I don't want to direct Eclipse either, sweetie. Film news hath no fury like the news of a film scorned. Catherine Hardwicke got booted from the Twilight series, despite rave reviews from pre-pubescent, adolescent, teenage girls and sexually repressed housewives the nation over, and even into Canada, so setting the field for any other young director to take their stab at the guaranteed box office hittery of the next Twilight movies. Many names appeared in connection to the second sequel Eclipse: Drew Barrymore, since she's apparently a director now, and El Orfanato's Juan Antonio Bayona most prominently. But they weren't really going to direct it. That was just for fun. David Slade is really going to direct it. But he doesn't want to.
New Moon gets an excitable American Pie director, and Eclipse is getting a director who has experience with a vampire film that didn't suck, and wasn't based on something that sucked. Slade is going from Hard Candy and 30 Days of Night to a branch of Twilight. What, does he need money? Apparently he does, because he hated the very idea of Twilight. His quote circulating around the ol' webamajig says...
Twilight drunk? No, not even drunk. Twilight on acid? No, not even on acid. Twilight at gun point? Just shoot me.
... in response to the proposition of seeing the first film in theatres. And now he's going to direct that film's second sequel. Because he's one of those self-loathing directors. He picks projects he knows he won't enjoy after giving himself a fair amount of credibility with his earlier films. It's clearly destructive behavior. He's going directly against his gut taking the helm on this project. I'm hoping he will be severely judged for this.
Now, it would have been cool if he could have at least stuck to his text. But Slade is probably committing perjury by not retracting his first statement, but by glossing over it entirely, stating he has become a Twilight convert, a man saved by the light of 'Mormon' Meyer. It's not true perjury, because he isn't on trial, he hasn't been sworn in on any oath, but the judging eyes of every Twilight fangirl upon him is enough for me to accuse Slade of much worse for making these claims:
When I made these comments I had neither seen the film nor read the books...
Of course, I have since seen the movie and read the books and was quickly consumed with the rich storytelling and the beautifully honest characters that Stephanie Meyer created.
I would like to reassure everyone involved that I am invested in making the best film that I am humanly capable of, and that I am acutely aware of the power of the original books we serve.
Did Summit Entertainment slip a Yerk into his ear? Have the Body Snatchers targeted everyone working under the Twilight umbrella? Mormon voodoo, perhaps? Because I find it extremely hard to believe a 40-year-old British man, known to have directed music videos for Aphex Twin and Muse, and responsible for the darkest, most terrifying vampire movie I've ever seen, honestly believes Stephanie Meyer's Bella Swan and Edward Cullen are "beautifully honest", and the source material has anything remotely close to "rich storytelling". I mean, there's even rumor that Pattinson and Stewart asked for better dialogue, because it was too close to the drivel in books.
This grew to be a bit longer that I intended it to. My point is I sincerely doubt David Slade gives a shit about Eclipse. The studio probably approached him, and once swayed by the idea of all the cash that'll be rolling his way, especially in residuals, he jumped on board. Eclipse is like a watered and vinegar'd down version of 30 Days of Night minus basically everything else that made that movie worth watching. And David Slade is directing it. Boggled is my mind.
- Eric T. Voigt, Listened to Frog Eyes and Black Mountain During This Article's Conception
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