Behind the Scenes of New Moon

Courtesy of Summit Entertainment; Inset: Getty Images New Moon’s screenwriter takes The Daily Beast exclusively through its buzziest scenes. Plus, our complete coverage: the vampire economy, craziest tattoos, and the Rob Pattinson craze.

In 2006, Summit Entertainment hired Melissa Rosenberg to write the script for a dance movie called Step Up—she’d been a dancer when she was younger, along with dabbling in the fields of bartending, massage therapy, and waitressing.

Her collaboration with Summit went so well that eight months later, they had another project for her. “We have this movie with kind of an OC-type voice to it,” Rosenberg recalls the studio saying, in what now might be considered the under-sell of the century. She hadn’t read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, or even heard of it. “I’m almost embarrassed at how easy it was,” she says of landing the job as the writer of the three Twilight Saga films.

To make fans feel like they’re seeing the book on screen, Rosenberg’s main priority was to replicate the characters’ emotional arcs. “You have to make sure you’re taking the characters on the same emotional journey as in the book or you’ll lose your audience,” she says.

Having spent most of the last two years working on Twilight and the Showtime series Dexter simultaneously, Rosenberg refers to herself as “over-employed.” But that wasn’t always the case throughout her 15-year screenwriting career. “I spent my first 12 years [as a writer] on 11 different shows,” she says. “It was just bad matches all the way along. It’s like looking for a romantic relationship. It’s so hard to find.”

Rosenberg tested the waters with The OC, Ally McBeal, Boston Public, and Love Monkey, among others, but she was either fired, joined a show in its final year, or worked on ones that didn’t go past a single season. And then four years ago, she found Dexter, of which she’s now the head writer and executive producer. The show with the serial-killer protagonist was her ideal match—she has a thing for edgy characters.

To bring the Twilight series to the screen, Rosenberg relied heavily on the books and got feedback from Meyer, but ultimately, the task of transforming the slow-as-molasses Bella and Edward romance in Twilight, and Bella’s multiple-chapters-long depression in New Moon, was hers alone, and it wasn’t easy. “A book is very internal. They’re written very intimately… You’re inside the character’s mind,” she says. “But you can’t do that in a film. You hope to bring the audience into Bella’s experience, but it’s a visual medium.”

Rosenberg’s toughest challenge with New Moon came down to this: Team Jacob versus Team Edward. She felt that if she couldn’t convincingly build the third side of the love triangle between the three main characters, Jacob (Taylor Lautner), Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson), it wouldn’t just be New Moon that suffered, but the entire franchise. Going into it, she was nervous. “I was like, ‘How do you even begin to compete with Rob Pattinson?’” The chemistry between Pattinson and co-star Stewart is much discussed in Twilight circles and was perhaps the key to the success of the first movie.

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• More stories, galleries, clips of New MoonBefore filming started, rumors circulated that Lautner, who looked appropriately young in Twilight, might not make the cut to play the bulked-up, shape-shifting wolf that Jacob turns into in New Moon. But according to Rosenberg, Lautner took control of the situation. “He transformed himself. He is so natural and engaging… and he’s a tremendously talented actor. He can do funny, he can do drama.” As far as she’s concerned, the movie, directed by Chris Weitz, pulls it off. “The triangle is firmly in place,” she says.

The third Twilight book, Eclipse, has already been filmed, and will be released sometime in 2010. What will come after that, for both Rosenberg and the Twilight saga? The divisive fourth book in the series, Breaking Dawn, would be difficult to adapt for many reasons, one of which is that a demon baby is one of the main characters.

When asked about Breaking Dawn, Rosenberg says, “Writing is hard any which way you cut it. I suspect it would be a challenge, but I also suspect there’s a really great movie in there. I don’t really have any particular information for you on that one.”