Spoilers ahead if you haven't seen "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2.
Your prescient powers would have had to been on par with Alice
Cullen's to have seen this coming: the shocking deaths of two Cullen
coven vampires. Of course, it was all just part of an unfulfilled vision
in the final moments of "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2,", but it was a jaw-dropping twist nonetheless.
When MTV News caught up with screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg and
director Bill Condon in the lead up to the film franchise's finale, we
had to get the inside scoop on how the blood-soaked battle came to be.
"Stephenie [Meyer] and I were up in Vancouver at a steak house — I
remember very, very clearly," Rosenberg said. "She was still trying to
decide if she wanted 'Breaking Dawn' to be a film because she was very
concerned [about] how do you do that ending? In the book, the ending is
very much a very tense confrontation, but it's resolved in the
conversation, and of course, for a film that is a very challenging place
to be. So both of us were trying to figure out how do we make that
cinematic? It's just that back and forth, and the idea hits — wait a
second, it's all happening in Alice's mind. It's actually referred to in
the book, we just don't see it in the book. So the beauty of film, you
get to see it."
And, as it turns out, this reimagined conclusion went a long way towards convincing Condon to sign on to the two-part finale.
"When I got involved that was already in the treatment, and I
don't think I would have made the movie if it hadn't been there because I
think it was a great, great adjustment to the book," he said. "And it's
still true to the book, you know, because there is a reason for it
happening and it doesn't change the outcome of what happens."
Yet, it was a lengthy process deciding which beloved characters
would meet their untimely, yet temporary, demises. (For their parts,
actors Peter Facinelli and Jackson Rathbone, who portray victims Carlisle Cullen and Jasper Hale, were good sports about being ripped to shreds.)
"For me, it was, who is the most shocking and whom — not whom do
you love the most, but to me it's who gets the most bang for your buck?"
Rosenberg recalled. "If you kill Carlisle, that's a lot of bang as
opposed to someone you just met in this movie. I kind of tossed it
around for a bit."
"We went back and forth," Condon agreed. "I spent three months
[pre-visualizing] this before we shot anything. There were times where
other people were dying ... Choosing which Cullen — it was maybe the
sweetest of them [that] were the ones that bit the dust because it had
the most emotional impact."
