I just don’t. I think that they don’t really need my advice because they are determined to remain true to their own life, in spite of anything that might turn their heads. That’s the only advice I could give them: that they stay the clever and decent people who they already are. And I don’t think they’re manifesting any problems in that regard.
I heard that the on-set experience has been like living in A Hard Days Night.
It was like that in Italy. Although it wasn’t so much running and chasing. I’d compare it more to The Birds. You look around and then there’s suddenly ten girls over there. And then there’s 20. Then 30, then 40. And then suddenly the street you’re intending to walk down to get to your next location or lunch is just blocked and there’s no way to get through. Or you will get through, but it’ll take you hours because you’ll take pictures and sign autographs. Which is fair enough because they’ve come all this way and they’re really the reason that we’re there. Or you’ll have to be a real meanie and just run past. I’ve developed a preoccupied look that sometimes works. I try to seem as though there’s something going really badly at a different location, and sometimes that gets me out of situations.
Have there been any crazy fan experiences?
The crazy thing has been how extraordinarily supportive, friendly and enthusiastic people are. They really want this to be done right, but they’re not hyper-critical. There’s a degree of good faith between the people making the movie and the people who want to see it, and we are innocent until proven guilty. And that’s great because that’s not always the case with fan boys. I did encounter this Italian girl in Montepulciano who then appeared in Vancouver who speaks impeccable English. That’s one of the reasons I recognized her. She came up to me and said, ‘Do you remember me?’ and I said yes, I did. And then her mom was there and I sort of wanted to ask her mom what else she and her kid were up to because it seemed like she should be in school, but it’s really not my place.
Which other book would you love to film?
To be honest, I would love to film The Golden Compass. I would love to have been allowed to do my own cut of The Golden Compass because I did film that book and there could be a real version of it, but it would cost millions of dollars to complete with the special effects. The cut was taken away from me and that was a devastating experience. That’s the other book that I would like to film. I wouldn’t have the strength to go through another three years to do it, but it is a great shame that the fear of the ideas in the book led the studio to do a version which I think caused its own downfall.
It was a beautiful film, the look of it.
It’s a good-looking film. And there are moments where it’s precisely the way I wanted it to look or to feel. But it’s been put through a blender so that the interesting ideas that it had in it and the real emotional heft of the story was lost. And that’s a shame because I take very seriously my responsibilities to an author in trying to represent their vision on film. Failing Philip Pullman in that regard is a big sadness for me because he’s one of the authors I most admire in the world.
Between the author and the studio, that can be a lot of weight.
It is, and I have to say that Summit understands that the fans want to see the book in the film, not just a popcorn movie.
It’s almost a safety net, having that many people know the book already very well, more than American audiences knew The Golden Compass.
Yes, American audiences weren’t that familiar with The Golden Compass. Once you start monkeying around with the plot and characters and key concepts in the film, you really lose what made the book appeal to anyone in the first place. If you take the example of The Lord of the Rings, it wasn’t that it made everybody into a geek overnight. People were able to see what had been great about it in the first place, and the adherence to story and character really paid off, even though a lot of people went to see it who hadn’t read Lord of the Rings in the first place and didn’t know anything else.
What can you tell me about The Game, the film adaptation of the Neil Strauss guide to picking up women?
I can tell you that Rawson Thurber [director of Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story] is going to direct it, and that he is rewriting it now. It’s an attempt to walk a very fine line with a project like this. It has things to say about the relationships between men and women and it could be perceived as misogynistic or as a textbook in how to manipulate women. But it’s really not about that—it’s about the weaknesses of men and women more than anything else.
And your brother Paul also has a high school vampire movie coming out?
He does. That was not planned at all. It’s very funny. A week before I was offered New Moon, I was wondering why there were so many vampire movies around. Paul had wanted to indulge a long-standing love of the grotesque, which the Cirque du Freak series allowed with its visuals and that sort of perversity—not perversion, but perversity—of the books and the script. It’s a funny coincidence. Actually, if you want to take it one step further, my grandmother was a silent film actress in the Mexican version of Dracula. They shot it on the same sets as the Todd Browning version, but they started shooting at midnight. My grandfather, who was a producer for Universal at the time, was courting my grandmother, and when talkies came out, there were no parts for women with strong Mexican accents. He convinced Carl Laemmle at Universal that you could make a profit by using the same sets during the night and making Spanish-language versions of the same film. Hence, the Spanish Dracula. It’s a film geek delight to compare the Todd Browning version to the Mexican version.
And if your grandfather hadn’t done that, you might not exist.
This is true. If it weren’t for vampires…
On September 9th, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart were filming their new movie Eclipse. During break time, this photo was taken of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart enjoying a bit of down time with each other. Also Taylor Lautner was doing a few more motorbike scenes with a stunt actor who is taking Kristen’s place judging by her clothes. To view these photos and more, head over to Celebrity-Mania.
Just wow! Actor Kristen Stewart looks so much more vibrant when she smiles! I wish she would smile more often, I guess the Paparazzi would get a bit annoying after a while, but in this photo she looks so much better.
Click play to listen to the full version of Death Cab For Cutie Meet Me On The Equinox. I like the song, its different to mainstream rock/pop and has a more indie feeling to it which should fit well into the movie. If you want to add the song to your music collection, you can buy it from amazon for $0.99
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Lj5HKb78g
Remember the video that was going to be released during the MTV Music Video Awards? Yea it was just another New Moon Movie trailer… SWEET! They’ve packed a lot of scenes into this one, I especially like the way they’ve integrate Edward into the movie in his surreal appearances. Tell me what you think of the video.
