Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Breaking Dawn -
Still Number 1 in the Irish Box Office (2nd week running!)

Breaking Dawn is still top of the Irish box office - for the second week in a row - and has accumulated €1,965,957 so far!
Go Ireland!! :D

Check out the figures below courtesy of IFTN.


This Week:

Last Week:

Julia Jones talks 'Breaking Dawn' on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live'

Part 1 Part 2

Robert Pattinson's Dog makes Peoples 'Best Pets' list!!

Wow! 
It seems that Robert Pattinson's pup, Bear, is moving up the fame ladder -
winning an award that we all know Rob will never have the chance to achieve! :P
 
PEOPLE Magazine Best of 2011 - New Star Pets

2. ROBERT PATTINSON
The Twilight heartthrob saved his new pup Bear from euthanasia at an animal shelter earlier this year, and hasn't stopped showing him just how charmed celebrity life really is.

The Twilight Boys Imitate Rob and Kristen for Zooey Mag

 Omg this is hilarious... Rob and Kristen won't be impressed ;)
Zooey Magazine is in shops now, with Anna Kendrick on the cover!

source

HQ Detagged Taylor Lautner Outtakes For L'uomo Vogue

 


Source / via / via / via

Ashley Greene’s ‘PanAm’ Debut: Get Her ’60s-Chic Look


Ashley Greene is currently filming for a guest appearance on the ABC show PanAm (which airs in Ireland every Monday on RTÉ 2), where she looked super ’60s chic in a black dress detailed with a tweed skirt, black gloves and a neck full of pearls. 
Ashley looks sassy and sophisticated just like a modern day Jackie-O, all dolled up in her 1960′s-inspired outfit.

Ashley is outfitted in Stop Staring, a brand that is responsible for all of the chic vintage silhouettes we’ve seen on the Pan Am set — and this actually isn’t the first time Ashley sported the brand! She used to model for the line — no wonder she looks so cute in her retro-wear! If you want to recreate the get-up, it can be yours for $140.
What do you think? She looks amazing, right?! :)

Production Designer, Richard Sherman talks Breaking Dawn

How did you choose the house for Edward and Bella’s Brazilian honeymoon?
RICHARD SHERMAN: We looked at pictures and found a house we loved. But two days later we learned it was going to be blown up because it had been built illegally. The next morning I got on a plane to Brazil, hopped on a boat, and went through countless islands along the coastline south of Rio. It took us four weeks to finally find the Bernardes + Jacobsen house, which had a tropical modern interior and was located near Paraty on the coast that we liked.
Did you change anything about the house?
For the movie we actually created our own exterior—what’s visible when you approach the house by boat—in the visual effects department. What you see of the real house is the front door, the steps leading up to it, the veranda, and all those glass doors. I loved the interior. We made a big open kitchen and living room. Some of the scenes that take place inside the house were actually shot on soundstages in Louisiana, where we created a courtyard, a bathroom, and the bedroom where Edward and Bella spend their wedding night. It was a seamless set—you really couldn’t tell the difference between the house and our stages.

How closely did you follow the descriptions in the book when filming in Brazil?
In some cases we really veered away from the book. What works well on the page doesn’t always work well on film. The location was challenging. Stephenie Meyer, who wrote the novels, set the honeymoon on an island in the middle of nowhere. Brazil is famous for its many islands down the coastline from Rio to Paraty. When you look out from the location where we shot, you don’t just see a horizon of water, as she wrote, but all these beautiful tropical islands. In the end it all worked out very well.

Basically the whole series has been building toward Bella and Edward’s wedding. What was your approach to designing such a momentous scene?
The way Stephenie has written it in the book, it’s a very pretty wedding—it has the white path and the white chairs that are covered in white fabric. But Bill [Condon, the film’s director] and I thought, How can we make this truly special and unique? For the people who know the books and movies, this is the wedding of the century. So we created this very organic, whimsical, fairy tale–like atmosphere—A Midsummer Night’s Dream kind of thing—with benches and seating made of branches that came out of the ground and were covered in moss and flowers. The whole forest floor was covered in moss. The ceiling was dripping flowers.
Were some of the sets recycled from previous movies, or are they all new? 
Bella’s house is the same. But we rebuilt the whole three-story set of the Cullen house in Louisiana on a soundstage, and we remade its exterior in the woods of Vancouver. We changed the interior decoration of the Cullen house subtly but completely. If you remember the original house well, you’ll notice that it is completely different. This has the same tone, but it’s a lot prettier. The other huge change is the castle of the Volturi, a group of vampires from the Roman Empire. The sets from the other movies kind of looked like—no offense to those art directors—the Four Seasons Hotel, with marble columns and sconces. So we built an old castle on stage.
Did you worry about the perceptions of the fans? 
You have to keep your fan base in mind, because they’re the real critics. They know the story so well, they know what happens, and they know the environments and the atmosphere. You hope that your sets coincide with what the audience and the fans expect. The producers, studio, director, and I were all very conscious of that.
What was it like on the set?
Everyone had a good time. The three main actors are all very fun to work with. Kristen is quite serious. Rob and Taylor are a little bit wild. Rob and Kristen are actually a couple in real life. When he’s with her, he’s a little more restrained. When she’s not around, like most guys when their wives or girlfriends aren’t around, he’s a little looser. Taylor’s a kid—he’s 19—so he was bouncing all over the place.

Source / via / via

MTV Interviews Breaking Dawn's costume designer
Michael Wilkinson

Michael Wilkinson
MTV Style: How familiar are you with Twilight as a whole?
Michael Wilkinson: You have to have been living under a rock not be the least bit familiar with these books, they’re so much a part of the public psyche of pop culture. You can know about them through mere absorption. That was part of the appeal of working on this for me—being involved with something that’s such an important franchise for so many people.

Right, but did you read the books?
Yes, I read them all! We tried to do as much preparation as possible. We wanted to be respectful and reverent to the source material. As a costume designer, it was fantastic because there are so many details. It’s such a blessing that Stephenie enjoys describing her characters, so there was lots of material for us to cue off of.

The most critical element with this movie is, of course, the wedding (*spoiler alert*), and this was misleading in the previews but the
re’s a dream sequence wedding and a real wedding. How did you delineate the two dresses from each other?
The script gave us a great opportunity to get inside Bella’s thoughts about the impending wedding. There’s a nightmare wedding and her perfect wedding. For the nightmare, we chose something that was a version of the dress that she would hate to wear. Something that’s uncomfortable and a dress Bella would be embarrassed in. It was stiff and had a boned bodice that showed a lot of bare skin which she’d be horrified by because she’s a bit of a tomboy.
There’s nothing very girly about her style so we had a huge, cumbersome, puffy skirt. We just tried to picture everything she’d find difficult to deal with and import that into a dress.
The real dress fit Bella like a second skin and I was really glad about how all that worked out. It reflects her simplicity and elegance. It’s not too girly, I thought it really hit the right note of having some vintage elements while working well for a modern woman. 

Details of Bella's wedding dress.
Photo: Courtesy of Summit Entertainment
That dress was stunning. I went to the midnight screening and it was an entire theater filled to the gills with girls sighing in unison. The lace panel in the back with hundreds of covered buttons, we all swooned.
That’s the great thing about Kristen, she has such an amazing physique so we thought the best thing to do was to show that. The dress really reveals curves and highlights each part of her shape but it’s all covered up and so we thought it was sexy but completely elegant.

There was such speculation for a long time about who would design that dress but it was Carolina Herrera all along, right?
Carolina had worked with Stephenie personally for events. And they’d struck up a friendship and dialogue so we talked to Carolina for the dress.
As you do…
[Laughs] Right! As you do… They’d been talking about the day that this dress would hit the big screen for a while and I was happy to help with the design as a consultant because it had to work with the rest of the film. So we needed complementary language getting the same look across.

Mind-boggling hotness front and center.
Photo: Courtesy of Summit Entertainment
You designed the other dresses? There were musings that Alice was wearing Zac Posen, how many costumes did you build from scratch?
I designed and built from scratch all of the Cullen women’s dresses. So Alice, Rosalie, Esme and Renee… it was lots of fun to start from the drawing board and think about getting all of the different personalities across. Alice has lots of fun with clothes and has a playful sense of style and a savvy approach to fashion so we wanted a modern take on a flapper. A 1920s dress makes a lot of sense for her because that’s when her character became a vampire so it’s a particularly strong era for her.
Plus, true to her personality, the ‘20s were very much a decade that celebrated female sexuality and independence.
Exactly.

You really did give it a lot of thought. The fans are lucky.
It’s all such a joy for me. This is gold for a costume designer, to have such great source material and these fun characters that are all so different from each other and, uh, a wedding? What’s not to love about that? You get to see the characters like you’ve never seen them before.

Let’s talk Rosalie. She has such a huge role in this movie.
Yes! I was so glad for Nikki, it was a great opportunity for her so show what a great performer she is. She’s got such different tonalities, for the wedding she obviously has a different personality from Alice so we went for something very dramatic, floor-length with a very high slit up the leg and it catches that great hourglass silhouette. We looked at the poise of the movie stars of the ‘30s and ‘40s so they were our references.
Total bombshell material.
Exactly. And it’s in the way they styled her hair and she has one of the most beautiful smiles in Hollywood, I think, which we actually get to see in this movie because in the other films she’s been a lot darker. In this one, she’s so protective of Bella and she’s at the wedding so there’s lot of different moments where she really shines and that’s a treat. Of course with Esme, she’s got that timeless understated beauty that’s so warm and appealing. It was a dream to dress them all.

Edward looked phenomenal in his tuxedo. Details on the boys please!
We put a lot of work into that too because we wanted to have them display a special, made-to-order feel. We didn’t want people to feel like you could just go out and buy them.
Well, there’s nothing off-the-rack about any of this.
[Laughs] No off-the-rack! Never. I drew up my ideal ideas for all the tuxedos. We wanted them to have a vintage feel, that sort of Edwardian turn-of-the-century vibe. Edward says, “I’ve been waiting a hundred years to marry you,” so we thought Alice would have fun riffing off of that.
But at the same time we didn’t want it to look theatrical, we wanted contemporary, young, and fresh. I drew up something that combined the lines of Edwardian formalwear and we made it up in beautiful contemporary Italian wools and gorgeous shirting materials.

Did you go into this with a list of designers you wanted to work with?
My first step is to absorb the script and get into the character’s heads to figure out how they feel about themselves and the world around them. We think colors, textures, silhouettes and fabrics and that’s my first step. 
From that I do massive amounts of research and I put up my boards with all my references for each character. I go online, do extensive research, go through magazine tear sheets and then I hit the stores and I do more research and call on my friends and contacts in the fashion industry. I try to cast the net wide. I don’t think it makes sense on camera if a certain character only wears certain designers. 

Edward's vacay clothes.
Photo: Courtesy of Summit Entertainment
Can we get onto a really important topic now? Um. Edward. IN SHORTS. Discuss.
How crazy is that?
Insane! I’d never dreamt that I’d see the back of that man’s knee.
There’s going to be so many inches of journalism written about this.
It’s breaking news. It’s MAJOR.
It’s a challenge to put an Englishman in shorts.
And Robert Pattinson is an Englishmen.
They have an instant freakout! I think it has to do with their public school uniforms that they wear as kids.
It’s all charcoal boiled wool.
Completely. Itchy, scratchy… they go, NOOOOOO long pants! We tried all sorts of different lengths but we ended up with a really classic look. My references were the Kennedys on summer vacation. That classic American summer wear. 
We went crisp with cool natural fibers, nautical navies and whites, trying to capture that classic style. More often than not, we went with a rolled-up chino but we didn’t think we could get away with not doing a short for a Brazilian scorching honeymoon so there you go. 

Members of the wolf pack.
Photo: Courtesy of Summit Entertainment
How was dressing the wolf pack different and was it difficult?
It was challenging. The choices are limited and I think it resonates as being truthful only if it reads like old clothes that they don’t care if they get ripped or destroyed when they turn into wolves. I had that as my starting point—what they have around their homes—old sweatpants, gear that they’ve painted a house in or washed a car in. I went for clothes that were disposable but even within that you have to capture the different personalities so again you’re using different colors, textures and shapes.

Speaking of textures and shapes, you know what was highly entertaining? Watching Bella arch her back and awkwardly prancing around in lingerie trying to entice Edward in that honeymoon montage.
That was such a fun moment because once you get to know Kristen, just the idea of her slipping into something black and lacy is hilarious. She has a physical aversion to it, she’s definitely your jeans and T-shirt kind of girl. I think she really didn’t find it hard to act those scenes because there’s a lot of Kristen there. And also there’s something so playful about Alice packing her bags and planting those items in her suitcase. It’s so cute.

Tell us who made the negligee and the polka dot number. I’m sure they’ll get sold out in moments.
There will be a worldwide search. I believe the negligee was La Perla, the knickers and bra was Agent Provocateur - they have the sauciest, cutest, frilliest bits of wispy underwear, so we went in and layered some things together.
But you know, I was thinking about your earlier question of what we made from scratch and we built a lot of the costumes in this movie but B.D. two, it’s SOOOOOOOO huge.

Did you just B.D. two me? La di da, B.D. two, no big deal… [Laughs]
[Laughs] Oh, come on, B.D. two, that’s what we call it.
So. Tell me THINGS!
Think about it! You’ve got the Denalis, Volturis, vampires from all over the world. We’ve got the final battle scene with the beautiful billowing Volturi capes. 
It’s just a whole vampire freak out that you’ll just have to hold on until next Christmas to see.

MTV / via / Via

Cute New 'Edward and Bella' Baby Bump Still!

Click for bigger!

Friday, November 25, 2011

Carter Burwell On Scoring Twilight and Breaking Dawn

TRIBECA, MANHATTAN: It was like a scene out of a movie. Film score composer Carter Burwell wrote the final cue to The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn (Part I) at his piano in the country by the flickering light of an oil lamp.

“I was out at my place in Amagansett trying to finish up the score when Hurricane Irene hit and took out my power,” Burwell describes. “And it stayed out for four days. So I ended up writing the ending in this darkened, boarded up house.
Carter Burwell during "Breaking Dawn: Part I"
mixing sessions at The Body Studio, NYC.

“It was interesting and painful at the same time,” he says, with a laugh. “But it worked out.” 

Being forced to compose the old-fashioned way is not as extreme an exercise for Burwell as it might be for another composer; he does write most of his themes at the piano. 

And the storm made a perfectly dark and romantic setting in which to conjure the final scene’s music, where Burwell reprises the soaring “Bella’s Lullaby” theme from the first Twilight, with liturgical sounds. 

Without spoiling the ending, it’s a heavy, most climactic scene.

We met up with Burwell during Breaking Dawn mixing sessions at his studio in Tribeca – by contrast a very well-lit, and highly technical environment. He’d been to record the score with an orchestra at Abbey Road, and was now working through the final stages with his longtime mixer Mike Farrow and his assistant Dean Parker.

He took some time away from the mix to chat with SonicScoop about scoring for Twilight, and scoring in general…

Looking over your filmography, it seems like you haven’t scored a sequel before. You did the first Twilight but not the second and third. Can you tell me about how you came to do Breaking Dawn, the fourth of the Twilight films?

It’s true, I’ve never scored a sequel. But it’s pretty simple – I’ve worked with this director – Bill Condon – before [on Kinsey]. Bill wanted me to do the scores, but he wasn’t sure I would want to because they’re such huge melodramas, and that’s really very different than what I normally do. But he is entirely a pleasure to work with so I definitely wanted to do it.
When I was composing music for the first Twilight, I don’t think any of us knew that it would be that popular… that it would have this cultural resonance. There was such an enormous response. There have been thousands of emails people have written me, wanting to know how to play the themes on piano. And that has been really nice.

Oh that’s really cool – the fans genuinely engaging with the film’s score. Wow. So, in scoring this latest film, did you reprise any of those themes from the first? How did you continue that work you’d done on the first one, or did you not approach it like that at all?

Well, I did to some extent. The intervening two films were directed by different people and composed by different people and they didn’t use any of the musical themes from the first one.
But there’s this one love theme called “Bella’s Lullaby” that was on the Twilight soundtrack album and that’s the one that most people respond to from the first movie. And when I first talked to Bill Condon, he was excited to bring back “Bella’s Lullaby” – so we have brought it back, judiciously. There’s a hint of it here and there, and then in the last scene of this movie, we actually play it out. And it’s pretty dramatic.

Having worked with Bill Condon before, and having scored the first of this insanely successful series…how much actual direction did you get at the start of this project? How does it get started?

Well first we have the spotting session, where – on the one hand – we’re talking technically about where the music starts and ends. But honestly in a movie like this, it turns out that it really never ends. There’s 80 minutes of score in this movie, so the “where it starts and stops” conversation hardly entered into it. Really we spent that time talking about what is the point of this scene? What can the music say? What kind of theme can we use for this? There’s a lot of give and take in a conversation like that.

And for one thing, in a movie like this – there are (especially in the second half) a lot of special effects so when I’m looking at the screen, I won’t necessarily know what’s going on. So I have to depend on the director to say, ‘OK, here there are going to be wolves coming down this hill,’ because I cannot always tell what the important dramatic impact is when there are all these unfinished effects shots.

Mike Farrow and Burwell mixing
"Breaking Dawn: Part I" at The Body Studio
And from there, do you just start working? You have the job, so you’re not exactly pitching music… 

That’s right. As soon as I talked to Bill and we agreed I would do this, I started thinking about themes and melodies. It’s a very different story than the first Twilight. In the first one, you begin in what seems like a normal environment for a high school girl and it becomes supernatural and very intense emotionally.
Here, by this point, there’s no pretense of anything being normal. So you begin in an already a heightened emotional state, with supernatural qualities and it just gets more so…so it’s much more melodramatic. And I knew that I would need a lot more thematic material than I did in the first one. In this movie, Edward and Bella get married. They’re becoming grownups. They face different challenges. The score has to take that into account. And so their music is really pretty different.
I began working as soon as I found out I had the job because I knew that it was a huge job and I wouldn’t have that much time to write all 80 minutes of music.

Did you tap any special musicians to play on this score? I know David Torn played a role on the first Twilight, contributing a lot of that characteristic electric guitar that worked so well. Since you are based in NY, it’s cool to think there’d be some NY influence on the sound of your stuff, just based on who you get to play on it.

Well, I like to think there is. This particular score is not as guitar oriented as the first. And that’s part of the tone that’s shifted from they’re being high-schoolers to them living an adult life. This score has a little more of the flavor of a traditional melodrama in the sense that we went to Abbey Road and recorded it with a larger orchestra than what we had on the first one. We did have, in London, this guitarist Leo Abrahams play on it – and he’s a very interesting guitarist.

Cool. What about the fact that Breaking Dawn is a two-parter? Knowing you’re also going to be scoring Part II, does where the story goes from here enter into the picture at all for you? When you’re thinking of these themes?

Well, I’ve read the script, but I haven’t seen any of Part II yet. But I did have to write a theme that Edward plays on camera in Part II. Bill wanted to echo the “Bella’s Lullaby” scene from the first Twilight in the last part, and so I had to write a lullaby for that well in advance so Rob Pattinson could learn the fingering – he’s a musician and prides himself on being able to do that.
So we know that’s an important part of Part II. And we hint at that theme in Part I. But honestly, it was quite a challenge for me to get my head around the 80 minutes of music for this one. My scores are usually half that. So I didn’t give very much thought to Part II while I was doing Part I.


To read more of Carter's interview (where he talks about his other projects like True Grit) click here:

UK Bel Ami Release Date to be March 2nd 2012?

Robert Pattinson’s next film, Bel Ami, is tipped to hit UK (and Irish) cinema’s on March 2nd 2012. 
Are you all ready for gorgeous Georges DuRoy?



It's about time we got a release date for this!
It's already been just over three months since the trailer was leaked ;)

Are you excited for it? Will you be going to see it in the cinemas?

Video: David Cronenberg talks to Popsugar about Rob and Cosmopolis

Another great interview with David Cronenberg - talking about his newest film 'A Dangerous Method' and then Robert Pattinson and Cosmopolis. 
(Rob talk begins from about 1:50)
It’ll be a while until we see Cosmopolis [ READ: Over a year:( ] but having so many goodies come out to tease us has been exciting!!



Four new Breaking Dawn Wedding Stills!

Awwww! Click for bigger! :)

Getting Married any time soon?
Details on how to buy Bella Swan's dress and shoes!

I don't know about you, but when Bella's dress was unveiled during the Breaking Dawn wedding last week, it took my breath away!
It's too bad that I'm not getting married any time soon, as you can now buy the same dress from Alfred Angelo!
(It's under $999... a bargain, really...)


BELLA’S BRIDAL GOWN
As seen in Twilight – Breaking Dawn Part 1

Bella’s beautiful bridal gown
Long sleeves with button detail
Cut out back with lace embellishments
Sizes: 0 to 30W

For more information on the dress, click here.

 
And lets not forget her shoes... oh, how I loved her shoes!!
(and the way she stumbled around in them at the start!)
So, if you have $1,295 lying around, why not buy them?!


Manolo Blahnik Swan Embellished Satin Pump, White
Shoes are never too good to be true. The Manolo Blahnik Swan pump steps out of the silver screen—we couldn’t think of a better “something new” for your big day.

Satin pump features crystal-beaded vine applique angled across vamp and outer side.
Almond toe.
4 1/4″ covered heel.
“Swan” is made in Italy.

For more information on the shoes click here



And lets not forget... 
Caroline Herrera will also be selling a copy of the dress soon, too!

So, if you all will excuse me for a minute, I'm off out to find my Edward!
*starts saving for future-wedding*


Ireland finally gets 'Welcome to the Rileys'!

AAAAAAAH!!!

As of today, Kristen Stewart's "Welcome to the Rileys" is being shown in Dublin's 'Screen Cinema'.
Kristen has already won Best Actress for her role in this... I can't wait to finally see it :)

*Please Note* 

This is an over 18's movie.
If you are under 18, do not look at the trailer or watch the film.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Scan: ITS Blogger, Jess, in today's Irish Independent!

So... I'm kinda sorta in the Irish Independent newspaper today...
Check out the scan below!



And if any one is interested, I'll also be talking about Breaking Dawn on Newstalk 106-108 FM tomorrow morning around 11am! (You can listen online by clicking the link above!)

New HQ BTS Stills from Breaking Dawn Part 1

 



Tuesday, November 15, 2011